Warp World (81 page)

Ama’s head filled with a persistent thrum. She had woken up and blacked out more times than she could recall. Each time, full consciousness stayed just out of her grasp. She was only aware of pain, rolling through her body like a wildfire. It took more than a dozen tries to find the latch holding her in place.

With a primal growl she managed to hook her fingers in enough to release the mechanism. She tumbled down, to the ground.

The world went black again.

When she opened her eyes once more, the pain and the howling were worse. With an arduously slow movement, she pried off her helmet. The blackness threatened to close in again but she fought it off this time. Something wet, there was something wet flowing into her eyes. Blood? She tasted salt on her lips. Yes, it must be blood.

Move
, she told herself, but the world swam and she couldn’t even raise her head.

The Storm, she felt it now, like the pull of the outgoing tide. The voices beckoned and she wanted nothing more than to go to them. It felt like the moment before sleep, caught been worlds, between one reality and the next.

Seg
. She held his name, forced herself to stay conscious as the tide’s pull grew stronger.

Now, memories. Her life unfurled like a ribbon caught in the seed winds. Her mother, those sad eyes. The deep green water of her river home. Her brothers—Thuy tugging at her hair, chasing her down the dock, Stevan with his head bent over a book, Geras smelling of the praffa wine he brewed. She was a child, riding on her father’s broad shoulders as he walked along the sand, with the roar of surf and the cries of gulls. Laughter, hers and Brin’s, as they toasted her new boat, won in an unlikely wager. The Big Water, the blue eyes of Nen. Seg beside her at the helm of the
Naida
, his silver-brown eyes burning with life as they battled through a spring squall. Salt. Wind. Fire.

The ribbon unraveled, pulled into the Storm. Disappearing. Memory after memory. Soon she would go there too, disappear into the black.

Then she saw the figure, out of the corner of her eye. Tall. A man. It was hard to tell, through the blood coating her eyes, if he was real or a shadow, his skin was so dark. Perhaps he had come from the Storm itself?

Help
.

The man, if that’s what it was, spoke in a language she couldn’t understand. But then she saw the glint of metal. A knife, she understood that. He was on her in three steps.

“No.” The word escaped as a useless hiss of air.

The Storm kept pulling.

The dark man grabbed her by the hair and raised the knife. Maybe this was better. He could end her pain this way. He yanked her head back and she cried out as blistering pain shot up and down her spine.

Not for long.

He stopped then. Without releasing his grip, the man moved around in front of her, staring at her neck. He spoke again in his language. She could see his eyes now, glowing a faint blue.

Then, in a tongue she understood: “The voices led you here.”

She tried to answer but her own voice was gone. The man became two men, twins, then rejoined into one. She moaned as he pointed the knife to a spot just below her left shoulder.

“Ama,” he said.

She stared, uncomprehending. What did that word mean?

The dark man leaned in closer, until their noses were nearly touching. “Storm Seeker.”

“Help,” she whispered.

The man looked up to the horizon, at a wall of black, then sheathed his knife and scooped her easily into his arms.

A white hot pain burst through her body. And then blackness.

“I can set up the Storm cell and tent from the seat myself. It’s got an auto-deploy unit,” Shan croaked as Viren stared out at Seg’s retreating outline. “Get him back.”

“Don’t wander off,” Viren said, with a wry smile, as he ran to catch Seg.

When he finally overtook him, the blowing grit threatened to scour the flesh from his bones. Still, Seg marched forward.

“That’s it!” Viren shouted over the comm. “Back to the Storm cell!”

“Go back yourself, Viren. I’m going to find her.” Seg staggered up a rise into the teeth of a fierce wind that nearly blew him back over the top. He bent against the wind, wrestling against the invisible foe.

Viren lunged forward, grabbed Seg’s helmet, and yanked away that protective shield. He tossed the helmet out into the swirling wastes. “She’s gone. Let her go. You can’t do anything now and I’m not going to let you kill yourself.”

“Damn you!” Seg bellowed, then coughed. The sudden barrage of dust and grit forced his eyes closed.

Viren pounced, grabbed Seg’s harness, and dragged him backward. With his visor still intact, he led his blind captive through the enveloping blackness.

“I’ll kill you!” Seg screamed at the sky as his boots dragged through the sand.

Too tired to argue, Viren hauled him the remaining distance to the Storm cell and tent Shan had activated. An eerie howling began to keen. Viren knew the sound—all the Kenda did after their first night in wasteland. It was the sound that permeated through the electronic fabric of the shield that protected a cell, the sound of the Storm.

He stuffed Seg to one side in the small space and secured the tent’s collar, muting the sound.

“Damn you,” Seg said.

“Yeah, I know,” Viren said, in an awkward crouch.

Beside him, Shan let out a long groan. Viren pulled out his auto-med and slipped the cuff around her arm, then he adjusted his bulky frame to wrap his body around hers. Shan shivered uncontrollably from the shock of her injuries.

“Damn both of you,” Seg said, as the Storm swallowed the wasteland.

EPILOGUE

Jarin Svestil sat at his desk, alone once more. By his elbow, the digifilm displayed yet another mark of victory.

“
Theorist Eraranat, by full affirmation of the Senior Council of the Cultural Theorist’s Guild, will retain all status and honors invested in the association of the Guild
.”

Only natural. To abandon him now, after he had galvanized the World with another tale of impossible daring and conquest, would seem insane to the eyes of the People. For better or worse, the Guild had to embrace its brightest star for all to see.

