To Hold Infinity (25 page)

“Move. I'll get Xanthia.”

Pale white light bled through the ballroom.

“But—”

“Those lasers can burn steel and carve granite.”

Even in the eldritch milky light, Yoshiko could see Maggie's face grow pale.

“My God.”

“No!
No!
” Xanthia's body was clenched like a fist.

Half a dozen Luculenti dancers, recovering from the onslaught of light and sound, staggered towards her.

Streamers of light spat from her body, impaling them on crimson beams.

They fell, smoke rising from their roasting corpses.

“
Help me!
”

Discordant waves of noise crashed upon the room. A fearful white-robed Luculenta, standing at a node of constructive interference, shook dreadfully, eyes clouding into milky opacity, as ultrasound cooked her in a second.

“Neliptha!” Yoshiko shouted, but it was too late.

Spinning jagged discs of light, flung in all directions, spread across the room.

As Neliptha turned, a disc sliced through her slender elegant neck, and her eyes grew wide. For a moment, she froze, then an impossibly powerful spurt of bright arterial blood signalled her decapitation, and her mouth opened, and dreadful awareness grew in her eyes, as her fine head fell to the marble floor.

Yoshiko looked around wildly. Rafael was held in an attitude of pain; God knew what he was enduring. Vin—

Where was Vin?

Gathering their wits, people were stumbling towards the exits.

Scarlet lightning arced and spat across the room, as the flow of people became a yelling mob, a panicking riot of desperate people trying to save themselves.

An unselfish act amid the maelstrom: Yoshiko saw a young Luculentus try to pick up an older woman, attempting to hold back the tide, but the mass movement was too much for him and he fell, and both were trampled beneath the rush of running feet.

A man pushed at Yoshiko; she grabbed his wrist and spun, and he whirled through the air and smashed to the ground.

She punched a woman in the throat, and swept her feet from under her.

She had to reach Xanthia.

Yoshiko plunged forwards. There was a knot of panicking people she could not get around, so she held her fists in front of her and pushed straight through.

Something smashed into the side of her head, a wildly flung elbow perhaps, and she staggered, shaking her head dizzily, fighting to keep her balance.

Someone knocked into her, and she fell to one knee. Pain shot up through her leg.

Damn it.

Xanthia!

She forced herself to her feet, ignoring the injury, and pulled aside a weeping woman.

Xanthia lay writhing at the ballroom's centre, and faceless demons and chaotic swirls of light played all around her.

Good God.
What was happening to her?

Yoshiko knocked a sobbing man aside.

Swathes of cutting light burst forth again, as a dark shape passed Yoshiko at a sprint, hurdled fallen bodies, and ran straight for Xanthia.

It was Federico.

She had never seen anyone run so fast.

“Hurry, Federico!”

There was someone pushing her way in from one side, heading towards Xanthia, and for a moment a flailing arm obscured the figure from view. Yoshiko sidestepped.

Vin.

Yoshiko saved her breath, and ran straight for her. This was too dangerous: she had to get Vin out of here.

Did Maggie get away?
She wasn't certain.

Everything else was forgotten as she focussed on Vin's sweat- and tear-streaked features, and ran harder than she ever had, heart thumping wildly in her chest.

No, don't forget Xanthia.

Xanthia was staggering to her feet. Then one great wave of agony shook her and she flung her arms up wide—

“No!”

—and white light shot upwards, arrowed into darkness, and tore apart the ceiling.

Yoshiko was halfway to Vin when Federico cannoned into Xanthia, lifting her straight up onto his shoulder while knocking the breath out of her, but he was not fast enough.

Vin, plunging onwards, could not see the danger, and Yoshiko had neither breath to shout nor speed to reach her in time.

Above, the great dome exploded.

Amid a shower of dust, great chunks of masonry plunged downwards. One jagged fragment dropped towards Vin's head.

Yoshiko dug deep, running harder than her ageing body should allow, and smashed into Vin, knocking her aside, and for a moment she thought she had made it, catching Vin before she fell, but then she saw the messy red ruin—shards of bone and lumps of rippled brain soaked in scarlet—that had been Vin's temple, and knew she was a lifetime too late.

 

A hand on her shoulder.

Maggie, wiping blood from her own face, crouched down beside her.

A distant part of Yoshiko noted the silver video-globe floating above Maggie's shoulder. Professional reflex.

“Is she—?”

“There's no pulse.” Yoshiko's voice seemed disembodied, as though spoken by another.

Maggie glanced upwards.

