Sunset: Pact Arcanum: Book One (28 page)

Michael snapped his head forward again, his face coloring.
“Sorry, sir. I was just wondering what the Ambassador and that Nightwalker are doing here. This is a Guild funeral. Dirtsiders shouldn’t be part of this.”

“The Ambassador is insane, if his actions are anything to go by. Who knows why he does anything? I didn’t see the Nightwalker. What does he look like?”
asked the more senior officer in silence, not turning around.

Michael passed along the image of the Nightwalker he’d seen sitting in the back row, while another of his old classmates came to the lectern to speak on behalf of the departed.

The Captain’s eyes widened. Turning, he looked over his shoulder at the Nightwalker before facing the stage again.
“Oh, hell. I shouldn’t be surprised. Of course he came. He always does.”

Michael blinked.
“Do you know him, sir?”

The other officer sighed mentally.
“Rafael Tervilant.”

Michael glanced back, noticing the winged arrowhead that signified the rank of Master Pilot on the Nightwalker’s left lapel.

“Don’t stare at him, Icarus.”
Merrick’s thoughts were cold, angry.
“He deserves better from you.”

Michael swallowed and focused on the stage again with difficulty.
“But, sir, he’s a legend! I used to study the textbook he wrote on the physics of zero gravity maneuvering. It was brilliant. Why is he out of uniform?”

The senior officer turned to him with a frown.
“He’s not Spacer Guild, Lieutenant. He had an accident and dropped out of the last stage of the Academy training program. Now, leave him alone and pay attention to the service.”

Michael knew an order when he heard one. Muzzling the rest of his questions, he turned his attention back on the memorial.

* * *

Nick watched the service in silence. He had hit the master teleport gateway to the Citadel as soon as Rapier informed him of the funeral; even so, he almost missed it. Luckily, he had some formal clothes in his apartment. If he hadn’t asked Rapier to keep track of new victims, he would never have known how Cadet William Thompson had died.

Recursion Dyssynchrony was a particularly bad way to go. Caused by an unknown genetic defect, it resulted in the nervous system destroying itself upon exposure to Recursion Drive—the standard mode of interplanetary propulsion on all Guild spacecraft. It manifested as intense pain, followed by uncontrollable seizures and death. At least, it did for mortals.

The service finally drew to a close, and Nick stood awkwardly near the back of the room as the Spacers broke into small groups and consoled each other over the Cadet’s death.
Ten minutes,
he thought.
That should be long enough to show proper respect, rather than bolting immediately
. Most of the Armistice citizens on Earth were already pissed off at him after Los Angeles; he didn’t need the Fleet and Colonists on his case as well. He silently sipped from his glass of bloodwine as he stood alone, looking out of the flare-shielded windows at the sere landscape of sun-blasted rock, counting the minutes until it would be politically acceptable to leave.

“Ambassador Nicholas.”

Nick blinked and turned, taken aback that one of the Spacers would want to talk to an outsider. He was even more surprised to find that the speaker was not a Spacer at all but a Nightwalker in a black suit. None of his clothing bore even a hint of the green color that Spacers proudly wore to identify themselves.

“Yes?” he asked cautiously.

“I found it strange to see another Dirtsider at one of these functions, so I thought I’d say hello.” The Nightwalker looked past him at the rocky lunar plain and the glittering stars. “It’s difficult to be the odd man out, isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” Nick said noncommittally. “I’m told Spacers keep to themselves.”

“That’s true for the most part. I’m usually the only outsider in the room.” He turned his full attention to Nick. “I’m Rafael Tervilant, from Icehaven.”

Nick tilted his head in response. “Nicholas Magister Luscian. Pleased to meet you.” He glanced at the winged arrowhead on Rafael’s lapel. “Why are you an outsider? That’s a Guild rank pin, isn’t it?”

Rafael nodded. “I achieved Master Pilot rating before I left the Guild. Now I’m just another Dirtsider, and the rest of them are embarrassed to be seen with me.”

