Ninth City Burning (43 page)

As I transition into a description of the IMEC's basic design and function, making sure to linger on the theory that makes the whole gorgeous contraption possible,
2
my blueprints multiply and metamorphose, depicting the city from numerous angles and levels of detail, diagramming everything from the layout of the streets to the internal plumbing to the prevailing weather patterns. What we have, now parading before the assembled bigwigs of the Incorporated Peoples of Earth, is nothing less
than a fully fledged flying city. Or, as Rae so enthusiastically put it, “A real live Laputa,
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you goddamned loony beauty!”

The overall effect is at once disarmingly simple and deliciously complex, a complete—and, I hope, believable—picture of a city capable of surviving anything either the Valentines or the Realms can deal out. We started with EASSaC-2, that brilliantly impractical, fanciful spree from
Associative Architecture
, pillaging the work we'd already done on establishing habitable environments under conditions not traditionally ideal for an air-breathing, terrestrial, human community and applying it by strenuous mental acrobatics to the various horrific scenarios to be found beyond Lunar Veil, including but not limited to: the vacuum of outer space, toxic and corrosive atmospheres, deadly high-energy radiation, extreme gravitational forces, temperatures exceeding 1.9 x 10
7
K and approaching absolute zero, and swarms of alien insects carrying flesh-eating alien microorganisms. Getting the whole thing into the air was simple when compared to building what is effectively a mini-ecosystem not only capable of supporting the population of a major city but able to survive travel at interplanetary speeds. The same innovations that go into Personal Gravity can be used, with a little elbow grease and the help of associative architecture–type applications of large-system dynamics, to put a city in the sky.

But it's obvious what's got this auditorium of eyeballs so fixated isn't the equations for shockingly authentic artificial sunlight or the thelemic schematics for circadian stabilizers. It's the dramatic (if conceptual) views from the IMEC's towers, the pristine fields and sparkling waterways suspended in the midst of space. I've given these people the next best thing to walking around inside the place, and in a few moments, they're going to have that experience, too. Here I'll admit to an unprofessionally egotistical thrill, since those spectacular high-rez designs are all me. Vinneas's skills lay mainly in theory, not producing pinup-quality renderings of drop-dead-sexy engineering. You could frame this presentation and hang
it in a gallery, and if you did, the smugly stylistic signature at the bottom would say,
Yours truly, Kizabel
. Also,
Up yours, Academy review board.

But not everyone is as impressed with myself as I am. The esteemed Imperator Feeroy can hardly wait for me to finish my presentation so he can get up and say something condescending. “Clearly you have put a great deal of energy into this invention of yours, and I assure you it is very impressive,” he says, sounding less impressed than annoyed. “But perhaps you have forgotten that we have only twenty-eight days until Romeo is free to continue his invasion. How much time do you estimate will be required to launch this—what did you call it?”

It's written right there, at the bottom of the main diagram, but I don't point that out. “IMEC-1,” I say. “Ingenically Mobilized Expeditionary City. One.”

Everyone is watching me now, anxious to see how this squabble will play out. The fate of Earth could depend on whether or not I know what I'm talking about. Only Vinneas is smiling, looking like he's thoroughly enjoying the show. This must be how he keeps so calm all the time—he plans everything out in advance. Even people like Imperator Feeroy aren't so scary when you already know what they're going to say.

“Yes, of course.” Feeroy chuckles nastily. “How long do you think it would be before your IMEC is prepared for battle?”

“Twenty-three days,” I answer without hesitating.

Feeroy's sneer drops away, and for a second I see it isn't me he dislikes. He doesn't care about me at all—except that, as far as he's concerned, I'm wasting time that could be put to better use securing the survival of humanity. “You must be mistaken,” he says, startled. He gestures to an aerial view of IMEC-1. “It would take years to erect that artillery array alone. How do you expect to build an entire city in twenty-three days?”

“I don't. Twenty-three days is how long it would take to assemble the underlying thelemic architecture and initialize the systems necessary to get the IMEC airborne, habitable, and combat-ready once the basic physical structure is complete.”

He lets loose an exasperated laugh. “And what good is it to know we can make a city fly if we don't have time to build a city?”

“We don't need to build a city,” I answer. “That part of IMEC-1 is already finished. You're standing in it.”

I
t isn't like I thought building a floating city would be
easy
. Not even building it, really, since we're using good old Ninth City, but even with the thing already there, no one expected getting it into the air was going to be like a simple process. At Limit Camp, they teach you about thelemity a little, how in some ways it works the same as a sort of machine, only you can't see all the gears and levers and engines and whatnot because they're made out of this invisible force. So I knew there'd be more to it than just waving your hands around a little and the whole thing taking off. First we had to put together all the little working parts—what the Prips call “artifices”—that make up this invisible machine that's supposed to keep a whole island in the air. I don't really know how I thought we'd do it. Maybe I was picturing some glowing crystals or something. But I definitely didn't think it would be like this.

