The Touchstone Trilogy (130 page)

From the squads on Muina's point of view, they'd been continuing their search for Second Squad when I suddenly popped into interface range, deeply unconscious with my alert blaring away.  Nils had dropped both our logs to the drones before letting me go, so they knew what had happened to me before I'd passed out.  And they knew exactly where I was, too – right near the bottom of the Oriath installation.

As soon as the Oriath team detected me, they'd accessed the drones, and withdrawn my nanosuit so that they could make a visual scan.  The visual had shown that I was lying alone on a (symbol-etched) platform being busily unconscious.  The technician driving the drones detected movement nearby and very sensibly didn't leave them sitting on top of me, but scuttled them down one side of the platform and tucked them as far out of sight as she could manage.  She even powered them down to a ready state, and I gather that she's likely to get some kind of commendation for this, since the Cruzatch invariably destroy any drones they spot, and it was a group of Cruzatch which came and took me away – up to a room directly below the room holding Lira.

After a suitable pause, KOTIS repowered the drones and did some cautious exploration of the lower reaches of the Oriath installation.  The Cruzatch had taken me up, and one drone tried to follow and was promptly crushed on a ramp.  The other searched down and found a particularly grand and magnificent series of sarcophagus rooms, ending in another malachite marble.  Once it reached here, the drone was tucked into a corner and KOTIS Command had a fun argument over whether to have Palanty from Fifth teleport down straight away, or to wait.  They didn't want to precipitate a countermeasure by the Cruzatch, and if they lost the drone's visual feed, it would be much more difficult and dangerous for Palanty to teleport down.

And they didn't particularly want to blow the place up while I was still in it.  Unless they had to.

The eventual decision was to hold off doing anything until they'd broken through to the malachite marble in the last of the other installations.  Isten Notra had stressed that leaving everyone one marble functional might create catastrophic stress on the spaces, so KOTIS has been shielding each marble against Cruzatch retaliation and planting bombs ready and waiting.

And they were still waiting when Fourth brought news of Second's location.  Fourth stayed on Muina, headed for Oriath, while Eleventh went back to trace a path to the Pillar where Second were stuck.  KOTIS was already well into full battle mode, most of the Setari squads massing at Oriath, and two groups of technicians frantically trying to overcome the ramp of doom and work through the last of the shielding at a final installation up near the northern icecap.

All that time they were trying to wake me up, but I was suffering from an extreme overload of aether and was totally non-responsive.  Other than them finally breaking into the other installation and planting the second-last of the bombs, there really wasn't any progress until I
did
wake up – by which time Fourth was about two-thirds of the way to Oriath and Second had been recovered and had just emerged from the rift.

Waking up was the worst thing.

I was lying down and I couldn't move and I couldn't see.  There were voices.  The whispers.

The whispers were still whispers, but somehow they were so loud, so dominant, that the large mass of people trying to talk to me over the interface were just noise.  But then that noise dropped away and became Kaoren, just Kaoren, talking to me steadily, and very sensibly sending the words to me in text as well.

Reading his words helped me hear him, repeating my name.  And then, in some of the bare few words of English I'd managed to teach him: "Please.  Need.  Hear."

That did start to shift me out of my groggy state, and I tried to turn my head and failed, discovering that the stuff covering me would only expand and contract a few millimetres, like strong elastic.

The whispers started to build up, trying to drown out Kaoren, and that made me angry, giving me impetus to respond.

"There's ten Cruzatch near me, and more somewhere down.  I'm tied up and can't move my arms or legs.  I think they've used the same stuff that net was made of," I said, struggling with the annoying rubberiness of it.  "There's something over me making it too dark to see.  I can hear the stones whispering.  They're a little further away, but otherwise it's very like my dream."

Although I held it together starting out, I sound openly terrified by the time I reached the end.  And the log has helpfully captured my gasping breaths when Tsur Selkie told me they needed me to wait, to lie there and tell them if the Cruzatch went away.

