The Far Shores (The Central Series) (69 page)

Michael’s vision blurred
and blackened, and his hands reached for his throat, an echo of his early
strangulation of the other Anathema.

“You have my
sympathies,” Nick Marsh informed them, close enough now that Michael could hear
him over the thrumming sound in his ears, as if a helicopter hovered directly
overhead. “You see, I died the same way. In a chamber, breathing in poison gas,
the air rich with nanites. I died just as you are dying, but I had the
misfortune to return, as you see me now, a thing both more and much less than I
was. It was a mistake, I have come to realize – but it is one that you will not
have to suffer.”

Michael continued to try
and crawl away, tried and failed to hold his breath. He struggled and could not
remember why, could not think at all in the face of the terrible clamor that
filled his head.

“Mercy is a virtue, do
you not agree? A kindness that even a dead man may offer.”

***

The dead were consumed piece by
piece, uncaringly launching themselves at the gradually expanding mass of
nanite disassemblers that swelled and fluctuated around Mitsuru like a black
cloud, like a thick mass of oil floating, suspended in water. Tendrils and
horns emerged from the black mass of nanites, impaling and dismembering the
corpses that Song Li launched at Mitsuru with increasing desperation. Mitsuru
took no notice of the dead that she tore to pieces, Anathema and Weir alike.
She was effectively unconscious, from trauma and blood loss, her heart barely
beating, her mind functioning only on the most basic and primal level. She
floated, supported by strands of black blood that held her upright and carried
her gradually toward the World Tree, drawn by the subtle gravitation of the
opening into the Ether. The battle with Song Li was little more than an
afterthought, a passing and unconscious distraction from the primary goal of
reaching the radiant World Tree.

The nanites had a
singular ambition – propagation. While they were not capable of thought, when
their number reached a critical mass, they gained a sort of limited group
consciousness, and that consciousness was
hungry.
Merging with the World
Tree would allow the nanite disassemblers access to the virtually unlimited raw
material of the world at large, via the perfect and unlimited conduit of the
Ether. In the center of this growing catastrophe, Mitsuru floated, nude and
half-dead from blood loss, aware of her own existence in only the most
fundamental way. The Black Door inside of her was shattered to pieces, the
fragments littering her mind as the power flowed freely through her body,
devouring her from the inside out until there was little that remained of the
Auditor other than a husk, the skin and bones of a woman who once called
herself Mitsuru Aoki.

Song Li cast the last of
the corpses nearby at the growing shroud of black blood, trying to drive some
portion of one of the bodies through the consuming mist, to incapacitate what
remained of the woman within. One by one, the bodies were decimated and
absorbed, becoming part of the mass that flowed inexorably toward the outer
limit of the apport field.

Karim Sabir swore in
Arabic, then in German, but the words fell short, felt hollow next to the
global calamity that he touched gingerly with the edge of his remote awareness.
He motioned to Chike Okoro, and the Nigerian handed him a new magazine for his
Barrett, specially designed rounds from Vladimir’s laboratory already loaded.

“Are you certain?” Chike
asked him, his voice trembling with sadness. “Is there no other way?”

It was a scale model, he
decided, a localized analog of the end of the world. Karim had been warned of
the catastrophe that an out-of-control Mitsuru Aoki represented, but he was
still disarmed by the sheer savage beauty of her dissolution. He felt a
reluctance to intervene that was neither moral nor emotional, but rather
aesthetic – it felt wrong, as if he would be putting an end to Mitsuru’s finest
possible moment, cutting short an achievement that might have cost a lifetime.

It was almost enough to
make him put aside the rifle.

“I am not,” Karim
admitted. “But I
am
afraid. Alice Gallow believes that I am witnessing
the end of the world, and I tell you, my friend, from where I sit, I’m inclined
to agree.”

It wasn’t heroism. Karim
wasn’t capable of grand gestures. The most he could aspire to was an offhand
sort of mercy.

Alice Gallow had warned
him, on the very first day, during his debrief. Karim had sought Mitsuru Aoki
out on the beach at the Far Shores not long after, seeking to put a face to a
name, to achieve a kind of rapport. He had deliberately made the act personal,
emotionally charged, for reasons that were obscure to him.

It was possible that he
felt some guilt.

This was buoyed by the
awareness that Mitsuru Aoki, bleeding ravenous nanites out into the world, was
every bit the apocalypse he had been promised. Her protocol’s aggression was
universal – it consumed the quick and the dead alike, the architecture, even
the landscape. The nanites within Mitsuru’s black blood used everything as raw
material for replication, and were therefore multiplying at an astonishing
rate. In and of itself, that was a disaster with no obvious end in sight.

Now the additional
hazard of the near proximity of a World Tree, and the threat grew
exponentially. A handful of meters was all that separated Mitsuru’s Black
Protocol from becoming a universal catastrophe. The worst of all possible
outcomes.

The magazine slid home
with ease. Karim charged the bolt and sighted the rifle with his remote vision,
ignoring the scope. His finger tensed across the trigger.

“I’m sorry,” Karim said,
exhaling as he made final adjustments. “I wish it were otherwise.”

At the valley between
breaths, the moment between heartbeats, Karim pulled the trigger.

Mitsuru’s body jerked
when the first round slammed into her torso, lodging itself in the center of
her rib cage.

The outer portion of the
bullet was coated with a depleted uranium shell, to punch through the walls of
the factory. The tip was hollow, and mushroomed on impact, delivering the
payload that was nestled in the core of round: a collection of dormant nanites,
activated by contact with oxygen, derived from painstaking and careful
experimentation on Mitsuru’s own nanite disassemblers. They were fundamentally
similar, with one major deviation: the nanites the bullets introduced into the
black cloud consumed only other nanites.

