Context (116 page)

He
walked out of the tree cover, into the open, uncaring.

Drones...     
                     
                     
             

He saw them, but they were
heading away from him—no, away from the crystalline structure—flying as fast as
their lev-units would allow.

Tom walked to the top, and looked
down from the ridge.

It was glowing.

No...

White light, growing.

Greater than the sunlight.

A thousand suns...

It blossomed truly, a vast wave
of white light.

A blazing globe: the Blight,
gathering its power.

Shielding his eyes, crying
inside, Tom rolled back over the ridge.

The
strange impossible light continued, great beams of it thrusting through the
sky, throwing strange, stark black-and-white shadows across the grassy ground.
The crystalline stadium had become a giant spotlight, trapping the world in its
blazing illumination.

Highlighting a trampled trail
which had been invisible before.

Squinting.

It’s growing brighter.

Tom moved with his eyes squeezed
almost shut, following the trail.

White sky, burning now.

Elva. I won’t lose you.

Half stumbling, half running,
while his eyesight remained.

Not now.

Lost the trail... No.

There.

And found the membrane-covered
shaft, an ellipsoid shining with reflected white intensity, and slid inside,
ignoring security, just burrowing down into the solid depths of Nulapeiron,
into welcome shade and safety.

White
light still blazed at the bottom of the shaft, but a few metres into the
horizontal tunnel beyond, he was able to open his eyes normally. Pale orange
stone walls, dark floor. Utilitarian, clean. Though he was beneath ground, this
was higher than the Primum Stratum: he had not descended far enough to reach
normal depths, and the air still felt strange.

There was another shaft opening
in the floor ahead, beyond which the corridor continued.

Which way, Fate damn it?

He ran forward.

There were doors to the sides,
all locked and hardened to opacity. And farther on, a long chamber terminated
the corridor. He stopped, panting, looked around, feeling desperate.

Damn, damn.

Ran back to the shaft.

This time he realized there was a
descending tube, its interior coated with some viscous liquid which smelled
faintly tart, and knew he had no choice. He lowered himself over the edge, felt
the liquid cling to his black bodysuit -imagined a slurping sound—and then let
go.

The transport-liquid propelled
him downwards.

It
was a climber’s nightmare: falling into the void. But it was controlled, and as
he hurtled downwards, breath torn away by the slipstream and trying not to
yell, he tried to estimate the drop. One klick, maybe two.

Deceleration.

Tom’s heart pounded as the slope
curved gently and the liquid grew viscous, slowing his descent, until he slid
out onto a horizontal chute and fell to the floor.

Blinking hard, he got up and walked,
trying to focus on his surroundings: shining mother-of-pearl, swirling shades
of grey. He was not just back in Realm Buchanan, but in the heart of the
Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum itself.

Part of him wanted to sit down
and cry.

Elva
...

Tom pushed on.

Somewhere
above ground the titanic crystal structure was pulsing with energy, blazing
brighter than the sun, but here the tunnels grew dank, some part of the
Collegium which was long disused, with scraps of derelict machines—broken scrubdrones,
the chassis of a burned-out levanquin—strewn across the cracked stone floor.

Tom stepped to avoid a
filmed-over puddle from which acrid vapour rose ominously—

Something.

—and stopped dead, listening. Was
something hunting him, or was it Elva and her captors?

The sound came again, from a
black opening to his left. With silent steps, careful as a neko-feline stalking
ciliate prey, Tom crouched low and moved inside.

He
came out in a rained square-cut chapel, ancient and deserted, lit only by
mutated patches of wild fluorofungus which rippled with disease. In its
shattered alcoves old worn-featured statues had collapsed, and lay at odd
angles amid the rabble and broken shards. It was dank and unsettling, but it
was not the place Blight drones would take a prisoner to.

Tom closed his eyes, cursing
himself.

‘Ah... Cor-cor... igan.’

A statue.

Against all his training, Tom was
paralysed.

The statue
moved.

‘Who are—?’

But then he saw: in the shadows,
a white fragmented face slowly twisting in his direction. A rainbow shimmered,
as a pale shaft of light struck a diffractive microfaceted surface where one
eye should have been—but the other half of that broken face was a blackened
ruin.

It was a Jack, damaged beyond
imagining.

In the past, when a fearful Tom
had glimpsed them, Jacks were preternatural beings whose skins were laced with
sensor tracery more sensitive than the best of scanfields and femtodefences,
while their bodies enclosed weapon systems of legendary power, capable of
blasting hugely superior forces into oblivion.

But this one ...

Fear of the shattered half-human
thing crept over Tom, until the Jack raised one hand, revealing ripped sinews
and power cables, laid open to view with the flesh torn asunder.

It was a broken wreck, which some
power had mostly destroyed and left here, propped up—immobile, statue-like—to
suffer slowly, to wait out the years until its internal power plant finally
gave up the ghost, and whatever passed for human in its core patterns finally
dissipated into oblivion.

‘I
...
hunted... you.’

That brought the fear back. Jacks
had searched for the Pilot’s mu-space crystal, when Tom was fourteen SY old;
years later, Jacks were part of the manhunt for Gérard d’Ovraison’s murderer.
Was that what it meant?

But the poor ravaged thing did
not have the energy for prolonged conversation: Tom could see the agonized
effort those few words had cost it.

‘I’m looking for a woman. Held
captive by the Blight.’

Trying to enlist its sympathy, by
naming the Blight as his enemy. For whatever had done this to a Jack was itself
no human being. Such power: the rained Jack’s abdominal area, blackened, was
melded into the chapel wall, part of the extended charcoal burn pattern which
sprayed across half the chamber.