I opened a private channel to Kaoren and asked him to keep talking, and especially to keep sending it in text to reinforce the words, to tell me what had been happening.  I needed that to keep back the whispers, which kept sucking at my attention, this steady stream of old Muinan, building a hierarchy of gods.

It might have seemed like forever, but apparently it wasn't more than five minutes after I woke up enough to respond that until the Cruzatch in the room gathered together, then moved away.

"They are going down," I said.  "None left near me."

"Tell us immediately when you can no longer detect them," Kaoren said, his voice shifting to measured captain-mode.  "As soon as that happens, the drone will be activated so a team can teleport into the room of the power stone.  We can't teleport to where you are, both because we cannot see the room, and because you're in the heavy zone.  Once you're free, you need to move either down toward the power stone or up to the surface – whichever way is easiest.  Once the teleportation group are in, I'm going to take you through a visualisation to help free you."

"I can only feel a couple now," I said.  "I – no, they're gone as well."

"Good.  We'll start the visualisation now."

Kaoren began to describe a drone, a very solid, squat drone furnished with a vast array of cutting tools.  It was his usual clear, concise description, and by that time I'd shrugged off more of the aether effect, but–

"The whispering's getting louder."  My voice was high.

"Then concentrate, Cassandra."  Kaoren's words were clipped, stern, the tone he only uses with me in emergencies.

He continued with the visualisation, and I think I did succeed in making the drone, or at least there was suddenly a loud crunching sound right next to me, as if a solid, squat drone with a vast array of cutting tools was being compacted for recycling.

Then Zee's voice, loud and abrupt.  "Use her suit.  Caszandra, we're going to cut you out."

Nanosuits can be cloth, they can change colours, and they can make an edge sharper than steel.  Lots of them, all over.  Caszandra Scissorsuit.

It worked too.  While Palanty and Kajal teleported down to the malachite marble room with the last of the bombs and a round dozen drones to send skittering off exploring, my uniform grew dozens of blades, effortlessly slicing through the stuff holding me down.  My hands came loose first as a technician cleverly manipulated the suit to slice as well as pierce.

But the whispers had me.

As I stopped hearing anything else, my vitals began climbing through the roof, and waves of distortion started rippling out: slow billows of heat which increased with every repetition.  Not confined to the room either – they felt them at Pandora.  For all I know, they felt them on Tare.

Tsur Selkie ordered Palanty and Kajal out immediately, and recommended that the bombs be triggered as soon as they were clear.  All they could do was hope that the malachite marble would be destroyed without much damage to my floor.  Palanty and Kajal teleported, but then the next wave of heat and distortion rolled out and that one–

Quite a few people have tried to describe to me what happened next.  Maze says he felt 'thin', Zee that she was made of glass.  Everyone on Muina had some variation of this: flattened, washed away, erased, frozen, unable to move, to think, to do.  To trigger explosions.  Kaoren says he felt painted.  And all of them could see another place, a Muina where enormous statues stood above the cities to proclaim the reign of golden gods.

I didn't feel thin, or made of glass.  I felt like I was being cooked alive while my brain was pierced by a half dozen needles.  My scissorsuit hadn't cleared away the covering over my face, but even through it I could see there was a bright, burning light directly above me.

There was just enough of me left outside the brain piercing to be aware that they were going to blow the malachite marbles.  I didn't realise the entire world had fallen into a pit of distortion with no way to dig itself out, and so I was pretty much lying there waiting to die.  Which was pathetic of me, but it had just felt so inevitable for so long.  I was the Supa Speshul Magick Gurl who had appeared from nowhere and made it possible to win, but who had to die at the end so that the people she cared about could live on.

Which would SUCK.

Especially when I was the one doing the dying, and particularly when it involved being slowly roasted.  If I was going to be blown up, I decided, I at least wanted to get away from the mega-sunlamp first.

I wanted to not break my promise to Kaoren.  I wanted to not have been wrong to let three children care.

My body didn't feel quite my own, but I managed to lift a hand and flail clumsily at my face, swiping away the rubbery shroud.  But the whispers were getting louder, louder, and I'm not sure if I would have managed any more if not for Lira.

