Champion of Mars (25 page)

A short slip. Tsu Keng knew that he was elsewhere. That was the natural order of it. How could it be otherwise?

The Martian squadron materialised deep in the Jovian subsystem and into the heart of battle. Tsu Keng’s wingmate flew straight into a cloud of debris at near-luminal speed, tumbling into a million pieces. Tsu Keng’s combat wing split, the four remaining ships spiralling in evasive manoeuvres as thousands of anti-collision hardbeams vaporised the debris.

Krashtar Vo looked upon the battle through Tsu Keng’s eyes, his mind comprehending their situation as Tsu Keng bent his own mind to the task of survival. Their battlefield spanned anything up to eight spatial dimensions, only the highest and the second temporal axes safe, unsullied by violence. Combat was conducted at speeds approaching the four-dimensional maximum for objects of their mass. At such velocities, relative position at a distance was impossible to judge, so they fought at close quarters.

A dozen Terran ships fought a desperate fight with four Stone Kin vessels. The Terran ships were near-identical to those of Mars, the same in all but song. Their armour was scarred and their movements panicked. The Stone Kin craft – if they were craft, none had ever been captured, and no crew ever seen – warped and flexed. Their presence was an intrusion into three dimensional space, and their forms were not fixed. It was as if they rotated in their own space, presenting first this aspect of themselves to the lower dimensions, then that, where they could be understood only as disparate parts. The spirits and humans of ordinary spacetime perceived them no more clearly than blind men describing an elephant. Beams of exotic particles erupted unpredictably from their surfaces. Their effusion and potency defied analysis. Eleutheremics could not predict them. They might impact upon a ship with less effect than a ray of moonlight, or they could cut it in two.

The alpha ship severed the fleet’s higher linkages, lest the Stone Kin infiltrate the ship’s cortices. Training, experience, and force of will would determine the outcome of the day.

The Stone Kin shattered two more of the Terran ships to glittering clouds, and bright fire roiled and died in the vacuum. The remaining Terran craft fell back, joining with the Martian fleet. The ships greeted each other with long songs, broadcast on inter-ship ranges, but they were muted. The Terran ships were exhausted and afraid.

Today they could all die. They were poorly matched against the Stone Kin, no matter how many Sulian craft crowded the sky. The Stone Kin’s power was ineffable.

Survival did not matter, not to Tsu Keng. He and his fellow ships found the Terrans’ fear contemptible. To fly, that was all. To fight, that was what was demanded. He had no fear, he would fly, he would fight. Death was immaterial.

The Martian fleet surged forward. They ducked and arced like dolphins as their engines pushed at the fabric of space.

The Stone Kin revolved their incomprehensible bodies to face this new threat. Beams jagged out from them, all targeted unerringly on the alpha craft. Beams of infinite colouring intersected on the space where the alpha swam. Too late, its pilot attempted to exert her will and force the ship elsewhere. Its wings were part unfurled as it was cut into a hundred pieces, fragments of it spinning out and impacting on those following it.

Some of the younger vessels, those with inexperienced pilots, hesitated and swerved, songs vibrating with panic. The rest hurled themselves on, diving through the lattice of beams the warping Stone Kin projected. More ships died in ecstasy, annihilated as they flew.

The Martians had lost thirty ships already.

Krashtar Vo and Tsu Keng moved themself into an attack pattern. They part-deployed their slip wings. Their remaining wingmates spiralled down after them, copying their leader’s action.

Pilot’s and ship’s shared skin prickled as slip shields came online. Krashtar Vo enforced his interpretation of events upon Tsu Keng and the craft jinked madly, moving from location to location without crossing the space in between.

Tsu Keng deployed his cannons and opened fire. Krashtar Vo extended his mind, unique organs in his brain pre-observing an infinity of outcomes. Their joined mind was capable of processing vast amounts of information at once. Self-imposed ignorance was the lever to the imposition of will.

Vo’s mind, pushed to great heights by that of Tsu Keng, observed all possible quantum outcomes exactly simultaneously, not sequentially, preventing any one state of truth being determined before the desired outcome was chosen and enacted.

