A pure light roused him gently to life.
For the first time he could remember, he was woken only by the warm kiss of sunlight and the cool breeze. In a sudden shock of recollection, he breathed a fast, full lung of air, and as his senses slowly returned, the strange sensation of waking in mysterious surroundings stole upon his consciousness.
“Awake?”
A quiet voice startled him.
With great effort, Saul lifted his head off the bedding, shielding his eyes from the light. When his eyes adjusted, the speaker appeared, sitting on the side of the bed upon which he laid. “You…” he murmured, half-dazed and incredulous. “What… what…”
He tried to lift himself up, but a sharp stab in his abdomen stopped him mid-rise with a growl.
Celyn rested her hand on his shoulder and gently laid him back down. “Take it easy,” she hushed. “You’ve been out for a while. The drugs are still wearing off.”
He looked down. His upper body was bare, and the minor abrasions and bruises on his arms and chest made very little of his agony. Through an open window, he could see rows of tree branches rising up, and the noon sun soared high, peeping through the cracks of the trees, and the branches stirred only with the fluttering of the birds and the walls and roof over their heads was a purlin of lumber logs oozing the scent of fresh pine.
“Welcome to Russian woodland.” Celyn’s eyes were fixed on the view beyond the window. She was wearing civilian clothes, close-fitting around the curves of her breasts and shoulders, and the rough scars in the dark, ebony flesh shone in the light.
“This place must have been abandoned after the wars broke out in this region,” she said. “We’re lucky we found it. We’re not out of the war zones yet, but should be safe here for now.”
He gazed intensely into the shimmering emeralds of her eyes. Her face appeared transfigured, all of the desperately suppressed sensuality presently revealed in the subtle contours of a vague smile. He was still trying to make sense of his surroundings. Everything came back in flashes.
Nova Crimea…
What had happened in between? How had they come to this place?
“Malachi…”
Celyn looked away with the aspect of mourning, and then looked back up at the wood through the open window. “It’s alright,” she said. “He chose his path. He knew where it would end.” The twinkling of grief faded. There was only the sound of swaying branches and the melodies of the blackbirds and yellowhammers. Unadulterated peace seeped into the fractures of his soul like an apothecary.
He turned to face Celyn just as she reached into her pocket and took out the black neural canister, and he watched her closely as she held it out in front of her with a wistful sigh. “I had stopped the program a long time ago,” she said, and fell silent. “I couldn’t risk telling you.” She grasped the canister tightly and threw it out the window. “Eli always said I was weak,” she said, clenching her fist.
He painfully sat up and brought his gaze level with hers.
“He was the weak one,” he said with a groan.
Celyn looked up and nodded with the flicker of a smile that disappeared instantly. “Everyone was massacred…”
Silence.
“That means that we are among the dead,” he said
“Never thought death would be such a relief.”
“We cannot stay dead forever.”
“I know.”
“We have to move on.”
“Soon… but not yet.”
He set his gaze beyond the treetops, toward the cerulean sky, and soared with the flight of the eagles. He could feel the rack of the world loosening, the cool wind soothing the aching of his soul. The pine air filled his nostrils and the soldered pelt of his face bathed in sunlight. For the first time, the nightmares seemed a distant memory. If he could preserve that moment for all eternity, he would have gladly died there and then.
He pushed his weight up and flinched when the pain shot through his right shoulder. When Celyn reached out to the origin of the pain in a reflex of compassion, he, in an impulse of combat, intercepted and seized her tightly by the wrist.
He froze. Their eyes locked.
His breaths quickened with his beating heart, and he slowly, almost contritely, loosened his grip. She leaned in and kissed him, gently – first his forehead, then the temple, the side of his face, then the lips, tenderly at first and then with a steady-rising passion. He could hardly twitch through the sudden shock of it. Then, slowly easing into her touch, he leaned back with her, suddenly oblivious to the aches and pains. His left hand glided up the curve of her back, along the velvet skin, the other laced in the thick locks of her hair. His heart hastened past his breath.
The deep, hard lovemaking seemed to last only seconds, but could have gone on for hours or days. In the end, her lips stopped moving and her head reposed between his neck and shoulder. He held her close to him, stroking through the roots of her hair and caressing her nakedness against his.
“I always thought that when I would leave, that I would have to leave alone,” he murmured. “There was a part of me that wanted you to come, but I was sure that you would not.”
She was silent. Her body had gone completely loose, her whole weight pressing down on his chest. He looked curiously at the back of her head and noticed that her hair was not woven into the thin, cascading ropes that he remembered, and the feel of her body against his was different than the last time. She had lost weight since then.
