Etherwalker (16 page)

One of the trolls edged out into the light, squinting its tiny eyes in the blue glow. Standing erect to a full twelve-foot height, it sniffed at the brightness above him. The creature was massive, and Enoch could see the bones of its knuckles protruding from pink skin like dull yellow horns. With a low snarl, the troll swung at the bulb and shattered it. The end of the passageway went black. Cal and Rictus looked at each other.

“That’s odd.”

Rictus, with his sword extended in one hand, reached behind him with the other and pushed Enoch backwards, slowly following. The trolls crept after them, hesitantly following the big one in the lead.

“Move. Slowly. Enoch, keep the lights on in front of us as we move. The light doesn’t hurt them, but they don’t like it.”

“Okay—let me try to increase the power.”

With a
push,
the lights above them glowed brighter. The big troll shuffled back a couple of steps, deep growls coming from behind him. The beasts didn’t like having to wait.

Rictus kept his little group at an even pace, slowly moving through the tunnel. Enoch turned on the lights ahead of them as they moved, and the lead troll smashed the glass tubes one by one as he followed. It was getting impatient, coming closer and closer after each light went out. The trolls behind it were even more impatient, pushing and jostling. At one point the lead troll turned on the creature at its back with a snarl. The snarl was answered with a roar, and the walls shook as the two monsters grappled. In the half-light, Enoch could see this new troll cuff the leader to the ground and leap on its stunned form. He looked away as the usurper took a massive bite out of its fallen packmate and was quickly surrounded by more trolls eager for the easy meal. Horrible sounds, wet and hungry, filled the dark tunnel behind them. Rictus pushed Enoch and Cal onwards.

Distracted, the trolls stopped following them. A quiet minute passed. Two. Cal whispered if maybe the beasts had gone looking for different prey—or had perhaps already sated themselves.

Rictus shook his head. “They’ll be back. Did you see how they jumped on that one in front the moment he fell? Something’s wrong with these trolls. They’re starving.”

“Poor bastards,” said Cal.

Enoch gave an empty laugh, impressed that Cal could joke at a time like this. Then he looked over and noticed that Cal wasn’t kidding. He honestly felt pity for these things!

“Are you serious?” asked Enoch through chattering teeth.

Cal looked up at him and nodded.

“They were men once, Enoch. A remnant of the ‘souls who oiled the gears’ of our golden age, as Rictus puts it.”

Enoch decided he was done letting these mysterious innuendos fly by. And besides, talking made him forget about the cold. And the trolls.

“What do you mean? Are the trolls as old as you specters?”

Rictus laughed, and Cal looked slightly offended. Sal stopped to scratch himself before continuing down the hallway.

“I’ll just assume you meant that out of innocent curiosity, Enoch. An artist never tells his age, you see.”

Rictus was still laughing. Cal continued.

“As for how old the trolls are, I suppose it’s possible that some of them have survived from our time—apoptosis, negated cell death and all that—” He caught Enoch’s blank expression.

“Sorry, old timey words which mean that trolls don’t die unless you
make
them die. So, sure, these could be remnants from our age. But not necessarily—they’ve certainly been prolific since then. You’d have to ask the troll, I suppose.”

He looked from Enoch to Rictus expectantly. Nobody was laughing. Cal frowned.

“It’s complicated, Enoch. These trolls, like so many other elements of this wonderful dark age, are leftovers from the world before the Schism. Uh, how would you tell this, Ric?”

“Start with the plague.”

“The plague? You want me to get into . . . ?”

Enoch noticed that Rictus had gone serious, still walking slowly along the passageway, but with a strange look in his eyes.

Is he angry? At what?

“Alright, the plague then. Okay, Enoch, even though our world had become automated to the hilt, there were some tasks that we assumed would always require the human touch. One of these was medical care. Doctors and nurses and all that.” He paused and looked over at Rictus.

“Do they even have those anymore?”