Not all men could become pilots, just as not all spirits could be ships. The act of forcing one’s will onto an eleven-dimensional space required a stupendous act of double-thinking, for they had to be both ignorant and aware they were doing it. Awareness that all possible outcomes existed contaminated the observance of said outcomes, reducing the number of outcomes to one, and crippling the possibility of success. Through denial, they thus preserved the undetermined state of things before the time was ripe for determination to come into effect. At the same time, they saw what they saw; the inevitability. What happened was always the only answer. The pilots of Mars were unshakeable in their conviction that they were right.

They were bred to defy fate.

All truths, however, are subjective.

Together, Tsu Keng and Krashtar Vo observed exactly where the Stone Kin would be, and fired. But the Stone Kin operated outside of time, observing their fire at precisely the same moment, their will undermining the certainty principles of the aggressor.

Even if it was inevitable it would be hit, if the target could force its own interpretation of events onto the firer, then it would miraculously avoid the shot.
Always
. If the ship could force its own observed interpretations on a target’s, then the opposite would occur – it would always be hit. The target would either always be hit, or always be missed, but never both, as decided by the eleutheremic arguments constructed by the duelling craft, and how well they tricked their opposite number into adopting their point of view.

Combat was a matter not of flight, then, but of sheer will.

For a few brief moments, two observable realities vied with each other for dominance. Only one held true at any one time, but both could be true at different times, and the ships, the Stone Kin and the cannon’s ordnance flickered into and out of existence, describing multiple fractured courses and positions, the universe blurring into a myriad possibilities, time spread like a rainbow. The fabric of reality groaned under the strain.

Probability was wracked by a monstrous contest of wills. Packets of energy exploded or failed ever to have existed about the weaving, poly-possible craft. The ship was, then wasn’t, then was again, its potential ruination hanging on the threads of contested interpretation.

Seventeen thousandths of a second and it was over. Tsu Keng’s fire raked over the body of the Stone Kin. Volleys from his wingmates crisscrossed the thing. For one moment its pulsations stilled and its form solidified into something ugly and squamous.

It imploded, and ceased to be.

The Martian fleet flickered through the space the alien craft had occupied, rolling and singing as they moved from one potentiality to the next. Emboldened, they assailed the remaining three Stone Kin. Many died.

The sky wept tears of light as ships left mankind’s birthplace in their millions, fleeing the tear in the sky. The harsh light of the transformed Jupiter glared at them all as they fled. The Stone Sun was one fight closer to being kindled, the Stone Kin one step closer to being trapped. Earth, Mars, Venus – the ancestral homes of Man – would be entombed with them, but the plague of the Stone Kin would go no further.

Tsu Keng did not care. Tsu Keng flew.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Descent

F
OR THE BRIEFEST
of moments, the Veil of Worlds parts and the stars shine strong and clear upon parts of Mars long alien to them. I feel displaced; unclean. The gap closes, and swirling unreality returns. Where before there was nothing, our silver dart drifts in the shrouded night high above the world.

The rays of the true sun sweep around the planet, burning dimly through the Veil. Even sapped, it strikes glimmers of light from our many-finned hull. We drift, the ship turning as it begins to fall. It moves without direction. Burns and wounds criss-cross the hull; ugly welts and brassy contusions that mar the rainbow lustre of Tsu Keng’s seamless skin.

Tsu Keng is dying. He has been true to his promise and to his fate.

The ship’s pace quickens towards the shadowed deserts, the dusk-shrouded ice fields, the mottled ruptures where Stone intrusions pierce lower realities, to torture crust and time alike.

Yoechakenon sleeps. His face is frozen in a grimace, whether of pain or terror I cannot discern. A nimbus encases him, like frozen curls of oil on water. The area within it shimmers, as if uncertain whether to be or to be not. My love looks more like the possibility of a man than a being that lives and breathes.

This is fortunate. The stasis field holds. I do not have much time. Tsu Keng is disabled and I cannot control his failing body.

The instruments of the ship blaze around Yoechakenon, and blinking lamps measure the beat of the craft’s slowing heart. The lights flutter with increasing irregularity; some do not return to life. As the seconds pass, fewer and fewer shine, and those that still shine do so ever more dimly. The ruined cabin vibrates. Globules of viscous fluid quiver in the air, floating from torn arteries and smashed organs revealed by the ruptured walls.