“I see.” Nick really didn’t but had no interest in inquiring further. He gestured toward the portrait still being projected on a virtual screen over the stage. “Did you know the Cadet?”

Rafael shook his head and looked at the portrait too. “No, but he has my sympathy for the manner of his death.”

“I sometimes wonder if the Sentinel victims are the lucky ones.”

Rafael turned back to him, surprised. “I beg your pardon?”

Nick’s expression was indecipherable. “Vampire victims usually survive after a few weeks in a coma to allow the body to heal. They’re the ones left facing eternity with the perfect memory of that agony forever after. There’s no support group for that kind of trauma.”

“There have only been a handful of cases since Recursion Drive was introduced in 2023, Ambassador,” Rafael said, staring at Nick with interest. “Most Spacers aren’t aware that the condition isn’t uniformly fatal.”

“My name is Nicholas, Master Pilot. And there have actually been eleven cases, not including this one,” Nick corrected. “Six Sentinel, one human, and four vampire.” He took a sip of wine. “Three of the vampire victims made it, although their identities are confidential.”

“You’ve made quite a study of it, haven’t you? I wasn’t aware of the human victim.”

Nick shrugged. “He was a physicist the Triumvirate recruited to help with one of their research teams. They were shuttling him to one of the orbital stations when they switched to jumpdrive. He died almost instantly.” Nick finished his drink and set the empty glass down on the table beside him. “I’ve been trying to find the vampire victims for more than a year, but the Armistice doctors refuse to tell me who they are.”

“Why are you trying to find them?”

Nick turned to face the window again. “To see how the other survivors deal with the memories. Maybe we have something to offer each other.” He looked back over his shoulder at Rafael, who stared wide-eyed at him. “That’s right. I’m case number ten of the twelve. The most my doctors were willing to do was forward an anonymous invitation to the other two survivors, inviting them to meet me. Neither took me up on it.” He paused, waiting for a response, then shrugged as he stared out the window again. “Nothing to say to that, Master Pilot?”

“I thought the invitation was presumptuous,” said Rafael. “I threw it in the trash.” He waited until Nick had turned completely around to face him again, the Daywalker’s eyes focused and intent. “Case seven.” Rafael held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Nicholas.”

Nick reached out and shook the Nightwalker’s hand. “Call me Nick.”

Letting go of Nick’s hand, Rafael stepped past him to look out the window at the stars. “My friends call me Rafael, or just Raf.” He smiled wistfully. “My classmates called me Bellerophon, after the rider of Pegasus. It’s kind of a tradition to take a call sign from human mythology at the end of first-stage training. I was the best pilot in conventional flight that the Academy had ever seen. Then I finished simulator training for Recursion navigation and took the controls of a jumpship for the first time. It was supposed to be a simple ten-minute flight from the Citadel to Cassandra Station, just to prove I could manually plot a course to the Trojan point.”

He turned to face Nick, his eyes hard. “I remember screaming for almost a full minute before they figured out what was happening and shut down the drive.”

“Shutting down the drive doesn’t work,” Nick said softly. “The neural feedback cascade is irreversible.”

Rafael shook his head. “They didn’t know that then. I was only the second vampire case, and the first one didn’t survive. Until me, no one had lived long enough to even warrant an attempt to abort the progression.” He shrugged. “After four minutes, I finally blacked out. That’s the last thing I remember until I woke up again a month later, and my whole life ended for real. You don’t understand what it means to a Spacer to be grounded, knowing I have to spend the rest of eternity Earthbound. I would have just stepped into the sunrise and been done with it, but I didn’t care enough at that point to bother. It took me almost a year to finally decide to face life again.”

“What changed?”

Rafael met Nick’s eyes. “Tanya Byrd.”

“Case eight.”

