Silver inverted fronti.., p.3
Silver - Inverted Frontier, Book 2, page 3
My eyes ached with a sudden, terrible pressure of unshed tears. I went to him, crouched at his side, kissed his cheek. “I am so glad you’re—”
I caught myself, but not in time.
“Still alive?” he asked with a teasing smile. “Ah, but you see, I don’t dare die yet! There are so few players left in the world that it will be much too long before I am born into my next life.”
I sighed and kissed him again. What he said was true, though we both knew that even his endless curiosity could not hold him in this life forever.
He was even more fragile in appearance than when I’d last seen him. Too thin, and the skin of his hands and face so pale it seemed nearly translucent. Only wisps of white hair were left to him and his eyelids sagged, shrouding his nearly colorless eyes. But those eyes remained bright, glittering with an unabated interest in the world.
I asked after his health. He dismissed this inquiry with a wave of his graceful hand. “I am ever the same, though I will say it is a quandary of old age that with each year I should need less sleep though there are fewer and fewer things I can do to fill the hours.” He tapped the book in his lap. “I still enjoy a good story.”
I sighed and moved to sit on his bed. He had been such a friend to me when I’d visited the Sisters before. I had been sick, near death. Emil sat with me through that ordeal. And as I recovered, he kept me company, answering my questions and helping me to think about the world and why it is as it is—for all our hardship and sorrow, still a blessed place.
“I have a story to tell you, Emil.”
He said, “I thought it might be so.”
I had been so eager to see him, but now that I was there, I was unsure how to begin. Tentatively, I said, “You remember, I returned home to Kavasphir.”
“Yes. I recall you described Kavasphir as a wild land, with verdant, rolling hills, open forests, and silver rising in the swales nearly every night, just as it does here.”
I nodded and swallowed against an ache in my throat. A familiar grief, never far away. I said, “My mother had founded a family temple there. When we returned after the great floods, the temple was gone but the kobold well was still there, so we resolved to stay. We rebuilt the temple complex. First the wall, enclosing the orchard and the temple grounds, and then Temple Huacho itself. It took nearly four years to finish.”
“A huge undertaking,” Emil said.
I nodded, and then confessed, “We did not rebuild the wall exactly as it was before. I’d been told it was sometimes a custom to leave items for the silver to take or to change. It was my fancy to adopt this custom and my mother indulged me. We built niches in the outer face of the temple wall, flanking the gate. I thought it would be an entertainment for visitors to leave items and see what became of them.”
“Ah,” Emil said. “And did the silver participate in this entertainment?”
A flush warmed my cheeks. “Not at first. For three years the silver floods were so shallow they did not reach even the lowest niche. But that changed this past year. One night the silver rose almost to the top of the wall. I had not left anything in the niches, yet in the morning I found in one of them a little replica of Yaphet’s flying machine.”
I pulled the trinket from my pocket. Showed it to him. It was such a little thing, balanced in the center of my palm, perfectly made of a light, shiny metal that my mother said was aluminum. “Take it,” I urged him.
The ha sparkled against my hand. Most players would be frightened at the sight, but Emil did not hesitate. He had seen my ha before and knew it wouldn’t cause him any harm. He took the little flying machine. Turned it over in his beautiful, long-fingered hands. Studied the narrow, graceful wing, and the pilot’s cradle and cargo baskets that hung beneath it.
“Is it just a memory?” I asked him.
He returned his kind gaze to me. “Do you suspect otherwise?”
I lowered my eyes. Reaching into my pocket again, I pulled out the second token given to me by the silver. This one was heavier, made of several varieties of stone cleverly assembled into a tiny well-scaled model of a large temple and its surrounding high wall. I said, “I found this in the second niche. It is that ancient temple where I lost Yaphet.”
Emil set the flying machine atop the book in his lap. Then he took up the little model. He turned it in his hands, round and round, a half-smile crinkling his ancient face. “I remember the great library you described, and I am imagining it rendered within this model in such perfection that if we could retrieve the books, we might read them with a microscope.” He sighed and passed the model back to me, and the flying machine too. “It hurts my heart to know that library is lost.”
