Champion of Mars (26 page)

I feel great pain, and part of my greater being burns out: that which was bound to the ship’s soul, a temporary arrangement that could now turn fatal. Titanic cathedrals woven of thought that dance with more possibilities than there are atoms in the universe sputter and go black. Memories I have held for tens of thousands of years are gone. I isolate my core aspects while struggling with the craft’s few functioning systems. Should we survive, I will remain Kaibeli.

Should we survive.

“Warning, atmospheric impact in fifty-four, fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one, fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight...” My submind’s voice emotionlessly counts down as thirteen other pieces of me attempt to devise a way out. All solutions are found wanting and discarded.

“Three per cent probability of ship intellect survival. Six per cent of occupant’s survival. Nine point seven five of hosted AI survival.

“The ship is breaching the atmosphere. Warning. Approach vector incorrect. Destruction certain.”

A sharp whistling resounds through the hull as the ship passes through the upper layers of the atmosphere. Our velocity is comparatively low, but with my side-on approach I am certain to bounce across Mars’ thin sheath of air like a stone skipping on a pond, breaking up and plummeting to fiery ruin. Either that or I will pass over the Stone Lands entirely, and hit the Veil of Worlds at the far side, and be destroyed utterly.

The craft judders. The viewports glow red. The whistling grows to a roar. I try again to rouse the ship’s soul, but it is slumped in one corner of itself, mumbling in terminal quinary. I recoil; its routines are shot through with the spirit-slaying particles of the Stone Realms. It is closer to death than I thought.

“Yoechakenon!” I shout. “I don’t know how to do this! Yoechakenon, for the love of all life,
wake up!
” Part of me is amused. Yoechakenon has rarely seen me perturbed. There is no response from the frozen man, and he stays locked outside the normal flow of time.

I cast wildly around for salvation. Just as I am beginning to give up hope, I find activation routines for three directional impellers buried deep in the ship’s mental framework. I follow the trail of electrons to their locations upon the ship’s hull. My minds debate with one another if they will work, if they were damaged by our journey through the Veil, if they will do any good should they be sound. The conclusions I reach, swifter than lightning, are all negative. Lacking other options, I try them anyway. One goes instantly to destruction, searing my mind like a red hot knife. I force calm upon myself, and power the remaining pair up slowly. I pray, even though I know the Great Librarian cannot hear me.

There is a low counterpoint to the roar of the air outside, a pulsing that jostles with the vibrations of the cabin. One of the impellers is online. I manipulate it gently, as careful as I can be. Slowly, the craft tilts, nose forward, presenting its prow to atmosphere. Another gravity thruster sounds, stray graviton particles rippling through my being. The ship pitches to the right.

“Four per cent probability of ship intellect survival.” My relentless voice chimes, barely audible. “Twenty-three per cent of occupant survival. Thirty-six per cent of hosted AI survival.”

The ship streaks through the sky, a blazing spear trailing fire in its wake. My body roars over glacial peaks, passing over the endless plains that lie at the feet of towering cliffs of ice, dazzling places with my passage that have not seen light for thousands of years. Strange things, not of Mars, track the ship with cold eyes. I take little of this in. I try my best to slow the ship’s descent with the few means at my disposal.

“Seven point eight six per cent probability of ship intellect survival. Forty-six point four per cent of occupant survival. Sixty-seven per cent of hosted AI survival.”

The boom of the ship’s arrival shatters the silence of the freezing Stone Lands. I draw closer and closer to the ground, hurtling over the prairies that girt Mulympiu, lands that have not felt the tread of true Martians since the end of the Third Stone War. I punch through clean air and the choking fumes of Stone intrusion alike. I am pulled down, betrayed by my borrowed body.

“Eight point eight six per cent probability of ship intellect survival. Fifty-seven point four per cent of occupant survival. Seventy-eight per cent of hosted AI survival.”

And then we hit. To my minds, functioning far faster than that of a human being ever could, there is a universe of silence, an eternity of calm hidden in a nanosecond of fury. Then there is nothing but noise and blinding pain and the scream of tearing half-metals.

