CHAPTER 62
NUMBERLESS THE BEAST
“Warning: Primary Power Loss,” said the flat voice of the alarm once more, as we rushed out beneath the branches of that metal tree. “Emergency Power Enabled.” There was something in that voice, in its Classical English, in that peculiar accent—I should have placed it sooner.
It was the precise accent and tone Horizon had employed when we had spoken to it in the depths of Gabriel’s Archive.
It was the same voice.
“These pods are Mericanii,” I said, coming out from under the arch leading to the iron cage of the lift.
Calen Harendotes did not respond. The Monarch had surged ahead of me, had reached a console beneath one arching bank of gleaming pods. The fluid within gleamed a vivid pink-brown, almost the color of blood diluted in water. Suspended in each, the body of a man or woman nestled, neutrally buoyant, each tethered to the roof of its pod by the slick gray rope of an umbilicus.
“Aren’t they?” I asked. “Aren’t they, Sagara?”
Above and about us, the great tree began to move.
I suppose that to call the thing a tree is to confuse the picture. When I wrote of the place upon my last visit to it, I described columns studded with their human fruit, columns supporting arches whose limbs upheld that vaulted chamber. They were all of them on tracks, arching overhead and down to ground level, that any one of the scions might be brought down for observation or extraction. Standing beneath those arching branches, I could see the beauty of its design, the symmetry and the terror.
About the man himself, his five dragoons looked on in terror, half raising lances as the great machine whined and rattled about them.
“My sister will be here before long,” the Monarch said. It did not matter. I knew the answer was yes, knew that here were machines designed by machines, instruments crafted in ancient days against the last hours of the Foundation War. Vorgossos—Fort Grissom—had not been where the old Dominion made its final stand—rather it had been an outpost, a last redoubt whose men and computer god had endured long after the Advent and the annihilation of Earth. The Chantry teaches that the God Emperor’s victory had been total. Absolute.
What William Rex had failed to find and to destroy, Kharn Sagara had conquered, and in that moment, their machine bent to his will.
“Yes,” he said, hunched over the console. Only belatedly did I realize he was addressing my question. “It was here their princes had their congress with the daughter.”
“The daughter?” I asked. “The daughter of Columbia?” Another question occurred to me, and I asked, “Their princes?”
“Senators, you might call them,” Sagara said. “Not the true senators. The ones that ruled on Earth.”
“I thought the machines ruled.”
Sagara only looked at me, mouth slightly open. “You know so little of your own history,” he said, and shook his head. “Their machines ruled their people. Used them for substrate. But the machines still served their makers.”
“Felsenburgh?”
“His ilk,” the Undying said. “The princes of America.”
I stared at him, not knowing how to respond. On Colchis, Valka, Tor Gibson, and myself had spent months poring over the First Dynasty’s records of the Foundation War. I thought of the network of brains and bodies, the pyramids filled with men and women who—like Kharn’s scions—were never born, but lived whole lives in dreaming, their sleeping brains the ground upon whose virgin surfaces the iron wills of Columbia and her daughters trod.
Men did this?
Men had made the machines. Every man, woman, child in the galaxy knew as much. But that men had ruled the machines, even at the end?
“That’s not possible,” I said.
Sagara did not argue with me, but bent to his work.
I seized him by the arm, turned him to face me. “That’s not possible,” I said again.
“Deny it all you like,” the man said, wresting his arm free from my grasp.
I grabbed him once again, feeling his dragoons tense about me. Not one dared fire. “What are you going to do?” I asked him.
Again, Sagara extricated himself from my grip. “I told you,” he said, “I’m doing what I must.”
“What you must?”
“Stand clear, Marlowe,” he said.
“Not until you’ve explained what you intend!” I said. “If you meant to kill these people, you’d have done it in the control room up there!”
Calen’s eyes blazed blue, and for an instant I thought that we would fire on me. I lurched back, Ramanthanu hissing to my side. “Pavo!” the Monarch shouted over the flat, feminine warning as it played another time. “Shoot Lord Marlowe if he interferes!”
At once, all my men raised their weapons, and Pavo’s men did the same.
“No!” Harendotes amended. “Shoot the girl.” In that instant he was the deathless king of old, and no man. A creature of dread majesty and of power deep and ancient as the stars. A devil in human shape. Voice snarling and tinged with bitter mocking. “I said stand clear, my lord.”
There were only five of them. Five, and Harendotes himself. We had the eyes to contend with. My own hand went to Edouard’s pocket telegraph transmitter. But it was as yet too soon. I still had both of them to contend with, and once I pressed that button—there would be no going back.
“Hold!” I said, extending my empty hand to stay my people. I repeated the order in Cielcin, though the gesture communicated my meaning well enough. “Sagara, we need each other! We are overmatched in here.”
