“What?”
“New scar.” She approached, touched the right side of his face. “Blade impact.”
“Yeah, well—” He wiped his face dry. “Your tits are bigger today.”
She scowled. “Glad you noticed.”
“It’s true.” West chuckled. “What have
She ignored him, snapped her glass open. Figures illuminated face and chest. “We’ll be out on runs for a few days. Recharge in the forts. A few little hotspots to seal up before we hit half-and-half.”
West shielded with a ssschiick and sheen. He flexed the blades of his right arm and slammed a needle cartridge into his right shiver pistol, repeated the process with his left, flipped both back into their forearm holsters. “Let’s fucking do it right this time. I’m getting old, kids.”
Benton shielded and locked her glass into place on her chestplate. “We’ll be good to go. Coordinates are golden.”
“Silver.” Paul pulled his faceplate down, locked it into place. His cardiac shield hissed and frosted blue as it blinked an affirmative. “Coordinates are silver.”
They went
back into the wind and it amazed me, all of it, the incomprehensible enormity of the system within which I now operated, the Judith Mind Essence. They’d taken some of the best parts of each book and combined them into the hive mind generated by the countless Judiths held in metastasis in the construct.
A twinge: too much. Right eye watered, from pain or from the sunlight reflected from white stretching away in every direction.
“That ridge. We’ll find the cave there.”
The hulk of Task’s vessel still smoldered on the ice plain of Lascaux. I smelled, tasted his blood in ice crystals, in the bite of the wind, the singe of melting metallish.
We trudged, West and I crunching down through the surface skin of melted and re-frozen snow, Benton walking along beside us, sweeping the field with her instruments and colorless eyes.
“I got a reading. Faint.”
“Human?”
She shook her head. “Two hearts. Berlin or Task?”
“Don’t know.” And I didn’t.
“We takin’ ‘em, or bleed?” West unslung his shivers.
“This one’s pure Judith patty. We’ll take him.”
They walked from wind into the dark of the cave, flooded it with schools of halo dust, lighting their way over ridge and around protrusion and under overhang.
“Reading’s close.” Hope’s voice was barely a whisper.
She need not have consulted her glass to conclude the proximity of their target; the two lines of tacking blood in the snow draped on the cave floor were barely freezing, two imperfect plow rows through drifts, the scrape of shattered femurs across ice.
It was an ugly place to die.
The tunnel widened, bubbled, tapered off into a series of smaller shafts into the rock. Laying propped against the ledge, the dying man who was Task gasped his agony through bloodied mouth. His glass eyes swung to view his three visitors in a way that suggested he was already dead.
In the plastic interface glove of his left hand, he still held a twitching, sparking something. It appeared to be the index or ring finger of his dead lover, the near Elle.
His right hand was crushed into a smear of bone and strips of flesh.
His legs were held on by what muscles hadn’t torn completely through in the crash of his vessel.
As Benton crouched beside him, surveying his damage, another twinge needled through and besind and before Paul’s eyes.
“Who..? Who—”
“Don’t try to talk.” Benton injected him with numby mist from the kit at her side.
West remembered a young doctor from Michigan who’d designed something like that once. Sweeping, flailing, tides of memory and something else, deeper and darker and alien.
“Task,” Paul took a knee. “Where are they?”
Blinking confusion and fear. Red teeth, crusting and browning.
“Berlin and Maire. Where are they?”
Task clutched the finger tighter. “Elle..?”
“It’s dead. You know that. You saw it die. We need to know where the others are. What happened after the crash?”
Eyebrows furrow, a gasp, exhalation and drift into meds-induced coma.
“He’s out.”
“Dead?” Paul reached to check Task’s pulse.
“Metastasis for now. He’ll die if we stay here much longer. He’ll cross over with us, minimal damage.”
“Looks like we’re heading home early.”
Paul stood. “You prep him for exit. West, let’s check out the rest of the cave for signs of
silver erupted everywhere, that piercing brand of light that exists beyond our concept of vision.
The force of the blast was enough to knock Hope from her feet. She not-gently hit the stone and snow floor, her head snapping back in a sickly and palpable crack of shielding.
I saw Task’s limbs flutter in ways that human arms and legs shouldn’t. Now passed out, he couldn’t have realized that what had remained of his left leg had just sheared off.
The blast knocked me back against the cave wall, but I kept my footing. I immediately thought my shielding to its highest phase.
The mountain that was West bore the explosion the best of us all. He had his weapons drawn and was returning fire before I even realized what was happening.
Blocking the light with an outstretched hand, I looked into the white that the tunnel entrance had become to finally see somethings that had crawled behind my eyes for centuries.
I hadn’t imagined them that way.
Beyond simple words or concepts, the Enemy spidered along the cave walls, tens, dozens, fifteens of them, a flickering, sub-screaming mass of writhing silverblack silverthought.
Each of West’s shiver blasts, accompanied along its trajectory with a stream of profanity that only he could seem to muster with such aplomb during combat situations, struck home on its intended Enemy target. The intruding Judas timeline patterns shattered and were re-absorbed into the Enemy mind-essence.
More came.
Bent physics fucked my mind for an instant before realization, but I tore myself from the big picture and focused on smelling the roses instead: I lifted Hope from her crumple on the ground and snapped the emergency exit pin on my chestplate. I did the same to Hope’s. I reached down to grab hold of Task’s arm.
“West! We’re out!”
A few more kills, a dozen more new arrivals, the cave ceiling cracking and collapsing into dust and chunks. He walked backward, dodging silver tendrils, almost to us—
He tripped.
The uneven ground met his bottom and back with a rough slap, but still he fired, the shiver blasts echoing and rupturing rogue code from the ME. He slid back, kicking with his feet, trying to get as close to us as he could before the jog jerked us back into nowhere.
He’d almost reached us when a shot went wide, an Enemy got too close, a silver tendril snaked and severed his right arm from the elbow down.
The shiver fired once upon impact with the ground, taking out the Enemy’s legs. It snapped to grid.
West dropped his other shiver and tore the emergency exit release from his chest. When he was within reach, I helped him into what was supposed to be our exit bubble.