For the past week or so, we've been building houses in the middle of nowhere. No kidding. I mean, I suppose it isn't really
nowhere
. We're out in the valley around Ninth City, not too far from our old Limit Camp, in fact, but it feels a lot like hellion territory, with all the empty fields and forests and no roads or fences or factories anywhere. Just the sort of place where there might be hellions waiting to skin you alive and eat your eyeballs and whatnot. It makes me kind of nervous, even though all I have to do is find a hill or climb a tree, and I'll be able to see Ninth City. At least I'm not the only one here. We've got three whole squads, and, of course, the place doesn't look totally devoid of like human habitation because we're building these houses, but somehow that only makes everything seem creepier because no one's ever going to live in them.

The reason I know the houses aren't for anyone in particular, or really anyone at all, is because as soon as we're done building them, we burn them down. Like, we'll spend days putting up these cozy little cottages, arranging them all in rows, and we'll make the beds and set the tables for like a nice meal, with actual food and everything, then once the Immunes have come through to make sure everything is done right, we just set it all on fire. And that isn't even the strangest thing we've done. Not even close.

We've been at it for a little over two weeks now, building good old IMEC-1, that is. It all started with the attack, naturally. We spent the whole thing down in the shelters at Limit Camp, and even though no one told us what was happening outside, we knew something was wrong. It wasn't our first trip to the shelters or anything, but they'd never kept us down there more than a few hours, and this was going on a full day. But then the alert ended, and it was like everything went back to normal, the same drills and PT and lectures on how to stop yourself bleeding to death from a severed arm and so forth, until a couple days later, when Optio Sorril called the whole camp together, just like she did that first day, when she told us all about the war and the Realms and the Valentines and so forth. I'd thought that was all bad enough. This was even worse.

What old Sorril had to tell us was that we'd basically just lost the war. She didn't say it that way, of course, but it was pretty obvious what was going on. While all of us recruits had been down in the shelters, there'd been this huge battle going on all over the world. It wasn't just some little atmospheric incursion the Legion could clean up in a couple of hours, either. This time old Romeo'd sent a whole army, the biggest Earth had ever seen, and the reason he could drop this like big horde right on top of us was that he'd already killed off everyone at the Front.

What made it even worse, for me anyway, was that the whole thing, the Front getting overrun and everything, had all happened months ago, before any of us had even been recruited. It had just taken the Valentines that long to get here because of how much slower time moves in the Realms. So everything that had happened, getting drafted and dragged out here and puking in my helmet and whatnot, none of that mattered. I could have been back at Granite Shore with Camareen this whole time for all the difference it would have made.

Everyone was real upset, you could tell. Poor old Mersh was actually
crying, and if you looked around, you could see other people were, too. I mostly just wanted to hit something, but I didn't. No one moved or made a sound—unless they were already blubbering and couldn't help it—because Sorril was still talking. The people in charge had come up with a plan to get us out of this mess, and we were supposed to help. We were going to build a fortress, an actual like flying island, that we could send into the Realms to hold the Valentines off. If it worked, everyone back on Earth would have something like thirty years to get ready before Romeo's big army, what Sorril called “the Valentine Host,” finally got here. Long enough that we'd stand a good chance of fighting Romeo off. If the plan was going to work, though, we had to have the whole flying fortress ready to go in twenty-five days.

We were supposed to have another two months or so at Limit Camp before we officially joined the Legion, but there wasn't time for that anymore. As of that moment, old Sorril said, we were all part of the Ninth Legion, Third Cohort, Twelfth Century. If we'd made it the whole way through training, we'd have all been assigned to different parts of the Legion, but the way things were, they'd decided to just make us our own new century.

Sorril had to pick a few of us to be squad leaders, too, and good old Mersh was right at the top of her list, thanks to how well his squad had done in combat exercises. Kiddo went from recruit to Decurio in two seconds flat. I think he was kind of disappointed it happened so quickly. He'd been excited about the ceremony they do when you finally graduate into the Legion. But he got to choose his own squad, and he made sure to get me and Hexi and Spammers, so we could all stick together.

We started work right away. Optio Sorril brought in these two guys from a part of the Legion called the Immunes, basically legionaries like us but specially trained to build big complicated things like flying islands. The Immunes were here to supervise our work on the fortress, which they were calling IMEC-1. They called up the Decurio from each squad and told everyone else to get into our D-87s and report back and bring our trenchers along.

Trenchers, also known as U-55 entrenchment tools, are sort of like lazels, only you use them to build things instead of blow things up. If you've got the right materials and know what you're doing, you can make your own shelter pretty much anywhere, including outer space. You can
even make things float, mostly rocks and logs and so forth, if you don't have anywhere good to build. I figured we'd be doing something like that, maybe making floating blocks to build this floating fortress, but I was way off.

Once we all suited up, Mersh told us we'd be going to the South Piazza. We'd all been there a couple of times since we finished our first four weeks of training and they started letting us out on recreation. South Piazza is one of the few places in Ninth City where people go just to relax. When we got there, though, it was totally empty, except for people in D-87s like us. Our job, Mersh said, was to draw lines. We were supposed to set our trenchers to make contrasting marks, then draw all over South Piazza. Not just anywhere, of course. Each squad had a square twenty meters across to work on, and we had to make the lines according to this very specific diagram. It wasn't easy, because you couldn't really tell if you were doing it right, and if the Immunes decided your line wasn't exactly perfect, you had to start over. Spammers got the hang of it pretty quick, but the rest of us made a lot of mistakes. As soon as we finished one twenty-meter square, the Immunes would come in and start drawing even more things, mostly weird-looking symbols and little pictures, like of animals and people and whatnot. Meanwhile, we'd get another twenty-meter square of Piazza and have to draw all over
that
.