“You’re right,” said the Monarch from behind his bristling guards, “we are overmatched. I overextended myself. But that is one of the virtues of being me, Marlowe.” He said, reaching up to find something concealed in the back of his broad, Egyptian collar. “I can.”
With a single, fluid motion, Calen Harendotes extended his arm, as he did so unspooling a filament of braided glass from a port at the back of his neck. There was a needle at its tip, an injector designed to link him directly with another machine.
Before I could take a step or speak another word, Calen Harendotes thrust the link into a receptive port on the console table, and linked himself to the system that ran his machines. Too late, I thought I understood what was happening.
He was taking the scions from her, removing them from her control, claiming them for himself. But why? Why bother, when they could do nothing but sit in their tanks and wait, helpless and bereft? Either side might kill them at their sport.
Before I could ask any of these questions, however, the Monarch sagged against his console, nearly tangling himself on his own cord. For a brief instant, I had a clear look at his face. His eyes had rolled back in their sockets, and his face was slack.
“My Monarch?” It was Pavo. The boy had turned, casting down his weapon to kneel beside his king. Calen Harendotes was shaking by then, and shook more violently with every passing instant.
“He’s seizing!” I said, pushing toward him. One of the dragoons jabbed me in the chest with his lance, and I caught the haft, brushing him aside. “Help me turn him on his side!”
Moments before, I had been ready to kill the man. There I was: trying to save him.
“What happened?” asked Pavo, kneeling across from me.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. “It’s possible he tried to transfer his consciousness,” I said. “Or the other one set him a trap.”
I should have killed him then and there—offered his corpse to his sister-self in payment. But something stayed my hand. Perhaps it was Valka’s shade. Had she not suffered so, a thousand times in our long togetherness, when Urbaine’s worm surfaced in her mind? Perhaps it was an abundance of caution, or simple panic.
I had lost control of the situation, had lost it on Forum, when Samek’s poison took me, or in Llesu, beneath Ragama’s sword.
Bang.
A shot resounded somewhere in the high hall. One of my legionnaires cried out, and staggered. He was still alive. But who had fired on him? I looked to Pavo’s companions. They were looking round, scanning the catwalks that ran among the branches overhead.
The searing flash of plasma lit the darkened laboratory. Daaxam had fired, hefted his carbine. “They are above us!” he said, and fired again.
Looking up, I saw them: men and women in the dun of Vorgossos, faces blank, scalps hairless. The Monarch still convulsed at my feet.
“Open fire!” I roared.
Gunfire filled the air around me, and I stood, shouting to Pavo to steady his lord.
Cassandra rocked to my side, swords flaring to life. I drew my own even as one of the SOMs fell, landed catlike not three paces from me. I slashed him in two. Bleeding, the arms still grasped for me, and I cut the thing to ribbons, felt my gorge rising as the fingers still moved, commanded by black implants that studded the flesh, visible here and there beneath torn fabric.
“They do not die!” Cassandra said, her back to mine.
“They’ve been dead a long time,” I said. A shot caromed off my shield, and looking up, I saw one of the undead soldiers aiming down at me with a plasma rifle in his hands. A green light seemed to shine through the sallow skin of his face and chest, an almost phosphorescent gleam, recalling the witch lights of the surface.
Daaxam had leaped into the air, alighted on the railing of the catwalk overhead. The bird man unleashed a piercing cry, drawing the networked attention of the puppet soldiers. He slew three before a shot forced him to leap from the rail, black wings spreading like shadows.
They had us four to one at least, but they had no shields, and but few of them had weapons, and they were picking their shots with care.
“They do not want to shoot the tanks!” said Ramanthanu in its inhuman rumble.
She doesn’t want to shoot the tanks, I thought.
Cassandra slew another of the SOMs as it hit the ground in front of her.
“Emergency Power Enabled. Emergency Power Reserves . . . ”
The flash of Ramanthanu’s scimitar struck the head from a SOM woman. Still her body came, blind hands outstretched. The Cielcin captain hewed at those limbs, kicking the blind half corpse to the stone floor.
“Ichakta-doh, rakasur lumayan!” said Otomno to its chief.
“There are many!” Ramanthanu agreed. “But they are little more than slaves!”
The dragoons clustered about their fallen lord, guns blazing, and sparing a glance for Harendotes, I saw that he had fallen still. Once more, the Irchtani, Daaxam, let out a piercing cry, and a shot rang out in the gallery above our heads. One of the SOMs that had been shooting at us fell smoking over the rail. There was another shot, and a splintering of glass as one of the bell jars shattered. One of the scion corpses fell from its containment, caught for a moment on its umbilicus, then struck the floor half a hundred feet below with a wet smack.
Above it all, the noisome siren wailed, and that feminine voice—the voice of the lobotomized daughter of Columbia—repeated its warning about the power reserves.