Her hand drooped and hung loose over the side of the bed.
Asleep, he thought.
There was a peculiar heat against his neck, a moist heat, like spittle. Not wanting to wake her, he gently reached over to lay her on her back and felt the moistness cover his chest.
He stopped.
A smell like rusted iron rose up to his nose. He held his hand before his eyes.
Blood.
Stale blood.
He pulled back on the tuft of hair and lifted a face as white as marble; gaunt, wide-mouthed, eyes writhing up to the back of the skull in bulging sockets. The viscous blood poured over him, colouring his vision red, and his soul fell like lightning from the heights of ecstasy into the depths of the dead, writhing eyes. And when his falling soul struck his lifeless corpse…
His eyes opened.
He drew a sudden and rapid breath. His throat was locked with terror. He panted, wheezed, convulsed and wanted to yell something – anything – but was no more able to bring words to his mouth than he was to wince. His eyes darted in all directions, but for long seconds all he could see was the image of his own reflection in the dead eyes, through shades of crimson blood. When the image faded, the light that had been the warm noon sun became a pale and sickly orb shining feet above him. A voice echoed in his head:
“He’s awake…”
Two alien figures appeared standing over him, and when his vision focused he saw that the figures were dressed in white.
The mask was removed from his face. The two ghostly heads disappeared and he heard a door open and close a minute later. He mustered enough sense to realise that he was lying on his back, immobile and half-mummified in a viscid caste like liquid glass, encasing half his face from the right temple to the left collarbone and all the way down the left side of his body in a tight-fitting cocoon. Through the viscous exoskeleton, his flesh was charred and mutilated to black and red rawness. The slightest movement gave the sense of excoriation. The throbbing pain from the dream-turned-nightmare now engulfed every inch of his flesh, seeping into the marrow of his bones.
“Good morning, Saul,” spoke a voice of stone.
Slowly, excruciatingly, he turned his head over to his left, his enflamed eyeballs stretching to their corners.
“Nightmares?”
The neuralist was sitting beside the bed. The solid blue orbs appeared through the glare in the lenses of his pince-nez and a marble smile carved into the sides of his face. He no longer knew whether he was asleep, waking, drea
ming, hallucinating or tumbling ever deeper into some new and abysmal nightmare. But, even as the thought occurred to him and Pope was still there, staring back with those bleak, cold, blue eyes, he knew that it was no dream.
“W… Wha…” He attempted to speak, and his voice was a dead whisper. “Where… am – aaarrgh!” He barely shifted his weight before the swift sensation of flesh tearing off from his bones broke through the receding anesthetic.
“Seragon Medical Complex,” Pope replied with a low drone. “Noble District.”
“Sodom,” he gasped.
“Yes.”
The answer cut deeper than the deepest wound. The one-sighted eyeballs swivelled in their cracked sockets as he regarded his own mutilated body once again.
“What… happened?”
Pope leaned forward, took a small clipboard-shaped device from the narrow slot on the side of the bed. “According to this medical report,” he answered in a narrating voice; “pulmonary lacerations, cerebral lacerations, second- and third-degree burns, two cranial hairline fractures, radial compound fractures, rib fractures (he dragged his finger over the screen as he listed), all manner of abdominal trauma, multiple hematomas, puncture wounds, abrasions…”
He stopped, looked up and laid the medical report aside.
“You have been in an induced coma for the last two weeks,” said Pope. “Truly, were it not for your exceptional resilience, you would almost certainly be dead. No shortage of donors for high-casters, fortunately for you… As you can probably tell, your reconstruction is not quite finished yet. If the matter which I have come to discuss had not demanded you immediate attention, we would not have woken you.”
On a table-top to Pope’s right, the same cubic device from the evaluation activated on order with a glow and started to record. Next to the device, there were two files – one brown and the other black. Pope took his slim, crystal tablet and laid it on his lap and the luminous screen reflected in the lenses of his pince-nez. “You owe your life to a certain Martial Celyn Knight, Third Tier Elite,” the neuralist narrated, scrolling down the tablet screen. “According to the mission record, she carried you to safety from a building moments before it collapsed, at great personal risk – for the life of me I cannot understand why. UMC law does accord half the earnings of a recovered martial to his rescuers, among certain other caste distinctions, but, of course, that only applies in the event of a successful assignment…”
Pope’s lifted his head, put aside the computer tablet and removed the pince-nez.