Rictus shook his head. “No, that kind of stuff ended with the Schism. You know that, Cal. I’ve met some tinkers who can leech you for a few coppers, though.”

Cal grimaced. He turned back to Enoch, who had just turned on the next row of lights above them. Still no sign of trolls.

Maybe they lost us?

Cal continued.

“So, when the Crow Plague struck the Asian Conglomerate—”

“And it didn’t just kill birds,” interrupted Rictus.

“—it ripped through the hospitals like wildfire, infecting the patients
and
the doctors. Undetected for months, it traveled through organ transplants. When its second stage took hold, just about every hospital in that hemisphere took a hit. The patients, already weak from other ailments, quickly succumbed to the virus. The symptoms for the disease were quickly cataloged, and, the medical community thought, understood. The doctors, assuming themselves free from infection due to all the usual precautions, kept their surviving patients isolated but continued their usual routine of travel and sociality. It wasn’t until the virus manifested itself in a third . . . horrible . . . stage that the ruling Pensanden, the Tzolkin Core, realized their dilemma. The plague had been spread throughout the world, rooted deeply in the one group of men and women who had a chance to cure it.”

“So the Pensanden solved the problem the way they always do—with machinery.”

“And,” interjected Rictus, “with a healthy dose of cold, mathematical brutality.”

Cal whistled for Sal to turn and point at the specter, who walked past them with his jaw set in a grim line.

“Let’s not start that old argument again, Ric. You and I wouldn’t even
be
here if not for the First Hunt—our LifeBeat systems are based on the tek that originated from the Tzolkin Core medical reforms.”

“Wait,” said Enoch. “How did the Pensanden cure the Crow Plague?”

Rictus stopped, his back to them both.

“They didn’t cure it. They were programmers, Enoch, not doctors. All they could see were the numbers.”

Cal sighed.

“The numbers were true, Ric. If they hadn’t done what they—”

Rictus spun around, fists clenched tightly. Enoch had never seen him this angry.

“They cut their losses! They turned their backs on three billion men, women, and children so that they could save their own lives! This is why the Pensanden fell, Cal! A little bit of cosmic justice!” He closed his eyes, visibly trying to calm himself.

“They loved their numbers and their power more than they loved the people they were responsible for. They weren’t even human anymore. They were . . .” Rictus stopped, looked at Enoch. His mouth hung open.

Enoch took a quick step back, shivering and feeling guilty for some reason. Rictus reached a hand out apologetically but shrugged it off.

He forgot that I was here, I guess. That I’m a Pensanden.

A darker thought bubbled to the surface.

So I’m a monster, too?

Cal tried to cover the awkward silence.

“That’s what some people thought, Enoch. But some of us were a little more, uh,
wise—
”
here he shot a look at Rictus,
“or distant from the situation, and realized that Tepeu and the Tzolkin Core made the only choice they could have. With the entire medical community paralyzed, they turned to their algorithms. They saw that unless hard decisions were made quickly, humanity would be inundated with this plague. It had spread too wide, too fast. The off-world colonies were untouched, but they still depended on shipments from earth to survive.”

“So what did they do?” asked Enoch, numb but still oddly afraid of the answer. “And what does this have to do with the trolls?” Mesha had climbed back onto his shoulders, and it was a welcome warmth.

“They created a machine which could detect the virus,” said Cal. “They created an army of them. And they programmed them to contain the virus.”

“Contain?”

“You’ve met these machines, Enoch. The Meka-scheyf Cyborgs—prototypes of the Silverwitch you fought—were the first line of defense against the plague. Clothed in a sculpted layer of anti-viral synthetic flesh, they entered the populace unnoticed and efficiently removed those who were infected. Entire nations had to be taken down. Billions of people. A human army could never have accomplished the task and kept their sanity. It had to be machines.”

Enoch was horrified.

“So the Pensanden built the Serpent Wives? To kill sick people?”

