Dusk (55 page)

Cyrus hoped that whatever ends Winberg
sought, that he had helped facilitate them for no other reason than
Winberg trusted him. And if his five-year long enemy could trust
him with his own life, what man or woman couldn’t? The idea, as
burdensome as it could have been, dispelled any guilt that could
have settled in Cyrus’s mind.

• • • • •

—
How was school today Dari?

—
It was kinda interesting today, Dada.

—
Another side-track on astrophysics
today?

—
Nah, not today, but it still made me think about
you.

—
Was it about grumpy old monsters that erase
their kids’ deckwork when they make more than three mistakes and
get in trouble with their wives for treating their children like
grown men?

—
Ha. Nah Dada, nothing like that. Miss Hasabe
talked about great leaders. You know, like George Washington,
President Truman from World War Two, Martin Luther King, and that
Alphonse Johnston guy from the Uni War. You know, a bunch of people
that everybody loves. But then Sergio brought up guys like
Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin, then some guy named Yosef Purse he
said was in the Near East Fringe War—a bunch of guys his dad told
him about. He said they were mean guys, but they were good at
beating other countries, and the people they ruled over loved them,
and he said even though they did some bad stuff, good things came
out of what they did.

—
What did Miss Hasabe say?

—
She seemed like she got kinda bent, then she
just said those guys were all monsters and were not what she was
talking about and she just kept going, but Sergio wouldn’t let it
go. He said he was sure George Washington was a monster to the
British, Truman in World War Two was a monster to the Japanese, and
the Uni must have been monsters to the Fringers that wanted
automousy.

—
Autonomy.

—
Yeah, that’s it. Well, Miss Hasabe got so
fritzed up she almost sent Sergio to the Disciplinarian. She said
the Uni represented justice and safety, but what Sergio said made
me think. I mean, you’re like the leader of this family, and you
care about justice and safety, but sometimes you seem like a
monster to me, but then later I understand and get over it. But
sometimes, I think even you might make mistakes. I’m not saying you
aren’t a good leader and Dada, but I guess even good leaders make
mistakes sometimes. It’s just that when you do, you can just
apologize, cuz your mistakes don’t make people dead.

—
I think you do have a point there, Dari. You
know what I think? I think the worst monsters we have to fight
aren’t people at all but misplaced ideas. Monsters that don’t have
bodies are the hardest to fight because even the best of us can
help create them ourselves without even knowing it. Leaders like
Martin Luther King and Yosef Purse at the beginning of the Fringe
War fight the hardest battles against oppression and human
selfishness. But the problem is, sometimes it’s hard for even the
strongest of us to fight monsters. Hercules and Perseus were both
half-gods, and I’m sure the Hydra and Medusa didn’t think they were
too stellar when they showed up in their houses to get rowdy. A man
named Friedrich Nietzsche said, “He who fights monsters must see to
it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you
stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” I think
Nietzsche had it wrong though. I don’t think you can truly fight
evil unless evil itself sees you as such. If those you see as evil
can abide by you in any way, then why should they listen to you?
Your true enemies should hate you—even if you don’t hate them. And
sometimes that makes you look like a monster.

—
What about the abyss part? The abyss is like
Hell right?

—
Worse than Hell. The abyss is nothing. Oblivion.
Complete separation from everything. If you focus on that which
would devour your very soul, it will tell you something about
yourself, and sometimes, you may not want to hear it.

—
So maybe the heroes in history are the ones we
agree with, and the monsters are the ones we don’t, because you
can’t really be those guys without being a little monstrous. And
the only thing that can tell us is our own soul.

—
And unfortunately, whether it’s deckwork getting
erased or people losing their lives, when the abyss stares you in
the face and checks the level of your keel, the only comfort you
will have is whether or not, at the end of the day, you can leave
your monstrosity in the abyss where it belongs.

• • • • •

When his pupils finally expanded enough to allow
light into them, it felt as if the light would laser-cut two holes
in the back of Euston’s head. It was as if his entire head had been
put in a pincer lock while he was unconscious. And the alarms did
not help. His arms were wobbly as he lifted himself from the
ground. Moony, Capshaw, and Scalia lay before him. Capshaw was
moaning, but the others seemed completely insensate. Euston stood,
and as the blood pounded through his temples, and the base of his
neck pulsated like a rioting throng, he steadied himself against
the wall to let his body adjust.

