Icarus Descending (43 page)

The Asterine Alliance did not belong to Luther Burdock or his children at all. It belonged to Metatron. What plans he had for us, I feared to guess.

But our father had turned back to the ’filing screen. “I have to go now,” he said. “But I understand you will be here within a few days. I look forward to meeting with you and discussing our future together. Until then—”

He bunched his fingers together and made an odd little salute. “Ad astra et cetera.”

The image blinked into dead air. A moment of utter silence, and then chaos.

“It was Father!”

“Did you see—”

“He remembered! I could tell he remembered—”

My sisters ran to embrace each other, laughing and crying out across the room, pointing at the Element’s watchful blue eye outside or running to the window to see if they could glimpse the elÿon that was to join us.

“O Kalamat!” exclaimed Cumingia as she hugged me. “You always loved him the best—you must be so
happy
now!—but what is it? What’s the matter?”

She drew away from me, shaking back her beads and frowning. “Kalamat?”

“Don’t you—how can you—they are sending us to fight, sister. Didn’t you hear? They are sending us to war in the Commonwealth.”

Cumingia’s brow furrowed, and then she gave a small laugh. “But only for a little while. You heard what the Oracle said—in a few weeks we will be together again. Oh, Hylas!—”

She turned away to take another sister into her arms. I walked through the little crowd, saying nothing as my sisters reached to stroke my cheek or laughingly called my name. I shook them from me, my heart raging with anger and dismay.

War! He was sending us to
war.
How could they not hear that, how could they not care? I had only a handful of days yet to live, but I would not be spendthrift with them, squandering them in battle. It did not matter if it was a war we could not lose. It was not what we were made for, it was not what
I
was made for.

And I realized then that my sisters had no idea why they
had
been made. Their thousand days they accepted greedily, but without question. Our lives serving the Architects on Quirinus had been busy but not difficult. We were not treated cruelly, we had our dormitories and our pleasures, we were even permitted our Rites of Lysis, so long as they did not intrude upon the Ascendants.

But for the first time I knew that, for my sisters, this had always been enough. They wept when one of us died, wept as they recited the orison and bore the bodies to the chutes that would cast them into the Ether; but afterward they forgot. They remembered our father, but he was as a father in a dream, a father glimpsed in a cinemafile. Not someone to spend an entire lifetime mourning, even if that life lasted only a handful of days.

And there was the truth of it. I was not like them, no more than I was like our Masters. Something had gone wrong when they made me, some phantom turning of the road of cells and nerves that led to Kalamat. Instead of a creature as like to those others as one grain of wheat is to its kin, they had somehow created me.

And I remembered my father. I loved him. I could never forget.

At the window I stopped and leaned my head against the glass. I wept, remembering Luther Burdock. I remembered how he had held me when I was a child and awakened screaming in my bed, how he stroked my curls and whispered to me.

“
Do not fear the dark, daughter,
” he had said. “
The night can never harm you, and anyhow, soon it will be time for us to wake.
”

I stared out at the Element, the world that in my memory had always belonged to my father, but now belonged to Metatron. And if like our great Mother I could have wept worlds, new worlds, my tears would have seeded the Ether with stars.

As the aviette auxiliary capsule approached the golden torus that was the colony of Quirinus, the energumens Ratnayaka and Kalaman sat apart from their brothers and stared outside. Travel in the aviette made Kalaman uneasy, a holdover from earlier terrorist forays when he had still feared discovery by the Ascendants and subsequent punishment or attack. He sat with his hands clenched in his lap, the flattened blade of his
kris
straddling his knees, and hoped they would arrive at Quirinus soon.

Beside him, Ratnayaka sensed his brother’s fear. Any one of them might have known it; but the rest were clustered at another window, pointing to where the other two aviettes seemed to float like smooth flattened teardrops in the Ether. Kalaman’s fear made his brother tremble. To think that Kalaman’s mind was so open to his own! He brought his face close to Kalaman’s and stroked his cheek, then let his hand rest upon Kalaman’s thigh. Murmuring, Ratnayaka caressed the feathery impression of scars that Kalaman had drawn there with his
kris.
His brother was so beautiful. Even in these rare hours of calm, Ratnayaka could see the rage within him, filling Kalaman as blood or wine might fill a crystal krater, until at last it spills out and stains the hands of the libation bearer.