Cal looked away. Rictus kept walking, silently.

“But how could they excuse themselves to . . . didn’t they at least
try
to find a . . . ?” Enoch was speechless. The pride he had felt for his newfound lineage was gone. Now he felt sick.

It’s true. I’m descended from monsters.

He jumped as a hand rested on his shoulder. Rictus had sidled up next to him as he walked and matched his pace. The specter was obviously feeling bad about his tirade. His voice was soft, apologetic.

“It was the numbers, Enoch. They didn’t dare hope for a chance to save those people. The risk was too great for them, too frightening for a group who had forgotten about faith in anything that couldn’t be calculated. So the cyborgs became commonplace since we couldn’t risk another outbreak. Machines watched our health, extended our lives,” here Rictus tapped the box at his chest, “and became our crutch.”

“Don’t think this heavy burden didn’t affect your own people, Enoch,” said Cal, his tone heavy. “The weight of those actions is what drove them to create Ketzelkol. They didn’t want to have to make that kind of choice ever again.”

“How?” said Enoch, “How could they live with themselves, having ordered the murder of so many?”

              “Some of them couldn’t.” Rictus’s hand was heavy on his shoulder.

              Cal whistled, and the ape swung from another cable to land right in front of Enoch and Rictus. Sal turned and held up a hand to stop them.

“Oh, but they didn’t kill all of them, Enoch. You see, some of those infected with the Crow Plague didn’t die.”

“Yeah,” said Rictus. “The lucky ones who had cancer.”

Enoch didn’t know the word. He shrugged, and Mesha hissed at the motion.

“Cancer,” explained Cal, “was a disease of our era in which parts of the body started growing . . . incorrectly.” He shot a look at Rictus, searching for the right words. “Well, that’s the layman’s description, I suppose. These cancerous parts, these ‘cells’ would often grow uncontrollably, blocking off normal bodily function and, in many cases, killing their host.

“The Crow Plague virus, however, was attracted to these cancerous cells like a bear to honey . . . wait, you don’t know what a bear is, do you, Enoch? No? Okay, how about like a nerwolf to a newborn lamb? Does that make sense? Upon infecting a cancer patient, the virus would chemically ‘sniff out’ the cancer—deliberately avoiding the healthy cells—and bury itself in the mitochondria, er, the
guts
of the thing. There it would quietly go to work, changing the nature of the cancer until one day . . . boom.”

“Boom?”

“Boom. The cancerous cells would burst into an unheard-of frenzy of energetic growth, dividing and specializing like the stem cells in an embryonic, um . . . well, they just started to grow like crazy. Bones, muscles, organs, every part of these once-sickly cancer patients became strong. Too strong.”

Enoch understood where this was going.

“The trolls.”

“Exactly. The hospitals were already scenes of chaos, abandoned by anyone wishing to avoid the plague and filled with the dead and dying. All of a sudden, entire wings of the building are filled with these crazy overgrown monstrosities. Crazy? Well, the human brain wasn’t meant to grow at this speed. The poor creatures kept some remnant of their core animal brains, but any memory of their civilized lives was lost. And to make matters worse, the explosive growth was accompanied by an insatiable hunger. A hunger for the quick sustenance of warm meat . . .”

Cal let the subject drop, and that was fine. Enoch didn’t care to pursue that line of thought either.

I don’t want to know the details.

“So the Silverwitch army—the
cyborgs—
were sent to kill them, too?”

“At first, yes. But the trolls proved surprisingly resilient to physical assault—and it was soon discovered that they weren’t
vectors,
i.e. they couldn’t pass the plague on to uninfected people. So the Pensanden focused their efforts on that critical First Hunt. The Crow Plague was their primary concern. The trolls escaped into the dark places of the earth and became, well, trolls. They bred. Where there was food, they flourished. Your ancestors made a couple attempts to eliminate them all after the plague scare had ended. But it was too late—the trolls were too many, and too well hidden.”