Now that he was up, he realized he was in
pain. He pushed away from the wall and felt the frustration of
being in the same position once again. He felt the stiffness in his
elbows and knees washed away with impulse. This had happened one
too many sunfried times, and he would be damned to the wastes if he
let that houndspawn get away with it again.

Fortunately, he had an idea where the
scientist was going. Most of the soldiers here with the same
vertices only knew the Knight of Wands as another wastebaked leader
of the Apostates, who claimed, impossibly, to be the father of the
Sword Scourge. But Euston knew how he had gotten to Asha, and if
this man had organized an ill-laid escape from a military
installation, albeit lower vertex security, without even talking to
most of the punting headgamers in his crew, then it would be a safe
assumption that he didn’t select the Orbital as a meeting place for
the beautiful starscape.

No, as far as Euston knew, the Flame Knight’s claim
of reverse pedigree was probably true, and because Euston knew
where he had come from, and given the fact that the Paracelsus had
completed launch preparation this very day cycle, he knew where he
was most likely going.

Uzziah moved in closer to the black vehicle
Jang had placed on their course marker. The holographic imagers
showed it closer than it looked in the shrouding darkness of the
Miasma. Without warning, a light flashed on the ship they were
following. A yellowing flame danced around the back of the ship and
briefly lit up the craft to reveal the large gun that was firing at
them. Bluish and orange sparks began to play across the windshield
of their lev in sync with the flickering muzzle flash on the enemy
craft. The astrapi shield that surrounded them caused any material
below a certain mass and beyond a certain velocity to disintegrate
before impact, and kept the gunfire from penetrating the stolen
Echelon craft.

The Echelon had not hesitated to open fire.
These men were under the same restrictions as the men from the
Scar—which meant this was going to be nothing like their escape
from Eurydice.

But they had all prepared for this. Uzziah
slowed their fighter and rose a few meters. Two more fighters
appeared on the imager, closing in from the opposite side of the
craft they were pursuing. According to Jang, those two crafts,
which were piloted by Apostates, should be visible on their own
imagers but invisible to the Echelon. It was an unorthodox
approach, but it would maybe buy them enough time for their plan to
work. No doubt, the Echelon ship had already sent word that it was
under attack, but it needed to be taken out before more fighters
could scramble. The imager was zoomed out almost to its maximum,
but the two fighters opposite them still moved across the image at
a blinding rate of speed. They were small, two-man fighters,
piloted by Norrin of Pentacles, and the Apostate’s best pilot, who
the Apostates only called the Ace of Wands. The two ships rolled
and spread out in the imager as the gunfire buffeted the shield and
Uzziah continued to close the distance.

And then, when the signal was given by the Ace of
Wands over Uzziah’s earwig, Uzziah activated what Jang had called
his special sauce—a modification that had been achieved by removing
the heat limiter on the thrusters. This allowed them to achieve a
massive burst of speed for a brief moment. It was only good for
about three uses, as it irrevocably damaged the thrusters
themselves, but as it launched Uzziah up and over the speeding
Echelon craft, he hoped he would not have need of it a second
time.

Cyrus could not keep his hair off his brow
and hold the Agamemnon unit at the same time. His hair was mottled
and sweat dripped from the ends. He had not sweated this much since
the day they had escaped the Archon building. By this point, it
would seem that his nerves could not be rattled any more, and yet
he could not shake the feeling that the luck he had experienced up
until now had been used up, the last of his nine lives spent. He
was sure that when the bell tolled again, it would be for him. He
stood in the main hall of the Paracelsus contemplating his next
move. What the Agamemnon unit lacked in volume it made up for in
density, and it began pulling his arm into the floor. Cyrus was
tempted to radio Jang to lower the gravity settings on the ship,
but that would have been too complicated a process just to appease
his laziness. Besides, the sooner he got his monkey ass out of
here, the sooner he could set this thing down.