“We've got to get out of here. The whole damned thing's about to come down.”

“No—I'm not leaving her.”

“Of course not.”

They reached under Vin's still body, linked arms to form a cradle, and, with difficulty, stood upright.

Vin's head lolled against Yoshiko's cheek.

“That way,” said Yoshiko, and spat out hot blood that was not her own.

Stumbling past weeping, shocked injury victims, they avoided a heap of rubble, blinked as they passed through clouds of settling dust, and carried Vin out into a corridor.

People milled aimlessly around.

The dead, the wounded, the merely terrified, were propped, moaning, everywhere.

“My room,” said Yoshiko through gritted teeth. “Down here.”

They headed down a relatively deserted hallway. Cracks spidered the walls.

“Too far,” gasped Maggie.

“Do it.” Yoshiko had no breath to explain: with the building damaged, they should get away from the centre of the house. “Hurry.”

The doorway to Yoshiko's room was a gaping hole, the membrane having dissolved. Gently as they could, they lay Vin upon the bed, then Yoshiko ran to a wall cupboard, beat on it with her fist as the membrane only slowly softened, and tore out the small autodoc it contained.

Hurry
…

She tore the cover off, and placed the fibrous treatment pad across the gaping head-wound. Maggie ripped away Vin's once-elegant gown, while Yoshiko attached tubes and fibres to vital points and arteries.

Vin.

Breathe, for God's sake. Just—

“Is there a pulse yet?” The video-globe got in Maggie's way, and she knocked it aside.

A hissing and a smell of burning announced the cauterizing of split blood vessels in Vin's brain. Clear gel oozed as the autodoc sealed up her wrecked skull.

“No.” Yoshiko checked the display. “God damn it.”

“Shit! We need medical—quick, try the house system.”

Yoshiko waved the bedside terminal into life. A pulsing blue diagram swam above it: Tetsuo's info, the display she and Vin had been looking at, before the ball…

“There's a pulse.” Maggie's voice cut through Yoshiko's thoughts. “Oh, God.”

“What is it?” Ice flowed through Yoshiko.

“It—” Maggie looked up, her eyes hollow with despair. “It's brain stem function only.”

The body began to breathe again, forced to respire by the machine's insistence, but no mental activity registered upon the display.

Dear God. Let her live.

Please.

“Are you—all right?” A man's voice, trailing off.

Please let her live—

Yoshiko wiped tears from her eyes and turned.

Rafael de la Vega was standing in the doorway. His eyes, glittering, were fastened upon the holo display by the bed: the pulsing blue diagram of a Luculentus mind, not the readouts from the autodoc.

“
What is that?
”

His voice flayed Yoshiko's soul.

Then a smaller form was pushing past Rafael, into the room. Brian Donnelly rushed over, and staggered to a halt by the bed.

“Medics!” he shouted into his wrist terminal. “This location. Quickly!”

Rafael blinked, and a transformation spread over his features.

“They're coming,” he said to Brian. “I'm in contact—” He pointed at his headgear. “—and there's a team headed this way.”

Yoshiko looked up at Rafael.

“I have to go.” His expression was sombre. “Good luck.”

It was you…

She glanced quickly at the bedside holo, then back at Rafael. His eyes followed hers, involuntarily.

Icy certainty descended upon her.

Rafael.

“Come on!” Brian was almost screaming into his wrist terminal. “What's keeping you?”

Red jumpsuited men and women burst in through the doorway, pushing their way past Rafael. Behind them, a big white armoured drone rumbled in.

“Code alpha,” said one of the medics, and placed a hand on Brian's shoulder. “Stand aside.”

The drone's upper lid slid open as the medics, working furiously, grabbed Vin and the autodoc both, and lowered them into the drone.

“Femtofacts active.” Another medic, a young woman, stabbed frantic control gestures beside the drone. “AIs up. Diagnostics on.”

Black gel engulfed Vin's pale body, while urgent phase-space displays blossomed above the drone.

Rafael…

“OK.” The medic was intent upon the displays. “Seal it.”

Gone. Rafael was gone.

The drone slammed shut.

“We've got her.”

“How is—?” Maggie started.

A medic brushed her aside.

“OK, troops,” the woman said. “Move it.”

“Flyer in ten.”

“I want it in three. Tell them.” The woman glanced around at her team. “Right. We're taking her to the main steps. Let's go.”

She moved out at a run, flanked by the drone.

“You.” Her finger stabbed, as she called back over her shoulder, “Stay. Help the woman.”