It all had to do with thelemity, obviously, but none of us could figure out how. We heard about other squads going down to the main city shelters and just gutting the place, pulling out all the beds and supplies and everything until it was all just a big empty space, then, when that was all done, the Immunes told them to cut their thumbs and leave one fingerprint in blood on the wall. Seriously. The Immunes never told us why we had to do all this stuff, or if they did, they'd say something pretty unhelpful, like “this is going to be an ocularoclastic node” or “we need to redirect the cephaloparisic flow through this area.” It became a sort of joke in some of the squads. Whenever we had to go take a piss, we'd say something like “I need to flobnob the groobinwhistler.”

It took two days to finish the whole Piazza, and as soon as we were done, they sent us to this big flowery field just outside the city and told us to start burying little statues of animals. Like, we got boxes and boxes filled with these figurines of cows and pigs and whatnot, and a map of the field with marks all over it telling us where to dig and how deep to bury each
one. It was a little like assembling something at a factory, how precise everything had to be, only instead of a 1.25cm screw or whatever, you had a statue of a chicken. After that, we went to a lake, and they gave us all cups filled with some liquid, oil if you were a girl and water if you were a guy, and had us walk around the place in a big circle exactly seventy-nine times. That was it. Next they had us lighting candles and putting them on tree branches. Every day it was like we had some new crazy thing to do.

This one time they brought us all to some great big field and taught us a game called football. It's a little like dash, a game we used to play at old S-225, only there was no punching or eye-gouging allowed. We played all day, and it was actually pretty fun, up until the end, anyway. When we were all tired enough to drop, the Immunes had us play one last round, only this time they told us exactly how it was supposed to go, like who was going to win and by how much and so forth. Spammers nearly messed the whole thing up by scoring when he wasn't supposed to. It turned out he was pretty good at football, and I guess he didn't like throwing the game, even if it was for the preservation of humanity. Or maybe it was because Mersh was on the side that was supposed to win and he was being kind of a turd about it. Anyway, the Immunes made us start over, and I guess that time we got it right because now here we are burning down houses.

The trenchers actually make the whole job pretty easy, relatively speaking. They look sort of like giant-sized spoons, the trenchers do, and in addition to drawing really nice-looking lines, they can move and reshape just about anything you want. For example, if you've got a block of stone, and you want it to be shaped like something else, a cone or a ball or a little truck or whatever, your trencher can do it in about a minute, less if you really know what you're doing. So building a house isn't anything like as hard as it would be back at Granite Shore, where you'd have to dig the foundation and nail together the walls and shingle the roof and so forth. Here you just sort of wave your trencher, kind of like you're spreading something out, and the walls practically build themselves. The Immunes give us all the materials. We just have to reshape them and put them together according to the plans. We use wood, mostly, so the houses will burn. Our trenchers can set the fires, too. They really are handy little things. You can even use them to fight, if you happen to lose your lazel. It's only the little fussy parts you have to do by hand.

“Why do you think they have us make the beds?” I ask Spammers as we're doing just that. Each cottage is a little different, but there are always a few bedrooms and a few beds to make.

“No idea,” Spammers says. “Good thing we're trained for this kind of sophisticated and demanding work, though.”

We all got a lot of practice making beds at Limit Camp. On your first day, they teach you this very specific way of doing it, and after that, they're always real like persnickety about it. I doubt we were actually preparing for something like this, but it certainly didn't hurt. “But I mean, what's the
point
,” I say to Spammers. “If they're going to burn the whole thing down anyway, why make the beds?”

Spammers rolls his eyes. “The thing you've gotta understand about this thelemity crap, kiddo, is there's
no
understanding it. It's strictly for crazies.”

I kind of agree. If thelemity is about building invisible machines, then this one has to be the screwiest machine of all time. Most machines, you can look at them and at least sort of tell what they're doing. Like you have a machine that takes cans and fish, and it makes canned fish. But if there's some way burned-down houses and buried pig statues come out to be a flying island, I don't know what it is. “At least we're doing something to help, right?” I say.

“You sure about that, boyo?” Spammers says, doing the old skeptical eyebrow raise. His enthusiasm for the Legion hasn't really stood up to working on the IMEC, especially since he came down with that case of IED. We've had to go in and out of the city's umbris a lot, and that hasn't been good for some people. A few days back, just before lights out, Spammers was lying on his bed and suddenly he started sprouting big, shiny green flies. They just came out of his skin like bubbles out of boiling water, and in no time there was a huge cloud of them buzzing all over the place. All he had to do was go take some pill and he was fine, but it was pretty uncomfortable for a while, and ever since, he's been real grumpy. I don't think that's a very unusual way to feel, though, when flies start coming out of your skin.