Ratnayaka knew this rage as another might know the kisses or sweet mouth of a lover; as Kalaman himself knew the much-fingered blade of his
kris.
It was a gorgeous thing, that rage, hot and quick as a culverin’s flame; but it had been fired and tempered in the rarefied furnace of a HORUS colony. Upon the Element, Kalaman’s ardor, his solitary and sanguine nature, would not fare so well. Metatron wanted generals and janissaries; the cool, sturdy grip of a revolver or blade that yields to a command, and not the lethal holocaust of a Shining.

Kalaman was such a thing: a shining creature, an uncontrollable flame. But Ratnayaka was a general—had he not been his brother’s lieutenant?—a general and, if necessary, a sword that might be wielded by another’s hand; say, Metatron’s.

Ratnayaka smiled, looking upon his brother, and lovingly ran his fingers across a small raised scar upon his knee. No, there would be no place for Kalaman upon the Element. As for Ratnayaka himself: he knew patience as he knew the sound of his brother’s voice. And some swords have been known to betray their masters.

“O Kalaman,” he whispered.

Still his brother did not move, not even when Ratnayaka leaned forward to nuzzle his throat.

“We will finally see them,” was all Kalaman said after several minutes. With wide, calm eyes he stared out the window, at the radiant torus and its beveled lines of lights, red and blue and violet. “All those sisters we have never met…”

Ratnayaka drew back from his brother and nodded, his eye a sullen gleam in his ruddy face. “We can teach them what we know. We can bring our secrets with us to the Element—”

He thought hungrily upon the brothers they had harrowed in the cool green-lit chambers of Helena Aulis. How lovely they had all been, how greedily he had fallen upon Djistra, the last to be consumed before they left the only home they had ever known; and how Kalaman had given all that final pleasure to Ratnayaka, taking nothing for himself.

Kalaman shook his head. “No,” he said softly. His voice sounded distant, as though a ’file of Kalaman spoke there, and not the energumen himself. “That is a thing that belongs here—”

He turned and gestured at the tiny silvery image of Helena Aulis, already smaller and fainter than it had been, a star’s sad shadow in the void. “—To that life. But this will be a very different thing—”

Kalaman frowned, then let his breath out in a long sigh. Beside him Ratnayaka dipped his head, so that his brother would not see his mouth curling with disdain. His hand tightened about Kalaman’s thigh, slid up and beneath the short skirt of coarse linen, to stroke the muscles there, the smooth curve where Kalaman’s leg cupped into his groin. Kalaman groaned, moved as though he would embrace his brother. Something cold and smooth licked at Ratnayaka’s throat.

“Patience, oh, my brother,” whispered Kalaman. He moved the
kris
so that its curved blade slid down Ratnayaka’s chest, dragged it gently across his abdomen until it lifted the edge of his brother’s skirt. “You will have me soon enough.”

As he stared at his brother, Kalaman’s eyes glinted black and fathomless. But Ratnayaka only laughed, threw his head back and laughed until the other energumens turned, their gaze flickering uneasily between their two leaders.

“Oh, yes,” Ratnayaka said, the hunger racing inside him like some small razor-toothed creature seeking to burst out. He brushed away the
kris’s
blade as though it had been a toy. “Oh, I will, my brother Kalaman. I will have you, soon enough.”

In the empty docking chamber of Quirinus, I turned to my companions and said, “We have been betrayed.”

Valeska Novus stared at me, her eyes betraying no emotion. “Imperator?”

“Who has betrayed us, Margalis?” asked Nefertity.

“I do not know, I do not know.” I pounded my hand against the wall. My human hand—when I let it slide from the tiles, a shimmer of pale fluid remained. “Agent Shi Pei, someone who saw us boarding the
Izanagi;
perhaps Lascar Franschii. All I know is that we have been betrayed, and my mission has been thwarted.”

Captain Novus shook her head. “Surely not, Imperator—”

“Yes!” I exploded. “It is worse, far worse than I or anyone else can possibly have imagined. The other memory unit has been found. The members of this geneslave rebellion are receiving their orders from the Military Tactical Targets Retrieval Network—”

“Your nemosyne!” cried Captain Novus.