“She was a year behind me at the Academy. When I heard how she died, I pulled it together for the funeral. Seeing my old classmates again, hearing how their lives had passed me by, it finally penetrated that I didn’t have anything to show for my time as a Cadet.” He smiled. “A moment of vanity saved me. I decided to make people remember me and just how good I was. So I wrote it all down, everything I knew about flying, and gave it to the Guildmaster. I think he only read the book because he felt sorry for me. I hear they’re still using it as an advanced textbook.”

He sighed. “After that, I began to find other things to occupy my time. Turns out, I have a talent for writing software. I design Navigation AIs now, using what I learned as a pilot to refine the architecture of the interface and make it more practical for the average user. The Guild finds my designs quite popular; they’ve already approached me to submit a proposal for the
Odyssey
AI package. Who knows? If I can’t have the stars, maybe I can at least make it easier for others to reach for them.”

Rafael poured each of them a glass of Tiamat from the decanter on the refreshment table next to them. He handed a glass to Nick and took a sip from his own. “And yourself, Ambassador? You are Soulkiller’s Bane. How did you manage to keep such a major vulnerability under wraps?”

Nick took a sip of his wine and considered his answer. “No one outside my immediate circle of friends knows what happened, other than my doctors. The Journeymen were on a break between tours when I decided on a whim to do something different for my vacation and got on a flight to Ares Colony without telling anyone. I was traveling on a passenger transport, alone in my cabin, when they switched to inertialess flight.

“Scott felt me broadcast what I was feeling over the link. It paralyzed him with pain until he managed to mask himself from me. By the time he finally figured out where I was and which ship I was on, I was already in a coma. No one could understand what had happened. It wasn’t until after I was returned to the Citadel that they were able to detect the neurodegenerative signature of the disease. Even then, they didn’t believe it until after I woke up six weeks later and told them what I did.”

Rafael frowned. “What do you mean? The post-cascade biosignature is pathognomonic. What did you do that would cause them to doubt the diagnosis?”

Nick swirled his glass gently, watching tiny waves ripple chaotically across the surface of the bloodwine. “I had never heard of RD at that time, Rafael. All I knew was that I was in agony and that it was related to some form of neural feedback. Luscian used something similar on me whenever his knife hand got tired, so I thought I was under a similar form of psychic attack. I cast a neuroprotective healing spell, trying to defend myself.”

“Fire and Darkness,” whispered Rafael. “Terminal damage is the only thing that halts the feedback cascade. That’s why vampires survive, because we can regenerate the dead tissue. If you prevented neural death, you would just have—”

“Prolonged it,” finished Nick, his eyes focused on the red liquid in his glass. He carefully drank the rest of his bloodwine and put down the glass before raising his eyes to meet Rafael’s shocked gaze. “The reason nobody knows is that everyone thought it was some kind of failed assassination attempt. They didn’t make the connection to Recursion Dyssynchrony until much later because no previous case had lasted longer than seven minutes. Scott told the doctors I was screaming in his mind for more than half an hour.”

“God, Nicholas.” Rafael put his glass down before reaching out and squeezing Nick’s hand. “How did you learn to live with that?”

“I didn’t. Between that and Luscian, I needed a crutch just to keep up appearances.”

Rafael’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of crutch?”

“Heroin.”

Rafael just stared at him.

Pulling his hands free, Nick poured himself another drink. “Eventually, my friends and family banded together and forced me to stop. I moved away from Los Angeles to limit my access and appease them. But nothing was ever right again until the day Jeremy Harkness pushed me through the Gates and showed me something that made life worth living.” He sipped at his drink, outwardly calm, as he watched the Nightwalker fumble for something to say.

Rafael considered his words carefully before speaking. “Ambassador, why don’t we go for a walk and find someplace to discuss this further? I’m actually curious to hear what you think we can do for each other.”

Nick nodded and put his glass back down on the table. “Lead the way, Master Pilot.”

* * *

The two vampires silently left the room, side by side. Lieutenant Danvers watched them go.
I wonder what that was all about
, he thought to himself. Then he shrugged and turned back to his own conversation.