One of the medics stopped, while the rest of the team sprinted after their leader and the drone.

Yoshiko started to follow, but the remaining medic held her by the shoulder.

“Just a minute, ma'am.”

No sign of Rafael. He must have slipped out when the medics arrived.

“What's wrong?” she said. “Vin's—”

“Well, for one thing, your left arm's broken.”

“What?”

Yoshiko looked down, and for the first time saw how unnaturally twisted her forearm was. Pain flooded through her, at the realization.

“Yoshiko…” Maggie's voice trailed off.

“Go on.”

Maggie nodded abruptly, and moved out at a broken run.

“Just hold still.” The medic slapped an anaesthesia patch on Yoshiko's neck, then snapped a cylindrical cast into place around her forearm. “This'll hurt.”

Not pain, but an unpleasant grinding. Micro-servos drilled into her flesh, forcing the two halves of her snapped ulna into alignment.

“I'm going with Vin,” she said through gritted teeth.

Rafael.

“You shouldn't—OK, I'll come with you.”

You bastard. You're behind it.

A swelling sensation. Fluid-borne femtocytes, pumped into her arm.

Tetsuo. And Xanthia, I'm sure of it.

“Mind that debris.”

The medic helped her out into the corridor. He turned at the sound of an anguished voice, said “Excuse me,” to Yoshiko, then left to help someone else.

Rafael…

Red jumpsuits mingled with torn finery, a mêlée of victims and rescuers. Up ahead, Maggie was walking with her arm round Brian's shoulders, following the medical drone, with its most precious cargo.

Vin…

Just for a moment, among the milling confusion, Yoshiko thought she saw Rafael's darkly handsome features, but then he was gone.

Vengeance.

Steel hardened Yoshiko's grim heart.

I'm going to get you, Rafael.

Vengeance.

I swear it.

A torn bouquet of flowers under foot.

By my family's blood…

She slipped, corrected her balance.

…I swear it.

Cold enveloped Yoshiko's forearm, and beads of condensation formed on the cast. She imagined she could feel the femtocytes at work, knitting her bone together.

There were people in worse shape.

Maggie, still holding on to Brian, looked back, concerned.

Shaking her head, Yoshiko motioned Maggie on.

Yoshiko stepped around a grey-skinned man whose eyes were closed, as though in sleep. A haggard woman, kneeling beside him, looked up in sudden hope at Yoshiko.

Yoshiko halted, not knowing what to say, but one of the medics came up behind her, and crouched to examine the fallen man.

Yoshiko moved on.

Near the centre of the house, clouds of dust still swirled, and Yoshiko put her right forearm across her mouth and nose, trying to breathe through her sleeve's fabric.

Many of the rooms they passed contained medical drones, treating people who had taken refuge there. Mostly, the drones merely extruded fibres and other appendages to their patients; in two cases, people were inside their drones, but sitting up. Not sealed away.

The drones were so capable, it was better to treat the patients
in situ
than subject them to the trauma of travel to a med-centre.

Shards of ceramic and glass scrunched underfoot as Yoshiko reached the main atrium. She skirted round a pile of rubble which had slid like an avalanche from a ballroom doorway.

One of the big bronze doors was ripped and bent, hanging on by a torn hinge.

The medical drone was negotiating its way past the debris and dazed people.

“Vin?”

It was Lori, limping to the drone, her face as pale as its casing. She was incongruously lopsided, one foot suspended centimetres in the air by the lev-field, the other on the ground.

Her eyes, when she looked at Yoshiko, were filled with distress.

“They're taking her to Lucis.”

Vin's body
, Yoshiko thought. Taking it to be examined, certified, and disposed of.

Words failed her. All she could do was hug Lori, and hold her tight.

Over Lori's shoulder, the drone's status displays were visible: Vin's body, held in stasis, its slow pulse a sad illusion. Her soul was surely gone.

A shudder passed through Lori, and Yoshiko had an intuition of the reason why—deep in interface, Lori was linked with the medical drone, its continuous scans delivering nothing but bad news.

“I'm OK.” Lori backed away, dabbing at her eyes.

She lurched, almost tripping, her suspended foot wobbling in the EM field.

“Hang on a moment.”

Yoshiko crouched down, and picked up a triangular shard of ceramic. Holding Lori's ankle steady, she sawed at Lori's sandal until she could prise away the hardened gel. Yoshiko pulled, and it tore off in one piece. She flicked the stuff aside.