Nefertity’s voice was nearly inaudible. “Metatron.”

I nodded. “He knows we are here. He contacted me in the
Izanagi’s
library; he intends to take me prisoner. It was he who brought about the destruction of NASNA Prime and the other HORUS colonies. Now he has ordered his geneslave troops to attack Cisneros, and he plans strikes against other Ascendant targets—against every military target in his database.”

I fell silent, then finally ended, “The damage wrought by this so-called Alliance is far greater than I dreamed; greater perhaps than any holocaust wrought by mankind since the First Shining.”

“But why?” Nefertity asked softly. “Why—
how—
could another nemosyne do such a thing?”

“I believe that Metatron intends to destroy all humanity, and set up the energumens and other geneslaves in its place. As to how a
nemosyne
could do such a thing, independently, with no human commanding it—”

My voice trailed off, and I stared at the scuffed floor beneath my boots. “I do not know.”

At mention of Cisneros, Valeska Novus had paled. Now she grabbed me. “We should reboard the
Izanagi,
Imperator! If this is a trap, we must get you—”

My metal hand closed about hers and she winced. “Oh, I think we will be back on the
Izanagi
soon enough, Captain Novus,” I said. “It will be the quickest transport available to them, if he truly intends to return me to Earth.”

“What of me, Tast’annin?” Nefertity’s ringing voice held no fear within it. In the softly lit expanse of the docking chamber, she burned like the blue heart of a flame. “I would not be used as a tool for slaughter. I think you should dismantle me. At the least put me in my dormant mode.”

I stepped toward a wide archway that opened into a broad corridor lit with golden sunlamps. She was right. It would be simple for the other nemosyne to alter her program, or even to interface with her and make Nefertity nothing more than an adjunct of Metatron. But it also might be possible to use her somehow to crack Metatron’s governance code. And that might be our only chance of disabling the Alliance.

“No,” I said at last. “You may be able to help us, if and when we are brought before him.”

“But who found this other nemosyne? Who has programmed it to do this?” blurted Valeska Novus.

“I don’t know. But my guess is that it was someone who had no real idea what they were doing. Even the crudest and most mendacious of the Autocracy would not have ordered the systematized destruction of the entire human race.”

“You seem quite disturbed by all this,” said Nefertity, her words tinged with slight malice. “I had thought such emotions beyond the Aviator Imperator of the Ascendant Autocracy.”

“I will choose whom I will serve, Madame Nemosyne. I am not a puppet or any man’s slave—any
thing’s
slave—and if this Metatron thinks so, he will learn otherwise. Captain Novus, please arm yourself.”

“Yes, Imperator,” Valeska Novus said, slipping her gun from its holster and glancing at me admiringly. An instant later her expression turned grim, as the sound of footsteps echoed toward us from the corridor.

“Captain Novus, you will defend myself and this nemosyne at any cost—you understand?”

She nodded, her dark eyes slitted as she went into a half-crouch in front of us. “Of course, Imperator,” she said, and we waited to greet our hosts.

An announcement came over the Quirinus voicenet telling us of the arrival of the elÿon.

“O sister Kalamat, they are here! Do you think our father is with them?”

I turned from my sister Hylas in ill-disguised impatience. “Of course not. That ’file transmission was from the Element. And these are—I don’t know
who
they are. Probably there is no one aboard but the adjutant. But I think you should go now—
all
of you—go to your chambers and wait for me to call you.”

Hylas and the others who had come up behind her looked disappointed, but they knew I would brook no argument. They had few belongings, so there would be little to pack for our voyage. They had only, then, to wait.

“Go,” I said. I started for the door that led to the docking area. “We cannot assemble for departure until our brothers have arrived from Helena Aulis. And I wish to speak with their leader, this Kalaman, before we do so. I will call you when we are ready to board the elÿon.” As one, my sisters bowed their heads, hands crossed upon their chests, and left.

As I hurried down the hallway, a new announcement came over the voicenet, informing me that unauthorized personnel had entered Quirinus.

“An Aviator and two nonviable constructs,” the net’s ethereal voice chimed. “None have received clearance to leave the docking area.”