The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (35 page)

Karstus’s Godsort glanced briefly to the giant reptiles, most of which were were either fighting amongst themselves or succumbing to getnium poisoning. “They can wait. Who knows, they may be finished with each other by the time we’re done.”

The three Godsorts regrouped and approached Jav in his. Jav stood stock-still over the ruin of Hostur’s machine, somehow radiating cool anticipation if a machine could be said to do so.

“Check your blood levels,” Karstus said. “It wouldn’t do to pass out at the critical moment.”

“Fine here,” said Samas.

“Check,” called Barlo.

“Right. With me, now,” Karstus said. “
High Formation
!” And the three Godsorts were like three gods.

But Jav Holson had mastered the Eighteen Heavenly Claws, perhaps better than style’s originator, and now employed it on a scale never before seen. The Godsorts were strong and their pilots seasoned, but Jav was a man obsessed with vengeance. His reflexes were lightning fast under thirty standard gravities. Here on Stolom, where the gravity was roughly one and a half times the standard, he had a decided advantage as those reflexes, along with his prodigious strength, translated proportionally through his Godsort. So he laughed as the three came at him with their continent-shaking strikes.

Getnium Flares went unused. They were essentially harmless to Godsorts, unless the internal recycling system was damaged or somehow overloaded. No, this would be a physical fight, and Jav had no intention of losing. Nor did he show signs of doing so. He managed to defend himself against all three assailants, but had to concede to stalemate under the current conditions—they, like Stol, were accustomed to roughly ten standard gravities due to their combat training and experience. He could easily last the three minutes it would take for the other Godsorts’ systems to power down, but he had no intention of doing that either. He started to laugh again and the sound unnerved his opponents. What undid them wholly, however, was what they heard next and the resulting effect.

Jav’s laughter rolled to a halt and a terrible silence prevailed, but only momentarily. He cried out, “High Formation!” and the suspended pumps went to work, drawing the thick, half-dried blood from wherever it came most easily.

The others saw the change and each knew the significance of a man with this strength, this skill, in a Godsort in High Formation. Barlo simply stopped what he was doing. What could be done that hadn’t already been tried against a lesser opponent? Calling out for Barlo to keep fighting, Karstus drove forward, but was raked with steel fingers from countless blows unseen for their speed and which shredded the outer skin of his Godsort, leaving the internal machinery exposed and sparks showering. Jav took hold of the Godsort’s head, and shot a short, rising roundhouse to cut a diagonal clean through from left hip to right armpit. Karstus, visible through the latticework, was crushed and run through variously, as the metal compressed, bent, and shattered. Several thin streams of blood arced out under pressure, even as the majority of what he had left poured from a wound strikingly similar to the one delivered to his Godsort. The two halves of his machine ground together as the upper attempted to slide down the inclined plane of the lower. The Godsort stumbled back a step, purely due to gravity, then fell to the ground in pieces.

Barlo still hadn’t moved. Samas joined him in his stillness but screamed. It was a high pitched shriek born of terror and dread and came to an abrupt halt as Jav drove his hands into Samas’s chest, one over the cockpit and one below as if to tear the machine’s heart out. But rather than tear it out, Jav initiated the Kaiser Claw, calculating almost instantly, torquing his hands, and reducing what lay between them with a dull, squelching pop that nevertheless shattered every intact window in a five kilometer radius. Brilliant green light flared from between his hands, but Samas and his Kossig Engine were gone. The crippled Godsort followed the motion of his hands as he freed them, but Jav stepped aside casually to allow the dead hulk to crash to the ground.

“Raohan La!” Barlo cried, finding his voice. “You must help us!”

Jav watched the dyna sore turn from what must have been some mental exertion upon the Palace. He grinned. “Yes, Raohan La,” he mocked, his voice booming out across the battlefield. “You must.”

Jav bent his knees slightly and leapt back diagonally, doing a tight flip and landing to put Barlo between him and Raohan La before planting a solid front kick in the former’s midsection. Barlo bent double and streaked like a projectile for Raohan La.