It whisked upwards in the EM field, then blew away in a draught towards the outer doors.

Lori smiled wanly.

“Thanks, Yoshiko.”

A medic came up to her.

“The flyer's ready, Luculenta Maximilian.”

“I'm ready.” Lori swallowed.

Yoshiko gently touched her arm.

“Take Brian with you.”

As the medics manoeuvred the drone out through the doors, Brian stepped mechanically aside, face drained and pale. Maggie was watching him, to make sure he did not fall.

Lori's chin lifted.

She turned to look at a broad-shouldered Luculentus, clad in black and grey, who was directing a newly arrived team of engineers and drones. He stopped his verbal commands, and returned Lori's regard.

Their nonverbal communication lasted only a second.

“This is Professor Sunadomari.” Lori briefly touched Yoshiko. “She's in charge while I'm gone.”

Speaking for Yoshiko's benefit.

The Luculentus bowed. “Professor.”

He turned back to his team, and delivered a rapid-fire series of instructions to a Fulgida engineer.

Lori walked up to Brian and took his arm. Together, while Yoshiko watched from the doorway, they followed the drone down the broad marble steps. The lawn, lit by big emergency glowglobes floating overhead, shone with an eerie pallor.

The medical flyers were the colour of dead bones.

Flanked by Lori and Brian, the drone moved up a ramp, into the nearest flyer.

As the ramp retreated into the vessel, a sick feeling took hold of Yoshiko's stomach, reminding her of long helpless days at the medical
complex, while Ken lay dying. The smartvirus ravaged his femtocytes, destroying his body in the process. Medical AIs battled for days, but she knew from the first that the struggle was lost. She could only wait for the inevitable.

Warning ripples of amber light strobed across the hull.

The flyer rose smoothly into the high darkness, then sped in the direction of Lucis City, dwindling to become an orange spark in the night, and winked out.

Yoshiko stared, unseeing, at the far cold stars.

Rousing herself, she turned back inside, and saw Maggie in the entranceway, video-globe floating over her shoulder.

“I can't apologize.” Maggie shrugged, her eyes lost in sorrow. “It's what I do. Whatever's going on, however bad, there's always a part of me watching and analysing and filing for later, and drawing up a voice-over commentary. To give things meaning.”

Yoshiko wondered what certainty had been lost from Maggie's life, that she was so obsessive in granting it a framework of significance.

It didn't matter. She had seen the tears in Maggie's eyes, watched her furiously helping to get Vin attached to the autodoc.

For all the good it had done.

“Walk with me, Maggie?”

“Yeah. You bet.”

Side by side, they went back inside the ruined house.

 

“The bastard!” A man's aggrieved shout drifted from a far corridor.

Yoshiko looked, but could see nothing. Shrugging, she turned away, and followed Maggie to the ballroom entrance.

She stood in a current of warm air delivered by a honeycombed chemical heater, hugged herself, and watched the engineers at work.

The torn roof was mostly open to the cold night sky. Beneath the dark rent, tiny drones spun monomer webs, strengthening the building's basic structure. Black filaments were strung across the open spaces, and wrapped tightly around pillars on the verge of collapse.

From outside, an hysterical wail, and the slapping sound of a dermal patch hastily applied. It sent a shiver down Yoshiko's spine: someone had just been told the worst of news.

“Let's go back,” she said, and Maggie nodded.

They ducked out through a gaping hole which should not have been there, avoiding a trickle of water from a torn pipe. More medical drones, more red jumpsuits. Another medic team running alongside a sealed drone. An engineer looked blankly after them, cutting graser dangled limply at her side.

Maggie's voice was grim. “Looks like they cut someone out of the rubble.”

Glancing up, Yoshiko saw the video-globe was tracking them.

“I wonder where Septor is.” She knew her voice could be edited out, later.

“He and Lori had an argument,” Maggie said. “Vin told me. He went to stay with some buddies, I think.”

“Oh, no.”

Yoshiko felt wretched, for Septor's sake as well as Lori's.

“Damn it!” A curse sounded from around a comer. “Bastard thing clawed me!”

Exchanging glances, Yoshiko and Maggie went to investigate.

A blue-jumpsuited engineer was kneeling before a pile of rubble, swearing softly. Thin parallel lines of blood broke the skin on the back of his hand. He sucked at the wound.

A low growling sounded from beneath the heap of debris.

“Let me.” Yoshiko crouched down beside the engineer.

“Watch it.” From a med-kit, the engineer sprayed gel onto his hand. “Damned thing's pissed, and I don't blame it.”