I try to assert myself, throwing out parts of myself to fill the space Tsu Keng has vacated. I do not know what I am doing. His instruments are unfamiliar. I find an image bank, but its projectors ripple and fail, and no image appears. A shower of sparks issues from them, and many fall dark.

“My love.” My voice struggles into being, vibrating frayed vocal cords of living glass. It fades away, before swelling to fill the cabin of the slipship. I feel pain, as part of Tsu Keng’s voice breaks forever. “My love. Awake.” My voice is perfect, alluring and husky, for it was designed to be so, but also cracked and stuttering, and this I do not intend. I am afraid. “I am blind. I cannot see. We are caught. The ship is damaged, and it does not respond. Tsu Keng is dying. We are falling.”

“Warning.” My voice; a second voice from a subsidiary mind that has infiltrated part of the ship’s control system. Good. My choir grows into my new skin. This voice is impassive, isolated from my fear, and there is a terrible finality to its words. “Plasma drive offline, atmospheric entry in three minutes, thirty-seven seconds and counting. Warning.”

I attempt to rouse Yoechakenon. I struggle deep in the ship’s matrix, trying to shut off his protective cocoon. He was a pilot, once. He will know what to do. I caress sigils floating in the innerspace of the ship’s private world, but they do not respond. I push harder until something breaks, optic beams burning through crystalline arrangements stressed beyond tolerance by the ship’s transference from the higher dimensions to the lower. The field remains imperturbable, and Yoechakenon stays enmeshed in his nightmare.

“My love, Yoechakenon, wake up, please wake up!” I whisper. My voice is fractured, multiple layers of pleading. “I need you!” My other voice carries on its relentless countdown. “Atmospheric entry in two minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

I push and push, attempting to break into systems I barely understand. I feel trapped, imprisoned. I cannot get out.

Something gives, and I have influence over another system – the ship’s damage control. I steel myself.

This is going to hurt.

Agony assails me as I take on the suffering of the vessel. My mind fractures further as I wrestle with it. Then the pain is gone; I have offloaded the feeling onto a sub-personality, and walled it off, screaming, in a part of myself. Another of my voices sings a song of destruction. “Extensive hull damage. Slip shields disrupted during transit. Crystalline matrix disrupted. Columnar link severed, ship’s mind contaminated. Ship’s systems at twenty-seven per cent of prime capacity and falling. Probability of ship intellect survival fourteen per cent and falling. Wake up, Yoechakenon, wake up! The ship is caught!” My voices sound under and around each other in chorus, a melody of hull integrity, pleas, atomic cohesion, uncertainty, temporal positioning, fear. A hundred subroutines speak their opinions and announce procedures, possible as well as attempted, as my choir attempts to halt the descent. There is a coughing from the ship’s rear, a flare of light that overwhelms the viewports’ darkening mechanisms. The ship slews violently around, taking us broadside on to the planet. A cascade of molten half-metal rains past. “Plasma drive destroyed. Initiating emergency landing procedures.” My voices come together, speaking together with polyphonic certainty. “We are going to crash.”

The ship gathers speed. Elsewhere on Mars it will be full day, but the Veil lets little light through, and the land below lies under a greyish murk. The enfeebled sun illuminates orbital artefacts of ages past. Corpses in orbit, decaying platforms of long-forgotten purpose, their remains pointing tangled fingers of ruinous superstructure accusingly at the planet below.

Above the north pole, the blue-fringed Stone Sun rises to oppose the true sun, its light an anti-light, a light that blinds with darkness. So far away outside the Veil, the usual laws do not apply within the realms of the Stone Lands. The Stone Sun was made by Man, Jupiter resculpted to imprison the Stone Kin. Its stuff is of the Stone Realms entirely, and within this interface it waxes strong, a monstrous vortex of malice.

The damaged slipship continues its tumble. Tsu Keng’s dimension-warping technologies are functional, but useless in the face of mundane gravity. I am trapped in a disintegrating body, and I will die if I fail in my struggle for mastery of it.

Yoechakenon will die.

I re-route streams of light-borne data through unbroken areas of the ship’s inner network, I tear up the living machine’s operating protocols, destroying swathes of its personality in the process; anything to bring my beloved Yoechakenon down safely.