Raohan La, however, was having none of it. His proportionally small eyes narrowed malevolently and lines of visible force crisscrossed before him to batter, cut, and grind the giant machine to shrapnel, none of which was much larger than what Jav had left with his Kaiser Kick.

“Raohan La!” cried another of the dyna sores, one who seemed similarly engaged in a mindborne assault on the Palace. Its head jerked at the end of its long neck. Blood misted under high pressure from its eyes. “I cannot. . . It is
too much
!” Its head burst then, but the gray of its brain, exposed and awash with blood, began to expand and take on a fleshy pink hue. Several creases opened up, as if the mass were about to split severally, but these closed and opened again, snapping with long, sharp bone-shard teeth.

Jav watched the dyna sore turn and regard its fellow with rage and heartsickness—a combination he could appreciate perhaps better than any—and then with resolve. Something joined the two giant reptiles for an instant, some tether of psychic turbulence, and then the other’s head burst a second time, more spectacularly than the first, and the reptile fell over dead, making the ground shake with its mass.

The green light power lines upon Jav’s Godsort were beginning to darken. It had been three minutes, and while there were several systems within the cockpit to alert him to this, he had no need of their warning. The fading sense of
all
was sufficient. As he acknowledged this, he saw a glimmer of hope spark in Raohan La’s tiny eyes, but this only made him grin again.

“We are done playing, Raohan La,” Jav said over the Godsorts external speakers. “It’s not
my
blood this machine drinks, but the blood it wants is plentiful.” Almost in a whisper, Jav said, “High Formation.”

The pumps activated, the Kossig Engine responded, the green lights flared and Jav was a god again.

Raohan La dropped down to all fours, his bones shifting under thick, leathery skin to accommodate his original quadrupedal orientation once more, and charged Jav in the Godsort. Just before contact, Raohan La sprang cat-like, his bones shifting once again to make him bipedal, and he grappled with the Godsort. Genuine surprise at the dyna sore’s speed cost Jav his chance to evade. Carried by momentum and then by Raohan La’s substantial weight, they crashed to the ground, machine pinned by reptile.

Jav felt the probing fingers of Raohan La’s mind, but he felt them through the Godsort’s impregnable psychic defenses. Despite his powers, lack of leverage prevented him from altering his position. But only temporarily.

Letting Raohan La focus on a hopeless endeavor, Jav took advantage of his concentration, which amounted to distraction, and used Approaching Infinity to deliver a head butt, brow to brow. Raohan La’s eyes bugged from their sockets, then rolled up to whites. Jav could feel the other’s muscles go slack, slid out from under, and got to his feet in one swift, fluid motion, which finished with him gripping Raohan La’s head in one hand with vice-grip fingers.

Guilt began to bleed into his thoughts. High Formation took away all challenge, all sense of fairness. But then, there was no fairness, not anymore. They were dead now, like the rest. Somehow he sensed that the girl in the fortress had stopped breathing, had gone peacefully despite the assault upon her and her quarters. The girl with the red hair and eyes—they’d been so sad, those eyes—she’d gone less peacefully and the image blasted through the otherwise empty halls of his mind.

Jav squeezed, producing a sharp, echoing crack, released his grip only slightly for a split second to pair his hands for the Kaiser Claw, and then twisted his hands in a blur of motion so that left replaced right and nothing remained between them but the deafening sound of destruction.

The stalk of Raohan La’s neck fountained briefly to produce a red plume, then swayed along with the rest of his lifeless body to fall heavily to the ground.

Jav surveyed the scene. There were few dyna sores left, but they were mostly preoccupied with a variety of graphic maladies that made any action on his part moot. Most of his
friends
were accounted for. The man in the armor with the big ego was beginning to stir. The wooden man with the awful writhing thing in his back was still tending to some of the more resilient dyna sores with his puppets. The sickly giant was using his electricity to rebuild himself. He turned and stared at the fortress, which seemed to stare back with a single angry eye of green light. With his rage somewhat abated, he was overwhelmed once more by the profound sense of loss that had come to define him. He hadn’t forgotten his promise to the girl with the red hair, though. What was her name? Surely he’d known it.