I nodded. If Yaphet was still alive, he would be equally grieved.
“I feel he is calling out to me,” I whispered.
Gently, Emil asked, “So you’ve resolved to seek for him?”
“I’ve come to look,” I allowed. “And Jolly has agreed to come with me. My plan is to return to the Cenotaph and if I find nothing there I will climb into the mountains, to the site where the temple used to be.” I added quickly, “I do not expect to find anything. I have never sensed his presence through the silver, as I should be able to do were he alive. Still, I need to be sure.”
“To put your heart at ease?” Emil suggested.
“Yes. Just so.”
I slipped both objects back into my pocket. He took my hands in his, smiling as the sparks of my ha moved to dance across the back of his own hands.
He could have told me I was foolish to undertake this quest, that it was vain, that my lover Yaphet was dead and I would not meet him again in this life, and if Emil had told me those things, maybe I would have heeded him and turned back.
But Emil was wiser than that.
“Nothing is as it was,” he reminded me. “I do not know what you will find, but I would like to hear that part of the story when it is done. So I will try to be here when you return.”
“You had better be.” I smiled and kissed his hands. For several seconds I let my gaze linger on his. Then I said, “There is one more thing.” My heartbeat sped up in anticipation as I asked him, “Do you want me to awaken your ha? You were curious about it, and I’ve learned to do it, since the last time I saw you.”
His brows rose, his eyes widened a bit beneath their heavy lids. “Truly?”
“Yes. I don’t think it can hurt you . . . so long as you’re cautious and don’t call the silver in through your window.” I said this last part with humor, but the hazard was real and Emil knew it. I’d told him a story of how Jolly had lost control of the silver when his ha came awake.
“A necessary warning,” Emil agreed as he eyed the sparks surrounding our clasped hands. When he met my gaze again, he nodded. “Yes, Jubilee. Please, awaken my ha. Introduce me to this phenomenon you and your brother discovered.”
I smiled, and without looking away I opened my mind to an awareness of the silver outside, and also the silver within Emil, linking them together in the way I’d learned, though I did not truly understand it.
Emil blinked. His pale lips parted in surprise and his hands trembled against mine.
“You feel it?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Help me to stand.”
He turned to the window, and I pushed it open. We stood there in the chill night air, looking out at the great desert agleam with silver.
“Amazing,” Emil murmured. “You have given me a new sense. I can perceive the silver—its presence, its movement . . . Oh, for youth! It must be wonderful, Jubilee, for you to venture in the Iraliad with this sense awake.” He sighed, his shoulders rounding. “Well, there will be another life. In the meantime . . .” He gave me a wink. “This one has grown much more interesting.”
Chapter
4
Riffan summoned the three Apparatchiks. They winked into existence within their frameless windows: the Pilot, the Bio-mechanic, and the Engineer.
Riffan told them: “I’ve come to a decision.”
The Engineer leaned forward looking concerned. The Bio-mechanic, faded almost to invisibility by boredom, brightened just a bit. The Pilot, an ever-mysterious silhouette, crossed his arms and said, “I thought all the decisions had been made.”
Riffan shrugged. “It’s an ongoing process. Constant reconsideration. A weighing of alternatives. All of that. I’ve decided that Artemis will not rejoin the fleet. Not immediately.”
He hesitated, expecting to field a flurry of objections. None came. The three entities remained silent, awaiting further details.
“Right,” Riffan said. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Fortuna is missing. The most likely scenario is that Urban is aboard and in control . . . and that he believes Lezuri to be in control of Dragon. There can be no other reason why he failed to report in.”
“This is a logical scenario,” the Engineer observed.
Riffan nodded, both relieved and reassured at this positive assessment. He said, “The question that naturally follows—where has he gone? We did not find him along the expected trajectory to Tanjiri. What other destination might he conceive?”