“I'll be careful.”

Yoshiko got down on hands and knees. Ducking low, she could see a dark cavity in the rubble, framed by a bent but unbroken classic carbon chair.

“Come on, sweetheart.” Yoshiko kept her voice low, almost crooning. “Let's get you out of there.”

Another growl, softer this time.

“Yes, I know. Come on, everything's OK.”

Nothing.

“Come on, then.”

A wide paw appeared in the shadowed hole.

“Good girl. That's a good girl.”

A cautious whiskered nose followed, then the lynxette crawled out into the open, shook herself, and stropped her long whiskers against Yoshiko's face.

“I'll be damned.” The engineer sat back on his heels, eyes wondering.

Yoshiko rubbed the bridge of the lynxette's nose.

Behind her, Maggie spoke: “You're a natural.”

Overhead, the floating video-globe bobbed as though in agreement.

 

Xanthia pulsed inside him.

Stumbling, half-blinded by the urgency of his desire, he made his way down the wide marble steps and across the lawn. Paramedics and engineers rushed past him, heading into the building.

“Are you OK, sir?” A concerned face, above a red jumpsuit.

Rafael nodded, and walked urgently on.

A group of proctors—their uniforms torn, their faces bloody—were helping walking wounded up a big flyer's ramp.

“Mind your backs! Coming through!”

Medics escorted a sealed drone into the flyer.

Bright amber shimmered and strobed: another flyer taking off, its warning lights beating counterpoint to the insistence in Rafael's breast, its urgency matching the hot overspills from cache which threatened to engulf him.

He staggered, caught himself, forced himself to walk on.

Just hold on for a minute more, that's all. One minute more.

He avoided an enquiring look from another medic. Almost immediately, someone touched her arm and she was caught up in the emergency evacuation of some dead or dying victim, and Rafael ducked away, out of her sight.

Bright, silvery white, the glowglobes.

Head pounding, he sighted his flyer.

 

{{{HeaderBegin: Module =A34…<<>>}}}

 

<<>>

 

He moaned softly, unable to enter command interface without losing control entirely.

If a medic spotted him then, he would be taken for medical exam; even a cursory examination would reveal the additional plexcores in his body. A deep scan would tell them everything.

Just hold back.

Hold back hold back hold back.

His flyer. A small one, a crimson Phirina Duo, the colour of burning strontium.

He slapped a hand on its hull, and a ramp extruded, then pulled him inside the small cabin.

“Command:—” His voice shook; he hoped the system recognized it. “Darken…cockpit.”

The bubble membrane polarized to inky black, shutting out the busy swarm of emergency flyers.

Xanthia.

Yoshiko's diagram: a Luculentus mind, which might, just might, be his. The selected parameters had not revealed the full extent of VSI,
the full size of the plexcore nexus which formed the mind's substrate. But the swirling patterns of thought had been of such complexity—

Yearning, yearning, to break free from cache.

He held her in, just for a moment more. Consider the danger. What did Yoshiko know? Suspect? Was the diagram from Tetsuo, somehow?

Did he have to take action now?

He saw again the shock on the Earther woman's face, reflected that the house was swarming with proctors but none seemed to be seeking him, and decided that the risk was negligible. Riskier to deal with her now, in fact, than to bide his time.

Hold back. You want to let go, but stop and consider first.

That damned Earther woman.

Tetsuo was the source of Rafael's own mu-space tech. But Tetsuo should have had no access to LuxPrime info: his commsware had nothing to do with Luculenti minds. Not until Rafael had copied it and turned it to his own uses.

Why a Luculentus mind?
The diagram looked like phase maps from a deep scan, output from the kind of scanware used only in the Baton Ceremony—or Rafael's own infiltration code. Either way, it was from the kind of quantum-level measurement which destroyed the original even as it recorded the variables exactly.

Perhaps it was a simulation, like the simulation he had built yesterday—using three ghost-Rafaels—to test his infiltration code's tightness and security. But, if it were a simulation, it must be finely detailed, in that case, built up from the lowest levels. Who, other than LuxPrime, would create a model like that?

Low level. Levels, levels…

Why does maths lie at the heart of science? Why are features of the universe algorithmically compressible? Of what strange substrate is maths itself an emergent property?

Hold back.

Lying on the cabin floor now, and writhing helplessly.

Distinctions. He was on the verge of being able to slice the universe in new directions, to perceive patterns and differences in quite new ways. Deeper, and different.