But he couldn’t leave. Tanner hadn’t had his
z-axis properly set since they had entered the underground city.
Just getting this unit back to the Xerxes and retrieving the Ark
would not guarantee Tanner’s mindset would improve. Cyrus knew
parts of Tanner’s past were sordid, and that his faith had kept him
from degeneration into whatever dark reaches his soul had passed
through. Tanner was a grown man, and was responsible for his own
sanity—Cyrus knew that—but Tanner was the dearest friend he had
left, and if his dear friend’s grip on his sanity was not strong
enough to stand fast without help, what good would all the
information on Asha or Earth do for Cyrus? He could not stand to
lose another person close to him at this juncture.

So he set the Agamemnon unit down in the
hallway and headed toward the living quarters. If Tanner’s Bible
was the hoist that had pulled him from the troubled depths of his
own soul before, perhaps it could provide the same ballast on this
barren rock.

“We can’t blow the charges until you get back
to the ship,” Jang’s voice was calm, but was of little help. He
must have noticed Cyrus’s locator moving in the wrong
direction.

“I don’t think I’m coming back to the
rendezvous point,” Cyrus said, moving into a run.

“Just to let you know, the Echelon is going
to be beating at the jetwalk any minute now. That bulkhead isn’t
going to hold them much longer.”

“What the hell am I doing?”

“I don’t know, and now I’m a little worried
because I was hoping you could tell me,” Jang’s reply startled
Cyrus as he was not aware that he had said it aloud. It had
probably been under his breath, but the nerve signals had been
enough to send the subvocal communication across the network.

“Just leave without me,” Cyrus added,
speeding around the corner to Tanner’s room.

“And exactly how do you plan to get
planetside?”

“I’ll take this thing.”

“Not sure exactly what you mean by that, but
it doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

“What about this entire idea has been good?”

Septangle Marv Talladega tried to keep the mounted
auto-cannon trained on the fighter that had aggressively approached
his crew. But suddenly, the craft moved much quicker that it should
have to have been able to—he knew because he had been assigned to
that very craft twelve Dhekads before it had been stolen. He
continued firing in hopes the astrapi shield might flux and he
would hit something vital, but the ship went up and over them
faster than he could even follow it with his eyes. The vibrations
from the gun rattled the bones in his wrists, and his hands and
palms were beginning to itch in his gloves. And then the air shook
the craft as two much smaller fighters screamed past without
warning. Nothing had appeared on the gun’s targeting gram at all.
Suddenly there was an audible pop from both sides of the fighter
that sounded like electromagnetic countermeasures, exactly like the
ones used to scramble the navigation systems of missiles. But that
was awkward, because as far as he knew, no missiles had been fired,
and no one had even seen the fighters coming. The fighters most
certainly did not show up on his holomonitor. Then, when the
imposter ship settled in front of them, too close for missile fire,
Septangle Talladega heard the sound of the imposter’s auto-cannon,
and it became painfully clear what those fighters had done.

The Echelon fighter that Six had acquired had
proven indispensable. Jang, Doree, and Aerik had been able to
recalibrate the electromagnetic countermeasures to interfere with
the frequencies of the astrapi shield so that, with precision
flying, a burst from two fighters on either side of the craft would
render the shield sporadic for ten seconds—enough time for an
auto-cannon at point-blank range to turn the nose of the craft into
a sieve.

The composite windshield of the craft
shattered in tiny rivulets, and the Echelon fighter dipped
violently as the driver, either shot or caught off-guard by the
sudden loss of shielding, overreacted. The nose of the craft dug
into the ground and bounced, and one of the men inside fell through
the windshield, but he was caught by someone inside. The Echelon
ship was taken off-guard, but now the distance between them had
increased. Toutopolus fired another burst of auto-cannon fire into
the front of the ship, but only sporadic bullets actually hit the
craft as the partially restored shield flickered randomly in and
out. The earwigs Toutopolus had in each ear were synced to the
cannon, allowing them to cancel the overbearing report of the
mounted gun, but it was still difficult to hear. Milliken tapped
Toutopolus on the shoulder and then, when he continued firing,
shook his shoulders vigorously to get his attention.