To Walk the Constellations Pt. 07

I blinked. I looked at Techne. Techne shrugged at me. I looked back at the port guy.

"Are you from the ship End of All Things?" he asked -- the name the Alliance had said was safe to use.

I nodded. "Yeah," I said. "Uh, Techne is the captain." I jerked my thumb at Techne, stepping to the side in a quick hurry. Techne chuckled.

"Venn's the ship's boy," she said, grinning at me, then at the port official. "We're here with a supply of biologicals from Masque Macabre -- they're anagathic narcotics, with a liquid application system. We have the paperwork from Masque Macabre here and-" And the rest of what she said trailed off into blah blah background stuff. I, meanwhile, was focusing and looking at the city around us. I let my mind filter out -- reaching out with my feelings. I felt the burbling, happy comnet. The stolid and almost agressively competent comptech. The orderly and fussy electrical grid. The hyperactive maglev trains. The lumbering, exiox sleepiness of the mega-transport.

And then a note of music.

My brow furrowed.

THE MUSIC

The music sounded like a little trill. Techne had once sat me down and made me listen to some of what she called the classics -- the ancient instruments that came again and again and again. The elements of the Home orchestra, the sizzling squeal of the electric sitar, the rumble and pound of drums. The tune that stringed through my ear sounded like a haunting...yet...playful oboe. It made me step forward and drew my eyes.

And there, standing on the wall of the spaceport, was a robed figure.

And I knew they were another Liminal Knight.

I gaped. "Techne. Techne!"

"Uh-" the port guy said, but Techne looked at me, then at the robed figure.

The robed figure turned and started to run. Run straight for the maglev train.

"Shit!" I hissed. "She's...I..." I focused and tried to ping into Techne's head with my mind. My voice echoed in my ears, but no one but Techne heard it as far as I could tell: She's a Knight! I have to talk to her! Techne turned to the port official and smiled.

"A friend of ours, we were waiting for her. She's a Parkourist, they're just like this..." and then her words were lost to distance and wind as I sprinted forward. My eyes narrowed and the voiceless voice spoke in my mind as I saw the wall and the crates that were stacked up near it and the jutting branch of a large cargo crane. There was a route up, and I knew it, deep in my bones. I leaped once I was three feet away, landing on the top of a crate, then scrambled from crate to crate, jumped across a five feet of massive drop, caught onto the edge of the crane, swung myself up, then grabbed my threshold blade. I formatted it into a grappling hook, tossed, and then dragged myself onto the roof.

By this time, the other Knight had gotten almost to the maglev. Fortunately, the train at the maglev station was stopped, with cranes lowering crate after crate of asteroid ore onto it. I sprinted forward, my feet pounding.

"Wait! Wait!" I said.

The other Knight looked back over my shoulder. I saw a shadowed flash of grin at me -- and when I reached out with my feelings, I tasted the flavor of the programming that shrouded her body. Under those robes, they wore comptech and gadgets, but their taste. Their scent. Their feeling. I had felt it before.

On Stumble.

Shrouding the Hegemony Shocktroops.

The maglev train started to move. The other Knight -- the Hegemonic Knight -- leaped upwards and, somehow, cleared almost fifteen feet. They landed on the roof of the maglev train and I ran forward, throwing out my grappling hook. I grabbed onto my hilt with both hands and yelped as the maglev train set off. The music I could hear -- the sound of the Hegemonic Knight -- was getting louder. More...dramatic. And I was swinging from the bottom of a maglev train that skimmed over the city of Argo at insane speeds. I focused and reeled myself in, slapping into the side of the train as it began to slow, as if the train realized that going full speed would send both of us to the ground.

I scrambled up, rolled onto the roof, then leaped to my feet, panting.

The Hegemonic Knight rolled their shoulders. Their robe went skittering off and flapped away in the wind, revealing that, underneath, the Knight was a girl. She had red skin, covered in angular, black lines, marking out almost technical, gear-shaped patterns on her forehead and cheeks. Her eyes were dark pits and her teeth flared white as her black lips skinned backwards. Her hair was long and silver white and had been bound into a long pony tail which whipped free in the wind.

I hefted my blade, my stomach doing a slow flip as I tried to center myself. My heart hammered.

I wasn't ready.

I was not ready.

Wordlessly, the Hegemonic Knight lifted her threshold blade. She focused and a red beam of light emerged from the hilt -- forming into her sword. A mirror of mine. Then she turned it to the side, holding it horizontal. The hilt stretched out, metal flowing smoothly as she gripped it with the other hand. Then a second blade burst from the bottom. She held the twin bladed weapon with the casual ease of a trained warrior.

Her grin got wider.

I activated my blade and lifted it upwards as the maglev train whirred, almost silently, above a residential area. The end destination looked like a huge, circular pillar of a building. I took a step forward, to the edge of my train car, and hopped from car to car, landing. As my knees flexed, the Hegemonic Knight sprinted forward. She leaped and landed right before me, thrusting the bottom of her staff-weapon at my chest. I voided -- twisted to the side and skidding almost to the edge of the trail. The tip of her blade sunk into the roof of the train car and she swept it up and free, leaving behind a cherry red glow of heated metal.

Ah.

Her sword was hot.

Great.

BLITZ

The Hegemonic Knight attacked. It wasn't one attack, or an easily tracked combination of attacks. It was a nightmare flurry -an aggressive whirlwind. She would swing at my face, twist, thrust at my chest, snap at my legs. She would push forward with both hands, to try and smash my chest, then beat me about the head with her a free hand as she twirled her staff in a deadly, brilliant, ruby red circle. And each time, I barely managed to evade, to parry, to dodge, to duck. Each time, she worked me closer and closer to the edge of the train's roof.

In less than a minute, my lungs were screaming and my heart was hammering. I took four great strides backwards, risking a glance away to make sure I didn't step off the train car. I looked forward again and saw that the Hegemonic Knight had given me grace. She was twirling her weapon in a lazy arc. And, finally, she said something.

"You've been trained!" She cocked her head, her ponytail continue to flap behind her. "Who?"

"I'll never tell," I growled.

She shrugged. "Was it Wotan Hohmann? Did that coward come from his relativistic hermitage to face us again?" She started forward.

I leaped backwards, then reached out with my mind. The train sped up underneath me and the coupling linking car to engine disengaged with a chunk clunk. The distance between me and the Hegemonic Knight grew -- but the Knight sprinted forward. She leaped, lifting her staff above her head, and I felt the pull of gravity shift under my feet. She sailed upwards in the air, far higher than she possibly could, then landed in the center of the car with a clang, the impact causing the roof to dent inwards. She came to her feet and faced me.

"Fuck this," I snarled.

Thale told me the best defense was a good offense. Lets use that.

I rushed forward. I swung and she twisted to the side, laughing at me. She used one hand to twist her blade around, parrying my next blow with the left blade of the staff, then with the right, twisting the whole thing around just to bat my swings away. Then, with me off balance, she kicked out and caught me in the chest. The heel of her boot left an imprint on my fucking soul -- and the roof of the train cab cracked into my spine as I went sprawling. My threshold blade skittered away from me.

"Is this the best the rebels can do?" the woman murmured.

We were coming up on the cylindrical building.

She strode forward. I rolled. My hands closed around my threshold blade and, following my instincts, I continued the roll and leaped off the side of the train. My route arced me through the air and directly into a large pit of pure, clean water. I smacked it hard -- but not quite hard enough for the water to be the next best thing to concrete. My entire side flared with tingling, buzzing sensation and I flailed, then splashed up and out of the water tank. I gasped for air -- and saw that the Hegemonic Knight had landed on the catwalk that ringed the water.

"Don't drink that!" she called out. "Heavy water is not good for you."

I splashed, trying to keep my head above water, gasping. "Fuck you!"

The Hegemonic Knight grinned, then thrust her staff at me, as if she was trying to hit me, despite being almost twenty feet away. But I felt the impact. A strange lightness surrounded me -- and then I lifted up into the air. My arms flailed and I blinked as I saw a bubble of water rising with me. Some dripped out of the sphere of lifting that surrounded me, sliding out and then splashing back into the pool of water below me. I saw that the Knight was lifting her staff to lift me -- some kind of agrav generator built into the haft.

"Oh you bitch!" I hissed.

She spun her staff.

I went flying. The water sloshed around and hit the wall first, but did remarkably little to beak the impact. I felt something give inside my shoulder and hit a catwalk on the way down. I stood, hissing, and looked around myself. The only good thing was it'd take a few seconds for the Hegemonic Knight to get to me. But as it was, I was standing in a huge chamber -- there were loads of those water tanks, each glowing a pale blue, now that I was distant enough to see. There were row upon row upon row of stacked, black canisters at the bottoms of the glowing water.

-spent nuclear fuel rods contained in heavy water storage, reprocessed for use in hyperfusion reaction cores-

The voiceless voice spoke in my head, educating me. This was a power reactor. They took uranium, plutonium, thorium, then used a Machine designed reactor to trigger fusion. Cheaper than classic tokamak reactors, but dirtier. I was safe, though. The water really did do a good job of insulating the radiation. But this was the storage site. I saw that I had landed about fifty feet from the entrance to one of the reactor sub-complexes proper. I looked back and saw the Hegemonic Knight was walking forward, whistling in time with the music that seemed to be her...signature.

Each step, she slashed her blade through one of the catwalk's handrails, sending out a spray of sparks.

I turned and ran, grabbing at my shoulder. My threshold blade sheathed as I formatted it into a quick nanopatch, hissing as I jammed it into my shoulder. The medical diagnostic was clear: I had to apply some blunt truama to get my socket back in. Then the nano could repair the damage. I screamed and ran directly at one of the dangling support cables of the catwalk. The impact jolted my shoulder back into place and nano flooded the arm, leaving me gasping with relief.

The Hegemonic Knight called after me: "Is this your long term strategy, or..."

I ran through the corridor.

-security force field emitters-

The Hegemonic Knight stepped in.

I lifted my palm and glared at her. I reached out with my mind and called on the Machine and forced. The force field emitters -- simply a sideways application of agrav technology -- snapped on and created a field of nearly invisible force. The Hegemonic Knight didn't even dive for cover. She just took a lazy step forward at the exact right moment to avoid getting cut in half as the shield snapped on behind her, trapping her on one side between two fields, me on the other with only the entire reactor behind me.

The reactor was suspended above and below two huge pits. The Machine had explained the principle: If the reactor suffered a breach, the force fields would snap on for the fraction of a second it'd take to ensure the blast mostly went down and up, rather than out into the city. I shook my head slowly.

PAUSE

The Hegemonic Knight did her hair while we waited. She didn't pace or prowl. She just started to untie her hair and let it loose, smiling at me as she then began to braid it into a quarter of pigtails. I tried to meditate and center myself.

"You've done remarkably well," the Hegemonic Knight said, suddenly.

I meditated harder.

"You fight like a noviciate," she said.

"Hey, fuck you!" I snarled, opening my eyes.

"That's...not an insult, it's just a statement of fact?" the Hegemonic Knight stood, shrugging. "You fight like you've been trained by-"

My glaring at her wasn't meditating. It wasn't focusing. It wasn't keeping the force fields locked. And guess what? Their natural state...was not being closed. I sprang to my feet and scrambled to draw my threshold blade, while the Hegemonic Knight charged at me. She thrust at my head. I ducked.

And then something grabbed my ankles.

Two somethings.

I looked down and saw that each of her pony tails had whipped around my ankles, like the tentacles of an octopus. My eyes widened.

DIRE

My back smashed into the floor and my threshold blade went skittering from my open palm. The Hegemonic Knight stepped forward and kicked and my blade went flying over the lip of the pit and down, down, down, down. Gone. I tried to stand.

The Hergemonic Knight swung her threshold blade in an arc. For a half beat, I thought she'd missed.

And then pain.

My arm.

Floor.

I clutched at the blackened stump that was my left arm, staggering backwards. The Hegemonic Knight nodded. "We can patch that. Just surrender. You've fought the good- no, wait!" Her eyes widened. I stepped back -- and my foot touched emptiness. I tumbled backwards.

FALL

My right hand reached out.

I caught onto a kind of curved flange. My fingers hooked and my shoulder jerked and for the second time today, I dislocated a shoulder. The pain shot past unbearable and into kind of transcendent awareness. My brain was white fire. And then I felt the voiceless voice touching me -- and the pain went away. I was simply a being. Simply a biological machine, aware of the fact that my muscles would only stay locked for so long. I looked up through hazy eyes.

The Hegemonic Knight stood there on the lip, looking down at me. She shook her head.

"You did real good," she said, kneeling down. She held out her hand towards me. "I can just about..." She shifted, then held out her threshold blade. It formatted into a hook, which she tried to reach for my arm with -- to hook me and drag me up. I spoke through my gritted teeth.

"You touch me, I'm letting go," I said. My voice felt eerily calm.

The Knight jerked her hook back, her brow furrowing. "Really? You'll destroy yourself utterly? Just to spite me? You...are aware there's no afterlife. Right? You fall down that pit, you will blank out. You will be gone. Forever. Everything that you were, everything that you could have been, will be gone. Let me save you."

"I'd rather die than serve you..." I gasped out. "The Hegemony is...evil!"

She snorted and stood, her hair flaring out around her head. "No. No it's not."

I blinked up at her. "They kill...millions!"

"Billions. Actually. But the Hegemony exists to protect humanity from itself. From its own inability to control the future. If it does nothing, billions will die needlessly from their own idiocy." She tossed her head. "You've been on the Chain long enough to see the patterns. You know where this is going. It's better to glass a planet or two so the whole Chain can survive and-"

"Bullshit!" I snarled at her.

She shook her head. "It's better than the alternatives!" She slammed the butt of her staff down. "But if you want to die..."

I closed my eyes.

A MOMENT OF PEACE

I had been underneath a purple moon, my body naked as the day I was born, when Thale had tried to teach me meditation. He had been naked too and, lit by an azure light that shone across the mirror smooth surface of the dreamscape we had been in. His body looked like it had been carved from glass and fragile things. The urge to run my lips across him, to taste his slick sweat, had been intoxicating. Thale, his purple eyes looking at the purple moon, rolled his head to look at me and snorted quietly.

"You're not even trying to meditate. Are you?"

I was on my belly. My palms cupped my chin and I let my sheepish, school girl grin come out. "No..."

Thale shook his head and let out a little 'tss' noise.

"I mean, how can I help it?" I giggled.

Thale looked back at the moon. "The Hegemony trains you to meditate no matter what. To tap into your Djinn, no matter what pain or torments you're going through," he said. His voice trailed off and one of his hands lifted up, caressing along his shoulder. His fingers touched some of the scars that seamed his pale flesh. I put my own hands on the ground, pushing myself up. I had gotten more used to being naked around him, but I still crossed my legs to cover myself.

"What..." I paused. "N-nevermind."

"What did they do?" he asked, looking at me, his eyes shadowed. "You don't want to know."

But I did. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to hold him and caress him until all the pain had drained into a puddle before us. I wanted to wring him out and let him cry and be there, to place the pieces back together. Instead of being brave and bold, though, I had looked aside. I had closed my eyes.

I hadn't meditated that dream.

SPARKS

"Then fucking get it over with already!" The Hegemonic Knight swung her blade. It struck the edge of the pit and sparks rained down on my knuckles. But I was already beyond pain. I felt the stillness that a Liminal Knight needed and I felt the cameras and sensors in the bottom of the pit, for monitoring. Security. They saw my Threshold Blade, sitting near one of the blast release valves. Now I simply needed it to come to me.

The Hegemonic Knight swung again.

More sparks.

It was a matter of formatting.

My blade shifted, clicked. This wasn't a new program. It was one I had found inside of its architecture -- it was so obvious, once I had taken a moment to simply think. To hear the song of the Machine. And to know the name of the programmer. His signature was all over it. I smiled up at the Hegemonic Knight.

The program completed.

The micro-rocket on the back of my threshold blade kicked on with a shriek like a damned soul. The blade shot up the blast tunnel at the speed of sound. The Hegemonic Knight had just lifted her blade for another sweep.

My sword struck her gut.

Blood misted the wall behind her.

And she tumbled forward -- her eyes wide, her face striken. There was a moment where I saw her falling past me, trailing blood.

Then she was gone. I turned away from the cameras. I didn't want to see the impact.

RESCUE

Rescue came right before my fingers gave way. The force fields had shut down, but the security had to have been aware of the fight. Techs came into the reactor room, found me, cried out in alarm, and started to arrange my rescue. When they had me out of the pit -- using a series of makeshift gaffs -- my entire body seemed to realize that it was time to go. And I passed out.