He set off for the fortress, ready for one last sortie in his borrowed Godsort.

He paid no attention to the men swarming over the greensward towards the Palace, and many were crushed under foot or swept away bodily by his passage. Corpse and puppet soldiers could meet any threat they had to offer.

Upon reaching the fortress, Jav started pulling more concrete away from the rim of the hole he’d made earlier. He tried to be careful not to disturb the already ruined quarters where the body of the girl with the doorway eyes lay inert. He was pretty sure that her remains wouldn’t survive what he had in mind to do, but he couldn’t help himself. Chunks of concrete rained down all around him until he had a way into the structure. There were two more partial walls to contend with, but once through them, he found himself in an indoor garden, at the center of which was the source of the green light.

It was mesmerizing and, Jav realized in a moment of singular clarity, dangerous. The girl had said so, but now he understood. He felt a familiar gnawing sensation in his guts and knew that the light would kill him from the inside out if he didn’t do something about it soon. He vaguely wondered at how he’d managed to fend off its effects this long. Having a tiny version of the death generator at his back probably wasn’t helping, either, but it wouldn’t matter in a few moments.

Jav in the Godsort stood before the generator. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes in a vain effort to block the damnable vision of the exploding girl. When his eyes opened they were hard and cruel. He stretched his arms out before him at a slight downward angle so that his hands, fingers splayed, were one over the other, left over right. As he pushed, the ground beneath the generator broke apart as if tilled by an invisible plow. The apparatus canted slightly, but then rose into the air following the motion of Jav’s rising arms, until it hung suspended.

Jav looked down the barrel of his steely arms with the green light virtually between the palms of his hands. His calculations were brief, but sure. He pulled and pushed with explosive force, reversing the positions of his hands, and bringing blinding, white oblivion.

Witchlan stood in the Emperor’s chambers. It was dark save for the holographic screen which hovered in the middle of the room between him and the great sallow visage of the Emperor.

“It is as anticipated, Minister,” the Territorial Planning Director said from the screen. “As previously discussed, the radiation was converted to a variety lethal to the native population, but one somewhat less so to Vine fiber. All survey teams report back the same. All indigenous life here on Planet 1607 has been extinguished and likely suffered instant death at the time of the pulse.”

“Thank you, Director.”

The screen went dark but was already flashing to indicate a pending connection.

“Yes?” Witchlan said, but he already knew what the Medical Director had to say.

“You wanted to be informed of any change in General Holson’s condition.”

“Yes, Director.”

“He’s awake, but only semi-lucid so far, as is consistent with cases like his.”

“And his physical condition?”

“The burns and lacerations have healed, but the latter have left a whole new map of scars over ninety percent of his body. His strength appears to be undiminished. He shattered the medical tank on waking.”

“Thank you, Director.”

The screen went dark again, but remained in place. Witchlan folded his arms and stared through it for a moment, lost in thought. Finally he reached out a spindly finger and worked the holographic controls at the bottom right of the screen.

A video recording began to play and then looped repeatedly. Witchlan folded his arms again and watched the Kaiser Bones run off Jav’s body like jelly, watched him erupt with and become enveloped in blue light—
familiar
blue light—just prior to the giant robot’s hands closing around him.

Jav Holson should have died then. It would have made things easier, poetic even.

This system was home to five other planets, all uninhabited. They could spend some time here, recover at their leisure. They could afford to do this and do this with no sense of urgency because
The Place With Many Doors
was now within reach. One more trip would bring them to their goal and true, unadulterated freedom. But a contingency for Jav Holson had to be established. The blue light signalled a return to what he was before the Empire, and they couldn’t have that.

The holographic screen went dark a third time and Witchlan’s body sagged. His hands dropped lifelessly to his sides, his head drooped. It was as if he were assaulted by a sudden onset of narcolepsy. In time with his abrupt slumber, though, was the kindling fire of life filling the space behind the Emperor’s carved features.

Now the holographic screen became active on its own. Several minutes passed before someone appeared upon it, facing the Emperor.