“As you might imagine, a great deal has happened since. None of it good.” The placid voice heightened the foreboding. “Because of your actions in your previous assignment, Martial Court has deemed you responsible for the deaths of more than five thousand of its martials and the loss of the city of Nova Crimea to the Eastern Sphere. To say your employers are not amused would be putting it quite mildly.”
Pope’s slim, sanitised fingers laced over his hips and he leaned back in his seat. “Predictably, the biological signature of the neuromedicines we had given you thirty days ago are absent from your system…”
“There were… families…” he forced the words through clenched teeth. “Children…”
Memories of Nova Crimea started to return to him: the collapse of the bridge, the screams of the people falling into the gorge and the blinding flash of the explosion.
“I see…” the neuralist slowly nodded. “And did your enemies share your same special concern for their lives?”
More synapses sparked in his waking memory: visions of the tanks trundling over the bridge, crushing living bodies under their tracks like insects.
“All of the people you tried to rescue died nevertheless,” said Pope, starkly, “along with countless others. Nova Crimea now lies in ruins and the eastern powers have expanded their territories into the USE boarder…”
Pope pushed the eyeglasses back over his eyes, leaned forward and spoke softly.
“You see, Saul; this is yet another of the many, many problems with the unbridled defective mind. This twisted sense of deontology…” The hollow smile reappeared. “Everything and everyone is expendable, so long as it is expedient to martial order.”
A long, tense pause followed. He gradually began to make sense of the import of Pope’s presence. He was not afraid. He had had his chance at freedom. Now it was lost. He had failed. Presently, he did not regret but rather, welcomed the reprieve of death which pride had never permitted him to inflict upon himself.
“They will … execute me,” he muttered, almost hopefully.
Pope leaned back with a vague snicker. “Considering the expense of your recovery, I doubt your insurers would take kindly to that.”
He was vexed. “Internment…”
“Prison?” said Pope. “What would be the point of that?”
His indignation escalated. “What … will they do … to me?” he rasped.
Pope sighed deeply. “Saul, Saul, Saul,” he repeated, shaking his head. “We are not going to punish you,” he said, as though the very thought were absurd. “There are no crimes in martial society, only malfunctions… anomalies, which, for the most part, can be corrected, sparing both life and liberty. Penal systems are so primitive, and, incidentally, repugnant to everything we stand for.” A gleam of uncanny ire reared itself in Pope’s eyes. “You are a martial of the highest caste, as precious to me as you are, indeed, to the very stability of our world. And we are trusted with the single purpose of keeping you fit for that vocation. You are our responsibility – in every way. Hence your failures are not your failures, but ours. I, Saul, must carry the burden of all of your iniquities… Can you understand, now, why it is I take such especial interest in you?”
The twisted notions and barefaced mendacities manifest in Pope’s words, boiled in him like vitriolic bile.
Again, Pope shook his head.
“Hmmm… perhaps not.”
He reached over to the tabletop and took the brown file. The seal of the UMC was on the front and, beneath that, the mark of the UMC Court. He opened the file and removed its contents. “This is your full debriefing and a transcript of proceedings before the Ares Circuit Court, courtesy of your martial solicitor, Commissioner Donald Clarke Eastman, who you may recall,” Pope explained, as he perused the documents. “Commissioner Eastman has managed to negotiate a deal on your behalf. Due to the absence of evidence, they have agreed to suspend your hearing and, contingent upon success in your next assignment, drop the indictment.”
Saul’s attention was suddenly roused.
“What assignment?” he asked.
Pope immediately stopped flicking through the pages and laid the contents of the brown file aside. He took the second, thinner black file, with the same UMC insignia, and the mark of the Vanguard. “For you to peruse at your earliest convenience,” he said with an ironic smile, and slipped the file into the slot at the side of the bed. “Your flight leaves in sixty-three days at precisely sixteen hundred hours. You are expected to make a full recovery by then.”
Pope came to his feet and put on his coat.
“I trust you will make the right decision…” The computer tablet and the silver cube were slipped into the inside pockets of his suit. When the hands came back out, they were holding a fresh black canister of neural tablets, which he laid down on the bedside table-top, just within his field of vision.
“One more thing,” said Pope, as he was about to leave. “Your term of tenancy at Dragon Towers expired five days ago. Commissioner Eastman took the liberty of finding you another place to abode in the meantime. The address has been sent to your Nexus account … I am sure you will like your new home.”
The doors slid open.
Pope left the room and the two figures in white coats re-entered. As the mask came back down over his face and the lights faded to black, the last anxious thought that lingered in his mind was of where the nightmare would take him next.
BOOK II
DELIVER
ANCE
II