The next bullet passed
through her abdomen, while another splintered against her collarbone. The
fourth embedded itself deep within her hip bone, while the final round slammed
into the front of her skull, spilling its contents directly into her cranium.

The black cloud froze,
Mitsuru’s punctured and shattered body hovering motionless within its depths.
Its slow-motion progress toward the crackling energy that surrounded the World
Tree came to a halt.

Then, as if suddenly
remembering that it was subject to gravity, the black cloud rained to the
ground, forming a small lake of steaming black tar with Mitsuru’s ruined body
lying prone in the center.

***

Emily hurried over when the woman
came tumbling out of the portal, not entirely sure what to make of the
situation. She was relieved when Alistair followed a moment later, a handful of
Anathema troops filtering in after him, most of them bearing the grimaces of a
child preparing for the pain of an injection. Alistair helped the woman up, who
rubbed her bruised backside and shot him a resentful glare.

“Sorry about that,
Talia,” Alistair said, with a winning smile. “There wasn’t time to explain. Couldn’t
take the chance of losing the best and brightest of our technicians when we are
so close to bringing this one home.”

The technician gave him
a halfhearted glare, then turned her attention to the bag of equipment she had
brought with her, attaching readouts and digital displays to the machinery in
the room.

There was no need for
empathy for Emily to spot the transparently mollifying intent behind Alistair’s
compliments, but apparently they worked, because the woman’s expression
softened. His unfailing ability to win over women was one of a number of
qualities that Emily did not appreciate in Alistair, but she was prepared to
tolerate her commander’s failings, as long as his authority was temporary – a
reality that Emily had every intention of ensuring, whether or not John Parson
lived up to his word.

More than enough
decisions had been made for Emily Muir in her last lifetime. This one, she was
determined, would be quite different.

“Good to see you in one
piece,” Emily lied sweetly, surprised at how battered and small the Anathema
force he led appeared. “How did things in go in the Ukraine?”

“Successful,” Alistair
reported, with a smile she supposed was intended to be ingratiating. Alistair
had attempted to seduce Emily not long after her arrival at the Outer Dark,
shortly after her transformation – an attempt she had gently but firmly
rebuffed. She would never understand why Mitsuru Aoki fell for him. “It was a
closer thing than I would have liked, but successful nonetheless. Song Li and
Leigh should be able to hold their end long enough for us to align the World
Tree and prepare it for transport. Even if the Auditors destroy the Tree we
rooted in the Ukraine, possession of this World Tree makes it irrelevant. That
is, if Talia can replicate the performance,” Alistair added, with a vile little
wink in Talia’s direction, “that she put on back in the factory.”

“Save the flattery,”
Talia said unconvincingly, turning to Emily as if she were little more than a
functionary. “Is the area secure?”

“Of course,” Emily
replied smoothly, mentally adding Talia to the list of people who were going to
regret their lack of respect. “I neutralized the majority of the Far Shores
security, and the corridors leading to this chamber are flooded. It should take
them some time to reach us, assuming they try.”

“What about the
equipment?” Talia asked brusquely, brushing past Emily to inspect the racks and
towers of chattering electronics. “You didn’t damage anything, did you?”

Emily controlled
herself, but it took some doing. She limited herself to gesturing toward a
monitor at the heart of the nearby control center, which displayed the luminescent
crystal branches of the World Tree, confined to the adjoining sealed chamber
and shielded from outside observation with an Etheric interference generator.

“Of course not.”

“Fascinating,” Alistair
said enthusiastically, peering over Talia’s shoulder at the monitor. “It must
have been quite an endeavor, assembling this in such secrecy...”

“Not particularly,”
Emily opined. “Didn’t we just do the same?”

“Yes,” Alistair allowed,
“but we didn’t do it
inside
of the Auditor’s base.”

Emily hesitated, frowning.

“I suppose.”

“What an interesting
place. Such a shame I hardly had occasion to visit when I was an Auditor,”
Alistair said, wandering about the machinery. “If only I had known all the
things Dr. Graaf had gotten up to, out here on the Fringe.”

At a wave and a nod from
Alistair, the few remaining troops that he had brought with him distributed
themselves around the room, a pair moving to the door while another set headed
for the equipment room, the last remaining by the portal with an assault rifle
at the ready.

“We need to run some
tests,” Talia said, studying a digital readout protruding from the side of the
machinery. “We need to prepare the World Tree for extraction, and perform a
trial run to test the resonance...”

“Naturally,” Alistair
agreed. “Though it does seem to be operating. After all, we made it through,
did we not?”

“I want to be sure,”
Talia said, pushing past Alistair to the control center. “It will take time to
align everything correctly.”

“By all means,” Alistair
invited, gesturing at the waiting equipment. “Do your magic, Talia.”

She hurried off, but not
before Emily caught her giving Alistair a look that was equal parts pride and
attraction. Emily could feel Alistair settling his empathic hooks in the
technician’s mind, and watching it made her vaguely ill. While his talents were
mainly telepathic, Alistair had sufficient empathic ability to flatter a
receptive audience into performing, in the field – and then probably in bed,
after.

Men, Emily thought with
distaste. So disgustingly transparent.

“You said that you
neutralized the Far Shores security?” Alistair asked, bending to adjust one of
the armored shin guards that he wore.

Emily shrugged modestly.

“The opportunity
presented itself.”

Alistair must have
noticed the Changeling cowering in the corner of the room, head between her
knees as she continued whatever breakdown had afflicted her fragile persona,
because he froze, and then gave Emily a questioning look.

“Emily, please tell me
that you didn’t damage the Fey...”