Soil drags at the ship, scrabbling to bring my warmth into its freezing embrace. I break free and hurtle forward several hundred spans; once, twice, spinning over and over. I ram the ground again. Iron-hard ground claws at my ruined fins, hauling the ship back into line with itself, sending sprays of turf, water, steam, and dirt out either side of me. Caught fully in the clutches of the steppe, the ship skids to a long stop, leaving a steaming furrow four thousand spans long behind it. I cry out as the ship’s spine snaps. The craft breaks in two before coming to a final, tumbling halt.

Within, the few lights about the cabin flicker. But they do not die.

The ship sits in an empty landscape of sere grasses and dirty, timeless snow. High above, the Stone Sun burns in the sky with silent fury, Suul opposite cowed and faint.

The ground hisses, the ship’s half-metal body ticks as it cools. All too soon it is cold. The heat of re-entry dissipates into the frigid steppe, and a sheen of frost runs spidery caresses over the hull. All falls silent within the craft. Without, the land returns to its deathly watch, the gnarled heather and grasses that cloak it moving fitfully in the wind, as if it stirs in fever-sleep.

The noise of energy generation invades the inside of the ship, as a few more points of life spring uncertainly back to life. Flames gout from a smashed wall and die back, leaving the greasy smell of burnt meat upon the air.

“Yoechakenon?” My voices speak together again, quiet and tentative. I run my selves round the vessel. The field protecting Yoechakenon glows bright. This time, when I try the sigils and they do not respond, I smash them with a lash of my psyche.

The nimbus about Yoechakenon shuts off, and his tensed body crumples in upon itself. He utters an inchoate shout that seems the end of a greater cry, and is still.

I direct my will to preventing the dropping temperatures from slaying the one I love, and wait for him to awake.

Y
OECHAKENON AWAKES.
H
E
blinks, clearing tears and sweat from his eyes. His body tingles with the remembered pain of stasis. This signals good news, that he is in stasis no more.

“Yoechakenon? Yoechakenon,” I say. I hide my concern for his wellbeing. Stasis is not a natural state: those who step outside of time do not always return, and some of those that do are not the men they were when they departed.

He comes to properly, and I feel joy. He coughs on the alien air of the Stone Lands.

“You are here.” He attempts to rise, but is weak, and lies back on the couch, clutching at his armour and glaive.

“Yes, Yoechakenon, I am here.”

“Then the Emperor was not lying, in that one regard.” He puts aside the glaive and runs his hands over his face, as if feeling it for the first time. Another spasm of coughs racked his body. He looks around the pilot’s chamber. “What happened?”

“The ship sustained serious damage in our flight through the Veil of Worlds. My memory is seriously impaired, but from what I can gather, many of the ship’s defences were undone once it pierced the Veil. Yoechakenon, I...” – my voice struggles, fading out as more of the ship’s communication system shatters – “I am not sure, I saw...” I doubt myself, and Yoechakenon sees it. “The ship’s mind suffered greatly.”

Yoechakenon struggles up onto his elbows, and his movement provokes a million hurts, though these are but echoes of his earlier agony. Ignoring the discomfort, he looks about himself, gauging the danger in his immediacy. The cabin is dark, only the dim light of failing instruments allowing him to see anything. Ruptured bulkheads spill smashed crystals on the crumpled floor; the ship’s ergonomic lines are buckled. In one wall a rent stands, revealing the cold blackness of the Stone Lands outside.

Deep inside some of the shattered walls, crystal chips glow. These are weak, glimmerings in places that should have been ablaze with the illumination of self-knowledge.

“Tsu Keng is dead?” he says.

“He will pass soon. I am sorry.”

He is quiet for a time. His thoughts are clouded with grief. “That is a great shame,” he says. He levers himself into a squatting position within the couch. He stays there for a few minutes, shivering from shock and cold. The air gusting through the breaches in the hull is icy and strangely flavoured, and his lungs burn with it.

“Lost and without a means of return. Our situation appears grim.” Yoechakenon rubs at his forehead as nausea floods over him. Worse than the pain is the feeling of meaninglessness that permeates every part of his being, a side-effect of the Stone Lands. Men were not meant to tread here. “What hurts have I sustained? I feel as if death is upon me.”

“As far as I can ascertain, you are only superficially damaged.”

He runs his shaking hands through his braids. “It feels as if that is far from the case.”