“He has gone to Verilotus, of course,” the Bio-mechanic answered in a dismissive tone, as if to suggest only a simpleton would fail to deduce such an obvious conclusion.
“Yes!” Riffan agreed eagerly. “Yes, exactly. It’s not in Urban’s nature to accept defeat. He believes Lezuri to be in control of Dragon and he knows Lezuri wishes to return to Verilotus. So he has gone ahead. Urban has gone ahead to prepare some defense, a trap or an ambush that will stop Dragon. And because he will be looking for Dragon, he won’t see his enemy, our enemy, when Lezuri approaches in that tiny ship he made out of the containment capsule. Urban will have no warning . . . unless I warn him. Unless we do it.” He looked hopefully at the Pilot. “Can we do it? Shift our trajectory, balance risk against need, and push Artemis to a high velocity?”
The Pilot gave no hint he’d been impressed by this speech. He still stood with arms crossed, his expression unseeable, unknowable within the darkness that contained him. “Of course we can,” he said. “The question is whether you are willing to accept the risk, knowing that the higher our velocity, the greater our chance of fatal collision with some unforeseeable particle of debris.”
Riffan was only a ghost and still the thought of such a fate left him queasy with fear. Despite it, he said, “Yes, I am willing. I understand we might not survive a hard run, but what of it? We all have copies aboard Dragon and Griffin, while Urban has no backup copy.”
“Lezuri doesn’t either,” the Engineer said in a thoughtful tone. “None that matters to the current circumstance, anyway. For that reason he may seek to minimize his risk of collision by proceeding at the lowest velocity that will keep him safely ahead of Dragon.”
“That makes sense,” Riffan agreed. “And just like Urban, Lezuri will be looking for Dragon, deeming it the enemy. He won’t know to look for us.”
“I like this plan,” the Bio-mechanic said. “I’ll see to it our hull is fully stealthed.”
“Yes, thank you,” Riffan said gratefully.
He did not need the approval of the Apparatchiks, but he wanted it for the sake of his own confidence, knowing he’d let enthusiasm carry him past the point of good sense before. He turned to the Pilot. “Your thoughts?”
The Pilot snorted. “I do not support this plan.”
Riffan was taken aback by this outright rejection. “But why not?”
The Pilot uncrossed his arms. His dark figure leaned forward. “Because we must report Fortuna’s absence. That requires me to establish a communications link with Pytheas, and the only way to do that is to reduce the distance between us—in effect, to return to the fleet.”
Riffan sighed in relief. He’d already confronted this issue, and he had an answer ready. “That’s not the only way. We don’t need to send a full data stream. A simple summary report will do, and that won’t require a laser link. I mean to use directional radio instead.”
“I find this feasible,” the Engineer said.
“Do you?” Riffan asked, a little surprised, but appreciative of the Engineer’s ongoing support. “Well, good. Let’s do it, then.” He turned again to the Pilot. “I’ll leave it to you to work out a compromise velocity. We need a good chance of getting there, but we have to get there fast.”
“I understand the parameters,” the Pilot said acerbically.
“Good,” Riffan said, bobbing his head. “And thank you.”
Chapter
5
Urban searched for Dragon.
He’d calculated its likely path as it approached Verilotus, yet he could find no sign of it, either visually or through the lateral lines of Fortuna’s gravitational sensor. Even so, he didn’t doubt it was coming, bringing Lezuri home. He might have only days, maybe just hours, to devise a defense.
To gain time, he maintained his interstellar velocity as long as he could, and then he put Fortuna through a crushing deceleration. If he’d existed in physical form, he would not have survived it, but as a ghost he felt nothing.
As he approached the ring-shaped world, his two surviving probes entered into orbits around it, becoming satellites. One kept to a high but stable polar orbit that required only occasional correction. The other descended deep into the weird geometry of the world’s gravity well—a feat that required it to repeatedly fire its attitude jets—but even as it brushed the atmosphere, it detected no change in the rate of passing time.
The time differential Lezuri had described proved to be real anyway.