Shortly after reaffirming Segkel, the Council had voted unanimously to encourage House Tisandis to resume their long-standing feud with House Golonst. As Golonst had been pulled into the CWA’s sphere of influence a generation previous, the reinvigoration of the ancient conflict would serve as a more direct means of striking at CWA interests. It was the most overtly militant action the Guild had taken in over six centuries. It might also be the last, if the conflict did not go as they hoped and planned.

Next to the affirmation of Segkel’s status, another digifilm, a quiet inquest into the murder of Processor Merz Gressam. Even against the grand spectacle of the news from Julewa, Gressam
’s death had shocked the World. The cause of the uproar was not how he had been killed but how he had been found—posed in the retyel, in a pool of his own blood. A rigor mortis statue of Gressam as caj, an image permanently engraved in the public consciousness.
There was no hint of any connection with Segkel in either the public or investigative channels, but Jarin knew his hand was in this, somehow.

He glanced at his monitor.

Nallin Sastor. Had it been less than a week since she had sat in this office? How quickly she had turned from a potential acquisition of Jarin’s to another soul in orbit of the bright fire of Segkel Eraranat. She had been taking copious footage of Julewa since her arrival, and had been sending the raw material back to her producer—and, unknowingly, to Jarin—with the obvious intent of producing something different and unheard of on the World.

Newschatterers did not seek the news, they announced what they were given. Another breach of the natural order, another crack in the dam of orthodoxy. It was a moment to bring an old man pride. It was also a moment to bring an old man fear.

Today’s transmission included raw footage of an interview Seg had submitted enroute to Julewa.

He was changing, adapting at blazing speed, learning by the day to master more of his environment.

On one monitor, random footage Nallin had been recording played. Silent images of this new domain. On another monitor, the interview was cued up, Seg’s words that would soon become history. Jarin tapped the start icon.

“Why? Why the fifty Outers? Why the multi-strike? Why the words that sparked a riot? Why Julewa?”
Nallin asked, from inside the shuttle.

On the second, silent, monitor, Jarin watched a dusky sun rise over Julewa Keep. Men and women emerged from the shattered hangar doors, surveying the damage. Debris and bodies had been swept clean from the deck, leaving only skewers of metal and scars in the stone as mute testimony to the violence of two days earlier.

“I was considering the World. Do you know that we don’t even have World maps anymore? We occupy a few small islands, islands that erode by the year. We’re not mastering our environment, we’re hiding from it.”

Far below the Keep’s landing pad, a trio of figures emerged from the desert wastes, gesturing to the heights above. A metal basket was lowered to collect them.

“So once you have Julewa, then what?”
Nallin asked.

The silent image jumped again. Two medicals, one missing most of an arm, consulted a digipad. Rows of wounded stretched out behind them. Manatu struggled past on crutches, nodding to the Kenda as they lay in their low-slung beds.

“We open up a piece of the World once more. We bring people out from the cities and back to the frontier. Old Town proved something—we can’t rely on the shields to protect us forever. If we’re ever going to come back to ourselves, we need to make room for the People to grow once more.”

Fismar stood over the neat rows of bodies. Each face was turned to the left, “facing the sea” according to Kenda tradition. He took a drink from a flask, then offered it down to a young, glassy-eyed Kenda boy who stared off into some private nightmare.

Nearby, Pilot Shan Welkin slept. One arm and leg were splinted. A hulking Kenda sat at her bedside, a hand resting on her forehead.

“You want to change the World?”
Nallin’s voice asked.
“Ambitious. What about those who oppose you? What about the CWA?”

Bound prisoners were pushed along by Kenda guardsmen toward a repurposed holding cell. A wiry Kenda stared after them, his face twisted into dark contempt.

“The CWA faces the same pressures, lives in the same trap, as we all do. They can choose to join those who are looking for a way forward, for a better existence, or they can rot in their towers until the shields come crashing down.”

The women and children of Julewa streamed out onto the flight deck and raised their hands to the sunshine. A dark-haired Kenda guard stood next to an Etiphar woman and a young Etiphar boy, the first the World had seen of this House in over a century. The woman wiped tears from her eyes.

“So …”
Nallin’s voice trailed off uneasily.
“Are you saying the shields will come down? Do you believe the World is in some kind of danger? That’s certainly not what the CWA, or even the Guild for that matter, would have us believe. We’ve fended off the Storm for over a millennium, after all.”

A rider alit on the landing pad, bearing the insignia of House Haffset. For the first time in over a century, the World had returned to Julewa.

“Have we fended off the Storm? We’ve gone from walking in the open air, to fortified cities, to shielded cities that continually shrink. We haven’t fended it off, we’ve hidden and we’ve hidden harder. We’ve neither mastered our environment nor adapted to it, we’ve simply tried to wall it off. Let me tell you this, Nallin Sastor: the future will take courage, valor, and sacrifice. We won’t survive the Storm by retreat; we’ll survive by meeting our obstacles and overcoming them, by confronting the World before us and taking it back from the wilderness. We’re putting our lives behind this cause, and nothing less than that kind of commitment is what the People will have to give in order to survive.”

Segkel stood alone on the flight deck, staring off into the wilderness. Glints of metal could be seen in the distance. He swayed in the wind as he stood, inches from the drop-off.

“And now, the only question is, are you with us?”

Jarin shut off both monitors, letting the screens fade to black.

Are you with us?

He sat in the dark. Alone, with his thoughts.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS