The door and the old man’s eyes opened at once, and with his first new free breath Sav-Ren knew he was dying. The guard rose to his feet much quicker than the aging priest, who looked down at his still-bound hands and exhaled with a wheeze. He was breathless, aching, haunted. Dizzy. Slowly he pushed himself up from his seat; it was difficult, and the room spun around him. His legs groaned from the discomforting position he had rested in. The pain he knew to be the decay of his nerve cells felt more like needles, or a great surge of pressure into his joints. He had no idea how long the two of them had been there. Not long enough for atrophy. “He did it,” Yu-Sent exclaimed, his laser-pistol lowered but still held in front of him. He gingerly stepped toward the opened door. “He actually did it. The power is back on! We’re free!” “Is there anyone outside?” Sav-Ren asked, his voice quiet. The energy and intensity of his previous mood had vanished. He hardly felt alive anymore. With each breath he felt the urge to cough. Harsh rattling wheezes echoed from within him the likes of which he had never heard. His stomach was jumping within him. “No. No, I don’t see anyone out here. Just… just bodies,” Yu-Sent answered, his voice trailing off. He stood in the doorway looking at the bodies and the blood for a long moment before turning back and nodding to the old man. All of them wore the same colors as Yu-Sent. Stained with the same color blood. “We… I should move them.” His voice was cracking. “I don’t want to be staring at them until S-Eyu returns.” He lowered his head. Sav-Ren stood where he was. Pondering. “Perhaps that is no longer our best idea.” “What? Why in the hells not?” “How many are there?” “...Hells. Don’t make me count.” “How many, Yu-Sent?” “More than two. Too many. What does it matter?” “Are you going to move them all yourself?” “If I have to.” “Where?” “...Into the room, I suppose. I have the right.” Radiation poisoning, Sav-Ren thought, his eyes morose and more present than ever. He closed his hands into fists and opened them. What he could see of the skin was pock-marked, peeling, discolored. Soon it would be spreading to his face, if it hadn’t already. That explained the nausea, which would only grow worse as time went on. And then… “There’s no time,” Sav-Ren said, keeping his eyes lowered from the gaze of the guard. “Don’t waste your energy or put yourself into a vulnerable position. You never know when others may come.” “There’s only so many of us left. I don’t think they’ll be wasting more manpower on us.” “But what of reinforcements? Arrivals?” The man nodded, as if convincing himself of what he was saying. Hearing his own thoughts for the first time. His scarred hands writhed over each other, bringing him pangs of pain with each new sensation. “We’re days out from the nearest station, unless they send guns out in post-light speed. And they won’t do that. Not when the Rose Spear is still here.” The guard’s face darkened. “But that means we can’t leave, either. Not when he’s still here. He won’t let us leave.” Sav-Ren nodded again. “You must act now.” “Only me?” The old man didn’t answer. Days. He only had days left. At best. Sans answer, Yu-Sent turned halfway away from the bodies, his gun lowered and his brow wrinkled. His face was pale. “You’re right,” he admitted. “But I’m not leaving S-Eyu. If he comes back and we’re not here, who knows what’s going to happen? He might think we betrayed him. I don’t want to get on his bad side. If we don’t work together, it’s all over. None of us has a chance of escaping alone.” Sav-Ren almost smiled at that thought, at the implication that a Tyrant subscribed to human moral values like loyalty or betrayal. They couldn’t hope to comprehend the ideals of one so high above them. But S-Eyu wasn’t that advanced, not yet. Perhaps that could be what would save them. A plan began to formulate in his mind, but it was weighed down by anchors of pain and a fogged consciousness. Everything too slow. The aged man exhaled from deep in his chest and started to step out of the chamber that was once prison. “Alright. Then I will go.” “What? Where?” The old man paused, blinking, feeling lost, wheezing softly. His foot was half submerged in one of the stains of blood; red rippled around his weight. “How many reactors are there in this facility?” “Three,” Yu-Sent answered, after a second of thought. “Two on the bottom floor, where we came from, and one all the way down at the bottom of the complex, beneath the surface of the moon. You can’t even get close to that one without a warden-level security clearance.” “That’s quite alright. Two is enough.” He gave some thought to this calculation, going over figures and theoretical values in his head. For a complex of this size and this distance away from the twin suns, the loss of one reactor of three was no cause for immediate concern. But… It would suffice, if only to make things slightly easier. The guard was interrogating him still, but the aged man waved away the questions (with both of his hands, still bound) and stepped over the rigid splayed-out arm of one of the dead men. “I’m going to the other surface reactor,” he explained, off-hand. “And I’m going to shut off the gravity. Can you shoot in zero-g?” “Better than in baseline. That’s all we trained in. You know how to do all that?” “I do.” “And you’re going alone?” “I am.” “Unarmed?” Sav-Ren paused to think about bending over to pick up their laser-pistols, only to suck his teeth at the memory of the bio-locks. At this level of security, the weapons wouldn’t be unrestricted. If they were dead, their pistols were useless. He shrugged. “If there is anyone predicting my plan, then it’s already failed and I’ll be killed. It’s better this way for you to stay here then. If they are sending more guns, they’ll go after you, anyway. You and the prisoner both still have trackers in you.” Then he felt himself chuckling, against his will. What could kill a dead man? “I suppose you’re right,” Yu-Sent admitted again. “Don’t stay here once S-Eyu returns,” Sav-Ren said, cutting him off. The guard tensed up. “You must defeat the assassin and escape. Time is your ally.” “That’s impossible,” Yu-Sent protested. The aged man started to walk away anyway. “You must not lose here. You must not let this man be erased from this world.” “Yeah? And what about you?” the guard said. Sav-Ren walked. “I’ll see you again. Worry about him.” “You’re brave,” Yu-Sent called out after him. “I misjudged you.” “Far from it. But I am ready to die for this. Are you?” The walls haunted him. Even in the far outer reach of the Terra system, this far away from the twisting, half-broken corridors of Side Nine, the aged scientist could think of nothing but his research. I create the future. How long it had been since he had graced the tri-monitor setup of his desk. How outdated his latest biononic breakthrough had been. How big Number Eighty-Three must have been by now. The figures and theories and hypotheses that had circulated through his mind for years, ever since he was old enough to understand what it was his father worked on day in and day out. Born in the limitations of destiny and fated to die in them. But now, for the first time he could remember, his mind was blank. Empty. Lost. Everything he had formed for the future, every plan and machination and thing he would see when his work finally reached its perfect climax and post-humanity was in the galaxy’s grasp… it seemed to fade from his hands, now left empty save for the readiness he clung to and the numb realization that his body could not last. The priest went down the lonely corridors watching the stars. (It was so easy to find one’s way here, in these linear walls. Maybe the prison was built like this to confuse inmates. Maybe it was to prevent them from hiding when pursued.) The halls seemed to grow darker around him. Sometimes he could see distant stars; sometimes the moon beneath would let its ivory face peek through between his feet. It grew colder, a little. When the elevator reached the lowest floor it would go the nausea hit him, hard. Bile rose up through his throat, and the handcuffs binding his wrists kept him from comfortably covering his mouth. A small stream of spit ran from the corner of his mouth, and tears from his eyes. Miserable. He forced himself on, cringing through the headache starting to emerge from behind his forehead. Was this what Sav-Id felt, in those last moments? He finally emerged into a dilapidated hallway much like the one that he had waited for the Rose Spear in. Dark, quiet, walls covered in wiring and monitors and grime. With a facility this self-sufficient and unchanging, it was unlikely that much work ever had to be manually done on these levels - and it showed. But like most satellite stations, he soon recognized, the layout of the lower, maintenance-focused floors was fairly predictable. He had long ago memorized the way to the power facilities of Side Nine. This was not much different. He walked as quick as he could, though his body faltered. He grasped his own hands firm. When he came to the gravity panel - easy to find, with its neon lighting and warning signs - he opened it and began to fumble through its digital commands. Arriving to the station as an official representative of the Church had blessed him with a security bypass code that allowed him to tamper with the settings, and by the looks of it no one had bothered to invalidate his clearance - yet. There was a small, predictable error. With 33% less power available to the station a deactivation of the gravity systems caused a temporary surge in voltage that left the station at emergency-level power troughs for sixty seconds. All the lights in the small and cluttered securities room blinked off and the aged man could see himself reflected on the hard glass of the small panel monitor. Only his eyes. Dim, but irises still the same color as his lover’s. Old. Older than he remembered. Weary. Time ticked down from sixty to one. He watched it standing straight with his hands bound at his wrists. Saying nothing. Dying so so slowly. Forty-eight. Everything had been bet on this. There had been zero chance of failure. He promised. He had done the math and the equations so many times over. Confessed everything before the Goddess so many times over. Supplicated and knelt until his forehead split open. Scarred himself with it. For years. Twenty-two. What a waste of time. I could have thought about anything. Anyone. I could have been with him when he died. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Now his head pounded in agony. He watched himself wince. He watched his lips quiver. Seven. He watched his eyes water. Same color as his father’s. Still human. Not gold. Never would be. One. The lights turned on. He felt the gravitylessness in his stomach first. It felt just like falling, stomach spinning and lurching and twisting itself in knots. He wouldn’t have moved but the sudden vomit sent him falling - flying? - backwards, feet drifting up from the ground, fingers writhing about. There was blood in the fluid. Getting zero-g balance while bound in handcuffs was difficult enough, but doing it while emptying the contents of his stomach was nightmarish. His own innards had splashed on his normal suit in two different places by the time he came to some semblance of righting himself, and by then his head was pounding enough and his throat was raw enough that he couldn’t even moan out with the agony. Running out of time. Was he going insane, or was the poisoning progressing quicker than it should have? How toxic were those chemicals? Would he even survive the destruction of the second reactor? Going back through the hallways with gravity off was at once easier than before and a hundred times more difficult. There were no turns or bends for him to help maneuver; he had to push up from the ground (easy, soft enough for him to fly) and then down from the ceiling to regulate his pace and keep himself from slowing to a crawl. The weightlessness made his nausea all the worse. This wouldn’t happen to anyone gone Absolute. That was the term he had coined for humans elevated from their limits by the powers of the Tyrants, the Goddess’ blessed. Theoretical blessings included self-renewal, adaptability to gravity changes, exponential growth in cognition, causal foresight, even nigh-immortality. No one gone Absolute would succumb to anything. Let alone some weak human illness. No. He blinked away tears that coagulated in his eyes and formed thick spheres stubbornly sticking to skin. He swatted them away with his knuckles - very carefully, so as to not disturb his trajectory - cringing all the while from the peeling of the skin on his hands. He imagined all the others in the colony, some of them more wizened than he, some of them young, too young. All with the same dead eyes. Resignation in the bones. Passion in the hands and the hands alone. He imagined a world where they all had bodies that did not fail them, eyes that could see beyond the stars, ships that could take them wherever they wished. He would die but the dreams wouldn’t. He remembered that, even as the headache evolved into a migraine and the bile threatened to burst through his mouth again and again. “I’ll be with you,” the memory echoed, garbled and tinged with static even in his head. “I’ll be one of the stars. Watching.” Every star watched him flail, even if he was hidden by innards of machine. Even the moon below. That is no place to die. What choice did anyone have? When he got to the chamber he paused, let himself breathe, both hands holding onto what he could grab of the auto-door’s jamb. The second terminal room was much like the other, only in slightly less disrepair. No mist from a reactor leak. No collapsed ceiling. No assassin, yet. The work was slow; he had no tools, no way of damaging the reactor violently. He went about unplugging what physical wiring he could, or disconnecting extensions; then he went about to the monitors hanging on the walls and navigated the archaic systems as best he could. He was a cyber-biologist, not a mechanic, nor a pilot or a physicist… but here he was ruining, not repairing. Ruin came easy to him. The work was harder than it needed to be in zero-g, but it wasn’t impossible. Nothing was. So he wrought. His vision began to warp, and his hands grew less coordinated the more time went on. His self-navigation only grew more clumsy. Sometimes he would look or move left when he meant to go right. Advanced radionecrosis. He went through the checklist of the radiation sickness in his head, wincing at the speed of his symptoms. He hadn’t planned for this. No one could have planned for this. The machinery around him groaned and the lights flickered off after he set off a particularly damaging command into the reactor’s infrastructure. An alarm distantly went off, somewhere above, echoing slightly through the walls. He did it. The dim lights emanating from the reactor went off and on and off again, and pillars of pressurized hydrogenized steam burst from the seams of the great machine. He let himself relax. The tears clogged his eyes again. He floated upward, no longer bothering to grip onto nearby fat wire or push around the walls to keep himself propelled. It was done. But he wasn’t. As greatly as he wished, Sav-Ren couldn’t halt his mind from wandering, yanked back to thoughts and ideas regarding the guard and the incredibly rare Tyrant. Every odd was against them. (In the back of his mind he continued what he had long since believed to be a forgotten bad, impatient habit of his - counting seconds - to what end? for what reason?) Should they somehow manage to meet again without getting slaughtered by the executioner, their chances of escaping were closer to zero than Sav-Ren’s chance of surviving. If anything, they needed him - should they manage to escape to the hangar, it was incredibly unlikely that either of them had any knowledge of how to pilot a ship capable of atmospheric entry, let alone initiating any sort of flight at all… Sixteen seconds, and his eyes opened every three. The chamber was beginning to grow opaque with the haze of the hydrogen. The nausea and migraines were beginning to overwhelm his sense. They must have been affecting his cognitive reason much quicker than he expected. They must have been. He was going out of his mind. What other explanation could there be for him to be pushing himself out of the chamber, back the way he came, with the lion-like heat of life in his blood again? Sav-Ren coughed up blood that floated in perfect spheres as he floated to the elevator he had used to get down to this part of the complex. It did not respond to the summoning of it, even though he knew it had not moved. The power. I did this. Every action had its reaction. No man had fates in stone. His mind blurred, became thick as mud, as difficult to navigate as the air sans gravity. I miss you so. He pushed himself into the nearby stairwell chamber and started to push himself upward, wincing as he bumped into black wall and iron stair of the cramped chamber, trying his best to ignore the regrets in his mind and the words of his father thought long-forgotten. He knew where the two would be going. They still needed him. (Two hundred six seconds.) The ceilings of this Bride of Sevenless private prison facility were almost two times higher than the half-collapsed ones in Side Nine. Far above himself he pulled, hands still wrapped together, occasionally taking the time to dry-heave and spit up more blood. His insides were already rotting. All it had taken was thirty-eight seconds in the chamber for the second reactor degradation to greatly accelerate his sickness. He had no idea how long it would take for his end to come, or if he could even be salvaged anymore. (Three hundred ninety two.) He held onto posts of the brutal uncurving stairs with wobbling hands joined and held palms-up as if in supplication and swore to the Goddess that his stomach was disintegrating with him or close enough to it. Goddess. Goddess. Did she still hear him? Did she ever? He didn’t know if he would make it to the top of the stairwell but he knew he could not and would not stop trying. It hurt so damn much he thought he would die before getting anywhere at this rate. There was nothing left in him to retch but blood but that didn’t stop his insides from twisting about themselves. He tried not to look at the blood on his uniform. He couldn’t look down either. Without the power available for the lights in the stairwell he could see nothing but the off-silver of the chrome railing and stair edges. Beneath himself he knew there was an abyss calling, moaning, reaching out to him with hands cold as ice, wrinkled like his grandfather’s and his father’s and even his own. I will not be like them. I will not fail you. (Six hundred eleven.) The darkness ceased to be formless above him and started to grow concrete. The top floor - or at least the height of this stairwell. His body had forgotten what it was not to be in pain, but distantly in the memory of his face’s muscles, he recognized the urge to smile. The lost feeling of victory. Long-lost. His hands curled around the manual access handle leading out of the stairwell when he heard the sound of something being smashed beneath him, and then he froze. The sound of a piercing. Something sharp. Something bladed. The gentle murmuring of cloth in zero gravity. The silence of one trained to notice the unusual. Sav-Ren felt his heart drop down through his ruined stomach. The executioner. He must have seen the blood. He must able to smell the vomit. It had to have been. He lost count of the seconds, lost control of his breathing and gained it again. If he focused, the executioner would even be able to hear an irregularity in his breathing. He could not take the risk of making even a single noise. Not while the man was still in this very chamber with him. Seconds passed but he didn’t know how many. Too many. With each silent breath the explosive urge to cough and wheeze threatened to burst in his chest. The ringing of his head darkened the edges of his vision. His stomach ate itself inside out. Still he could hear nothing from the executioner below. No moving, no breathing, no pushing or pulling on railing. Only silence and the booming of his own heartbeat. Everything so far had been for his life. He felt cornered. Had become as prey. He realized the only thing that a man could feel more deeply than physical pain was fear. Another bang, far far below. Echoing through the abyss. The sound of a door, closing. The sound of freedom. He pushed open the door to the outside and wept grateful tears of blood. Forgive me. I know I swore I wouldn’t see you again until I succeeded. But I couldn’t keep off any longer. Even with hands bound together as they were, Sav-Ren managed to reach to the audio recording module embedded in the neck of his normal suit. It was difficult to navigate its buttons when he could barely feel his fingers, but he had long since memorized what it took to play what he needed to hear. “Forgive me for contacting you in your hiding,” the recording of his lover said, beautiful baritone voice echoing out through the halls, almost drowning out the sound of Sav-Ren’s own muted tears. “But if you’re hearing this, I’m afraid you’re too late for me. I'm sorry. I’m gone now, Sav-Ren. I lost.” |
XII
Faithlessness