The descending probe reported the length of each burn. The deeper it went, the greater the discrepancy between reported time and the time observed by the more distant probe, a result that told Urban the temporal boundary was gradual and that it could be successfully crossed, at least by a bio-mechanical object.
In the last hours of his voyage, Urban prepared for his own descent to Verilotus by initiating the growth of a physical avatar.
For Fortuna, the trip to the surface would be a one-way journey. Its propulsion reef could not survive within the gravity well and the little ship did not carry the mass to synthesize a chemical rocket sufficient to lift it free. If things went well, Urban was sure he could devise a means of escape, but for now he just needed to pull off a successful landing.
He felt confident as he dropped into atmosphere. He’d worked extensively with the DI, simulating the descent, testing each stage. He knew what to expect.
At first, Fortuna picked up radio transmissions like those detected earlier by the probes. Urban could not understand them. He wondered uneasily if they had anything to do with his arrival, but then he dismissed the concern. The probes—now operating as satellites—had observed no air or orbital traffic, so it seemed unlikely a system existed to track incoming vessels.
The transmissions disappeared as the sparse air, compressed by his descent, heated into a plasma curtain.
Gradually, his speed slowed. The hull cooled. Sensors emerged from the shelter of the bio-mechanical tissue to show him the dayside world below. He sped past forests, grasslands, rolling hills, rivers and lakes, and snow-capped mountains. A coastline off to the south.
Fortuna transformed, its bio-mechanical tissue shape-shifting to accommodate atmospheric flight. It sprouted tiny glider wings and a tail. As the ship’s velocity continued to drop, the wings lengthened, and the tail’s vertical stabilizer grew tall. Flaps formed, further slowing the ship, and enabling the DI to fly a pre-determined route toward the immense crater Urban had chosen as his landing site.
All was going well—until a flash of silver light blossomed across the nose of the craft and blazed against the leading edges of the wings.
“What the hell?”
Urban knew even before the DI answered. He felt it through the ship’s sensors.
In a calm voice, the DI reported, “A molecular attack has commenced against isolated portions of the outer hull. Defensive Makers are responding. Conflict is presently localized—”
“Not anymore,” Urban interrupted in a low growl.
He felt new hot zones erupting on the upper surfaces of the wings, on the sides of the ship, and on the vertical stabilizer of Fortuna’s tail. The ship’s defensive Makers responded by rapidly reproducing, ramping up their numbers to surround and confine the attacking force. But their defensive lines failed to hold. The hot zones rolled over them, spreading inward.
Fear like an electronic vapor rose in Urban’s ghost mind.
Verilotus had exhibited no macro-scale defense to counter space-based attackers. Dragon could have destroyed it easily. And yet on the microscopic scale it wielded a fierce defense—and he’d fallen into the trap.
He felt an echo of the helplessness he’d known when Lezuri launched a molecular assault against him in the opening move of their duel for control of Dragon.
Would he fall so easily again? Be consumed by Lezuri’s superior nanotech even before he reached the surface of this world?
No.
Not if he acted now.
He checked the time. Three minutes to touchdown.
A swift consultation with the DI. It issued new instructions to Fortuna’s bio-mechanical tissue, ordering the assembly of a dense network of metallo-ceramic threads just beneath the ship’s outer skin.
Such a simple structure required only seconds to complete.
Urban sent a current through it.
The threads grew white hot and then turned to ash—along with a layer of Fortuna’s outer tissue. In the hurricane wind of descent, the ash sloughed away, hopefully taking the infestation with it. But Urban couldn’t tell, because all of the hull sensors had been shed too.
Self-repair processes kicked in. New micro-scale sensors were assembled and pushed out to the hull. They reported hotspots still present on the leading edges of the wings.
Urban received this news with grim determination. He initiated the assembly of a new network of threads, preparing to shed another layer of Fortuna’s skin, but he hesitated when the passing seconds showed the vigor of the infestation in steep decline. The hot spots lingered, but they weren’t spreading. So he waited, unwilling to lose more bio-mechanical tissue.
