The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) (40 page)

Fosso skidded to a halt upon his back on the ground, his steel painted with red gore. He rose up on his elbows only to find Jav standing over him.

“What are you?” Jav said in a low voice, awed by Fosso’s resilience.

“I could ask you the same, but I think I know.”

“Yield,” Jav said.

“I think you know that I cannot. I have to try.”

The Golden Crown flashed, but Jav jumped clear. His hands were like a unit now, clawed fingers reaching for each other, his palms facing each other, twenty-five centimeters apart. He came at Fosso again, his hands still together, dipping down to his left, as he delivered a savage roundhouse kick to Fosso’s head. This did not send Fosso flying bodily, but strained his steely neck. Jav backed away slightly, allowing Fosso to get his bearings, something beginning to take shape between his hands.

Then, as it often did in moments of stress upon the battlefield, time seemed to stop, or at least slow dramatically for Jav. Fosso righted himself and stared at Jav, directly ahead of him. Jav raised his hands for the Kaiser Claw, which was somehow already beginning to affect space. The Golden Crown took shape and passed once again through a smoke facsimile of Jav, but this Fosso did not see. Jav had reappeared directly before him, had timed his displacement technique so that he jumped forward,
through
the Golden Crown in a sense, and had his hands clamped firmly upon Fosso’s crown and chin. Everything between Jav’s hands quavered surreally.

“I’m sorry,” Jav whispered. With a grunt of supreme effort, Jav enacted the final calculations, torquing his hands from left over right to right over left. A sickening high-pitched crack rang out across the plain, stopping everyone for an instant. Jav held Kan Fosso’s head in his hands, crumbling bits of shattered steel raining down from its stalk and from where it had been removed. Though it did not appear to be reduced as most things subjected to the Kaiser Claw did, it was somehow dark, burnt out, devoid life. This last was obvious of course, but was somehow more profound than death alone. It was as if the divine had indeed suffused Kan Fosso’s form and it was gone now, snuffed out.

Jav felt a sharp pain lance through the small of his back and nearly rip out through is stomach. He threw his head back in sudden agony and tried to look over his shoulder to identify the lingering pressure.

What he could not see was the lithe, sunset-red figure fixed to him, one hand wrist-deep into his back, legs bent and ready to flex so that its overall appearance was that of a giant candied butterfly perched upon the trunk of a tree. The legs worked, pushing with great force to yank the hand free and drive Jav stutter-stepping forward, beyond Kan Fosso’s dropped head and fallen corpse, where he fell clumsily, his chin pushing through the dirt.

He rose, clutching the small of his back with his right hand, staring at his assailant as awareness stole in.

The sunset-red figure was petite, and looked much like Fosso had after being made slick with blood. It was clearly a woman. Jav looked down to what she stared at and saw the head of Kan Fosso, now returned to normal and somehow beautiful. She reached down and took up Fosso’s head, cradling it with reverence. She stood straight and fixed Jav with an eyeless gaze—her faceplate was identical to Fosso’s save for color.

“
Down Lissa
,” a commanding voice cried.

Jav turned to look behind him and saw a black figure now, this one with the head of a great serpent, driving its hand towards him, fingers outstretched, held together like a spear hand. Black smoke gathered, took on the semblance of mass, and coalesced into the head of a greater serpent, fangs bared and reaching. This launched forward with speed and force enough to sheer Jav from the ground, taking him up, and sending him hundreds of meters away.

The smoke serpent bit into Jav’s torso, its fangs somehow finding the wound at his back and digging in deeper. Jav felt a million needles rain through his guts, every one of them cold, sharp of course, and numbing, demanding blackness, an end to everything. This went on interminably, or seemed to, until he felt opposite pressure stop him suddenly, shocking him so substantially that he felt as if his whole body had fit into and been struck by Dolma Set’s palm, his blood and brains threatening to rip out his front. Though he was dazed and racked with fantastic pain, he did not black out. He looked up. The smoke serpent was gone, but he’d been driven far from the conflict, back into the base of the Root Palace, which rose up endlessly into the sky above.

Olka Stusson hurried through the corridor with Garlin Braams close behind him. Red lights flashed in time with a bleating klaxon. Everything shook. The metal walls rippled with stress, but the standing tanks remained in place, pristine and secure, each tended to by a pair of white-clad technicians. The pipes running along the walls danced, bent, came loose from their mounting brackets, but did not rupture.

Braams thought he could hear the rush of the fluid being pumped through those pipes, had the sense that he and Stusson were in fact racing that fluid to its destination. He was not wrong.

They emerged from the corridor to the hub room Braams had first seen five years ago. The vast white basin was already exposed, the clear plastic floor had been retracted, and blood pumped furiously from holes set all around and down its sides, down to the base where the Blood Frame sat, raised a half meter upon a pedestal.

Stusson stopped at the edge of the basin and turned to face Braams, shouting an answer over the klaxon to a question Braams had asked en route.

“It had to be this far away in order to avoid the destruction precipitated by impact.” Stusson looked up as the ceiling rattled under the force of another quake. “You see, even here, we are not totally safe. We must hurry.”

Braams was still confused and a little annoyed. The invaders had arrived, were half the planet away, and still the Blood Frame sat idle, and yet
now
Stusson was telling him they had to hurry?

“There are two things that must be done to activate the Blood Frame. I wanted to be absolutely sure,” Stusson said.

Braams nodded, but Stusson eyed him penetratingly.

“Yours is the second. You must go down to the bottom and don the Blood Frame,” Stusson said. He continued to stare at Braams in that peculiar manner.

Braams shook his head. “What? What is it?” he demanded, shouting to be heard, but louder than intended because of his frustration.

Stusson swallowed hard. “You must give up your humanity. Once you are clothed in the Blood Frame, you must convert your own personal mass to fuel for the reaction.”

Braams’s eyes, locked upon Stusson’s, quivered. He pursed his lips, thinking about what this meant, about the hint of paradox he’d never been able to completely identify. Finally, he nodded. “For the Three Worlds.”

Stusson’s face broke. It came apart, resolving into a sad smile. Tears streamed from the corners of his eyes. “You are a great man, Sar Braams. Our salvation is in your hands. You know what you must do.”

“Wait,” Braams cried. “You said there were two things.”

“Indeed.” Stusson turned towards the basin. “Farewell, Garlin Braams.”

Braams watched, horror-struck, as a red cloud rose up in front of Olka Stusson. Every drop of blood was being extruded through Stusson’s pores to reform Stusson in that liquid medium. His body collapsed upon the floor, leaving the blood doppelgänger hovering over the basin. It looked over its shoulder to regard Braams and gave a final salute.

Braams was moved and appalled. “Sar Stusson!” he cried. But Stusson was already gone, pouring down in an endless stream onto and into the Blood Frame.

Stusson’s blood seemed to splash upon the ivory shapes, scattering wastefully, but in truth, not a single drop landed anywhere else. It did not mix with the rest of the blood filling the basin, but seemed to energize its singular target.

When it had finished drinking in all of Olka Stusson, the Blood Frame glowed with a kind of rich light Braams had never seen except within his meditations. Haloes manifested themselves variously, always textured and colored by the Entitled that raised them. What Braams saw was the pure light of the Divine, unmarred by ego or any influence of the physical world. It was pure, ideal, impossible, and yet real before him.

The Blood Frame stirred, rose up on its pedestal to stand straight as if worn by an invisible host. Braams knew that it was time. He stripped his clothes and jumped easily down to the bottom of the basin following almost exactly the arc that Stusson’s blood had made. He landed softly next to the floating ivory shapes, regarding them with awe. He circled them once, taking in their unreal light and then
stepped into
them. They adhered to him instantly. His head was now encased in a smooth helmet of shiny white bone with two slit eyeholes, from which he examined himself. Two plates covered his chest, two more his shoulders. His arms and legs were strapped with I-shaped struts. Bone links covered his finger joints; plates covered his palms and the backs of his hands; similar plates covered the tops of his feet. He felt a series of bone nodules down his back which formed a spine.

Once the Frame was completely in place, Braams noticed that the blood had risen up over the pedestal to cover his feet. He bent his knees slightly and snapped upwards, the blood at his feet rising with him, as if attached like an umbilical cord. At the peak of his leap, when he was level with the top of the basin and his momentum spent, he simply stopped. He floated there, taking deeper and deeper breaths, his breast heaving as the hub room grew hazy with heat shimmer. The sound of his heartbeat grew to fill the room, drowning out the roar of the rushing blood, and he began.

“For the Three Worlds,” he said softly.

Like stars filling the darkening sky, pinpoint atomic lights sparkled across his body, spreading, spreading until he was too dazzling to look at.

The air grew hotter, heavier, impossible to breathe, but the technicians were equipped with heat resistant suits and rebreathers. They worked the valves and funneled the blood which jetted into the basin, now half-full and like a small, tumultuous sea.

Braams had reached the point of no return. His body was no longer his own. With the next step, he would be consumed. He had faith in the prophecy, in Olka Stusson who’d just performed a miracle before his eyes, but he couldn’t banish a small sense of regret at having to abandon his sense of self. He knew that this must be done, but he’d never been good at being selfless. He could be compassionate, had an innate and unfailing understanding of right and wrong, but he was, at heart, selfish. Hadn’t that very trait played some very large part in his ability to excel, to become the thing that was needed now? He sighed and wished himself goodbye.

Braams’s form flashed brighter than any sun, but faster than his radiating light was the Blood Frame’s ability to absorb it. There was a muted, bass explosion from the middle of the Frame and Braams was gone. With sudden and immeasurable force, the roiling blood renewed its climb, jetting up the path of the umbilical tether into the Blood Frame which welcomed it with an unquenchable thirst. The hub room rocked as inordinate quantities of blood were drawn by the irresistible force. Blood thundered through the pipes, straining their capacity, pumping endlessly, and seeming to drain through a hole in space. But it wasn’t endless. Slowly, the blood pouring rapaciously up into the Blood Frame began to fill an invisible vessel, to be defined by an invisible outline, to remake Garlin Braams’s body into something like what Olka Stusson had become.

Garlin Braams was aware. He was somewhat relieved to find that he was indeed still Garlin Braams, but at the same time he was so much more. He had no heart, but he felt a pulse. He felt it through his being and with its coming he knew fear and hope and anguish and anger and countless other emotions, each through the individual experiencing it, both those of the Three Worlds and of the invading force. He felt the familiar and the unfamiliar and the intense clash on the other side of Shaala. He reached out, experimenting with this new sense, attempted to locate Kan Fosso, the closest to his equal he’d ever encountered, and found only an ebbing beat, faint and soon to be still. Another beat intertwined closely with Fosso’s—Lissa Kraaskau’s—and then another—Bask Sosa’s.

Braams frowned inwardly. Fosso was a great loss, but Sosa remained. He focused on Sosa’s beat, on his cool rage, and was gone from the hub room, debris raining down from the ruptured ceiling into the stark white bowl below where not a drop of blood remained, gone from Shaahal, from the continent, and across half the globe to arrive at Sosa’s side in time for the very next beat of his heart.

Sosa started at the red and white presence hovering just above his right shoulder, but recognition was nearly immediate.

“God, Braams. It’s
you
.”

Braams nodded. “But not in time for Fosso.”

“Look out,” Sosa said, more for informational purposes than from any sense of urgency. He drove his snake fist forward giving birth once again to that animate column of fanged smoke.

Kalkin, Vays at his back, accepted the rush of the smoke serpent, crushing it to his chest and exhausting it. There was something about the touch of that smoke that was like a lullaby, soothing him towards oblivion. The cells directly exposed to the smoke did not regenerate and instead poured away like a rancid discharge. If not for his mass and his ability to regenerate wholly from
any
of his cells, he might be in real danger, but the sensation was new and it disturbed him. “Be careful with the black one, Vays,” he said through his Artifact. “The Titan Star might be enough, or then again it might not.”

Kalkin leapt for Bask Sosa, surprising many upon the battlefield with his sudden and impressive agility, but Sosa would not be caught so easily. Kalkin’s giant, purple form landed where Sosa had been, would have crushed him to the ground had he been there, but Sosa, too, had leapt, high and clear, driving another smoke serpent into Kalkin’s head, back and shoulders. This nearly forced Kalkin to the ground, but after seconds of the onslaught, he gathered himself, turned savagely, his hand outstretched, and cried out, “Fuhai Hadou!”