“Your spiritual energies remain intact. There is no contamination or sign of interference within your neural or interface frameworks – unlike the ship. I cannot be totally sure, I have lost most of my external processing centres. I cannot see beyond standard human spectral ranges; the ship’s sensor suite is smashed beyond repair. But I am almost certain you are undamaged.”

“I should not feel so weak,” Yoechakenon says darkly. He grits his teeth, fighting the pain and queasiness, and succeeds at pulling himself upright. It is a supreme effort. He lays his head against the metal skin of the ship. It should be warm with life, but is clammy as a corpse. His hands are sticky with ship’s blood, his feet chilled by the thick fluids pooling on the floor.

“This will pass. The stasis field would not go out. After we crashed and the ship’s spirit failed. I am sorry, but I had to use force to wake you. The sickness is a side effect of your abrupt reintegration with linear time.”

Yoechakenon is disoriented. He feels vulnerable, an unaccustomed sensation that fills him with unease.

I cannot wait for him to ground himself. There is a feeling, a scratching on my skin. It is swift and then gone, but it draws near the ship’s bridge. “There is something outside the ship.”

Yoechakenon listens, focussing his hearing on the air beyond the gash in the wall. All he hears is the thin, malignant wind.

“I hear nothing.”

“They are stealthy. Much of the ship’s skin is numb, but there are places that can still feel. They pass over these, and are working their way up the hull towards us. Their claws hurt the ship’s flesh.”

Yoechakenon risks switching his sphere of consciousness. Ours is the connection of the prime degree, higher than the first, lower only than that endured by the Emperor and his spirit twin. Through me, Yoechakenon may feel what I feel, as I may look into his heart and mind. He does so now, interfacing directly with the ship’s senses. He grimaces as he experiences the ship’s pains. The death pangs of such a large machine are strong. We feel the life draining from the huge hull, feel the canker of madness growing in the ship’s mind as Stone Land contamination forces itself between its streams of consciousness. Twists of golden thought turn black.

There. Again. Claws upon the ship’s skin.

He concentrates on the sensation. It is fleeting, intermittent, present only when whatever monster comes for us passes over a living section of the hull. Yoechakenon has spent only a single lifetime as a machine, unlike I, who have lived many times as a flesh woman. To him it is strange and unfamiliar, this machine pain, and dread creeps up his spine as surely as the creatures creep up the hull.

I push back his senses from those of the ship. Tsu Keng is fading; Yoechakenon’s soul could be swept away by the ship’s mind as it dies.

“Their touch is of utter chill. Yoechakenon, they may be Stone Beasts, but I cannot be sure.”

“Sure or not, if there is but a chance they are Stone Beasts, we must leave. Now.” He pushes himself away from the wall. It takes most of his strength.

“Yoechakenon, I do not think we can do so without them detecting us. Conflict is a likely outcome of our current situation.”

“Do not fret, Kaibeli.” He moves silently to the gash in the hull. The air is dry, the wind cold, robbing his slime-crusted body of heat. He shivers violently.

“They are gathering where there is life in the ship still.”

“Then they must be Stone Beasts,” says Yoechakenon, his breath pluming in the frigid air. “Mortal creatures would not be so fastidious in their feeding. Our situation, it appears, is not improving.” He pauses a moment, weighing our chances. “Can Tsu Keng be saved?”

“No,” I say. My voice diverges into a chorus. A few dissenting voices sing a different song, but softly. “The ship and its mind are broken beyond repair. Even if it were to survive its injuries, it will never fly again. We will have to find another way from the Stone Lands.”

“I wonder if the Emperor planned for us to return at all,” he says. Yoechakenon frowns. “We must sacrifice our good brother to save ourselves.” He hunts through the wreckage as he speaks, his movements increasingly sure as his strength returns. His mind pushes out the dark futility bedded in his subconscious. A quick investigation of the combat sheath the Emperor provided me tells him that the body is smashed beyond repair.

You are going to have to ride in the armour
, he says to me, mind to mind.

“Yes, Yoechakenon,” I say. I do not want to ride with the armour. Its spirit is vicious and despises me. I try to disregard such pettiness and concentrate on the matter in hand.

“Kaibeli, when I direct you, you must divert all remaining energies into the hull, as far away as from us as is possible. Do you understand?”