I don't know how long she'd been there, trying to push me off the altar.  She was quite a sight to see, looking like a proper ghost instead of a little girl, with great streamers of light warping off her, being pulled toward this glowing starburst above where I was lying.  Every time she reached out, her arms would thin out to light and be caught by the starburst, making it impossible for her to reach me.

But she kept trying, and mouthed words I could barely hear: "You have to
move
!"

The sight of her galvanised all the parts of me which weren't caught by whispers.  Not to any rational, measured plan of action.  No, my response could best be summed up as BAD LIGHT EATING LIRA!  The amount of thought space I had left was definitely at Lolcat level.  Which is probably why I decided that the important thing was to save the little girl who'd been dead for centuries.

But it got me to move, to roll off the altar, trying to push her backward, looking for the quickest route away from the light.  There was no door.  That betrayal of expectation actually cleared my head a little, enough to realise that the burning sensation in my chest was at least in part because the air was really, really hot.  Still focused on saving Lira, I grabbed her to me, and staggered drunkenly toward the corner of the room, trying to shield her from the light.

As soon as I moved from the altar, the ground began to shake, and heading to the corner increased the amount of earth-shaking to a spectacular degree.  And it felt like the needles in my brain were being dragged out, with every treacle-pull step.

Then the floor heaved up, but at least it tossed us toward the corner, whereupon I shoved Lira underneath me and tried to cover her as much as possible, desperately trying to project a shield or wall to keep away the light.

The sky fell.

The earth-shaking was worldwide.  The damage at Pandora wasn't too bad – there's a crack in one of the science buildings and one of the towers in the old town fell down.  More spectacular was the split which appeared in the moon.  Instead of a bullet-hole, it now looks like a comma.  That happened just before all the painted glass people found themselves real again, and immediately blew the charges.

The destruction of the malachite marbles caused a great surge of power to be released through the platforms.  They aren't working any more, though Isten Notra thinks that's because their aether supply was exhausted.  Moonfall happened at the platform villages where the moon was visible yesterday, anyway.  And the Ena is currently a no-go area, all heaving and disturbed, so we're cut off from Tare and Kolar.  They think it will settle down, but not necessarily to the way it was before, and it's very likely the Pillars are no longer operating.

But all that was later.  They blew the charges just after I started causing earthquakes, and a world was thrown from its feet.  When the dust settled I was alive but unconscious, my vitals not critical, but not likely to improve with a palace and four levels of subterranean installation collapsed spectacularly on top of me.  It took nearly two kasse for them to get me out.

I woke in my home-away-from-home less than a day after my visualisation of Second Squad.  Kaoren was asleep in the chair beside me, but came awake with a start which meant he'd had an alarm set to trigger if my state shifted to consciousness.  I tried to say hello, but after all that burning hot air, my throat is pretty painful, so I said "I can't believe I'm not dead," over the interface.

He made a face at me, and then just leaned forward and rested his forehead against my shoulder.  I put my hand on the back of his head and we stayed like that without speaking, appreciating that we could, that we got to be alive together, and go on.

My cheek and forehead felt more than odd, so eventually I tried to touch them, but Kaoren caught my hand, then showed me what I currently looked like, with my left eye swollen shut and the skin around it red and angry beneath a coating of salve, the eyebrow gone along with most of my hair, which had been melted and frizzled and then chopped unevenly off by the medics.  I also have a broken arm and cracked ribs, but altogether this has been one of my less serious forays into injury-land.  I'm planning on it being my last.

"The kids okay?" I asked, and he nodded, and told me he'd fetch them and squeezed my hand painfully hard, then left me to the embarrassing things medics do to me.

Sen arrived first, running ahead enthusiastically, but stopping just short of leaping on me and instead climbing very cautiously into the bed with me.  She didn't say anything at all, just welded herself to my side and stuck there no matter what anyone said to her.  It wasn't too bad – she'd chosen the side without the broken arm – and I patted her on the head, feeling quite overwhelmed.  Rye had followed along hastily behind, but stopped short and just stared at me.