“Won’t someone shut that damn thing off?” Cassandra asked, catching her breath.
I leaned against the console rail, distracted for a moment by one of the faces in the glass bubbles.
Red haired and pale, it might have been one of the Emperor’s own blood.
“Pavo!” I shouted to the young soldier. “Can we get him out of here? Back into the lift?”
“Can we disconnect him?” asked the boy, suit amplifying his high voice until it cut above the alarms.
I didn’t have an answer to that, nor could, for in that moment, something heavy fell on me, and I tumbled to the hard floor. Cassandra yelled as something hard as stone cracked me across the face. Never had I been so glad of my helmet. The gel layer ate the impact, but still my head was torqued to one side. For a moment, my entoptics fizzled as my eyes came out of alignment with the projectors inside my mask.
A SOM had landed on me, a bald man with arms like twigs. Still there was a strength in those stubby fingers that was more than human. Hands invigorated by machines I hardly understood, those fingers tightened on my throat. They did not slacken, not when I thrust my sword into the creature’s side—flesh and fabric parting like water. The once-man’s lifeblood ran from that wound, mingled with something white as milk. Still those fingers tightened, still those soft eyes bulged. But there was nothing in the undead man’s face. No hatred, no terror. Hardly any strain.
He was empty. A true tabula rasa.
Bringing my blade up, I severed the arms above the wrist, felt the fingers tighten further still as the deathless man pressed his weight to try and smother me. I tugged one of the arms free, and suddenly the dead man was gone, lifted off me by innumerate hands. Ramanthanu stood over me, and Otomno beside it, helped by two of the legionnaires whose names I did not know. Taking one human hand, I permitted the man to haul me to my feet, and standing pulled the other hand free, hurled it across the floor with a shudder. Cassandra stood embattled, surrounded by many foes. I leaped to her defense, sketching an image in white and crimson on pillars and floor.
“You all right?” I asked, chest heaving.
She could only nod, breathless herself.
We had found an isle of calm in the madness, and from its shores I looked up at the gallery above, the catwalks where Daaxam fired down on the chaos below, on the gunmen still above us. Where were they coming from? I saw doors open on the level above, saw dead-eyed men streaming in.
“Abba,” Cassandra heaved, twin swords slack at her sides. “There are too many.”
“We can’t stay,” I said. “We have to go back the way we came.”
“You should . . . call Edouard,” she said. “Give them something else to worry about.”
I shook my head. “If I do that, we won’t have anything to bargain with.”
“We won’t be alive to bargain,” said she. I knew she was probably right. “Abba, I—Abba!” She pointed at the pod nearest us, in which a slim woman with long, black hair floated. She was stirring, thrashing, hammering the glass.
She was not alone.
“It’s all of them!” I said, and roared, “The tanks! Shoot the tanks!”
There must have been half a thousand Sagara scion-clones in that chamber, each now violently awake. Their dreams of paradise had ended, and they had woken to the terror of the real.
The sound of glass shattering rose above the clangor, and pink-brown fluid spread across the floor. My legionnaires had taken up my orders and fired upon the tanks, and the bodies of more than one of Kharn’s dread scions lay cut to ribbons by gunfire and broken glass, puddled in the floor of their crèches.
I thought I heard Cassandra sobbing. “Get back to the lift!” I called to her, seizing her by the wrist. “Fall back!” I shouted.
“But His Majesty!” Pavo challenged.
“Cut him loose or leave him!”
All about us, the crèches were opening, fluid draining from the bottoms, setting their adult fetuses on unsteady feet, hatches hinging upward.
“Shoot them all!” I roared, shoving Cassandra toward the lift. “Pull back! Pull back, men!” And again in Cielcin, “Petunnaa! Petunnaa!”
A trio of SOMs alighted between the exit and our position, one falling to its knees with the force of its impact. Their hazy eyes looked round, struggling to find focus. Before they could mark us, a naked man hurled himself upon the nearest, umbilicus dragging a mass of red-black tissue behind him as a prisoner drags an iron weight upon his chain. His hair was golden, plastered to his face. His mighty thews flexed as he wrestled with the nearest SOM soldier, seizing the monster’s knife. With a fluid motion, the naked man slammed that knife up under the puppet’s chin and into the brain. The SOM staggered, executive functions compromised. The naked man pulled the knife free, cut his own cord with a savage gesture, teeth bared as—snarling—he hurled himself at the other two. So stunned was I by this grotesquery, this savagery, that I stopped short, Cassandra frozen beside me. The golden man—bleeding from the cable in his belly—rounded on the two remaining SOMs, knife in hand. He bellowed at them, smashed the head of one against the wall of the chamber with a force to shatter bone and fell upon the other, muscles of his back twisting like cord.
Chest heaving, he straightened, turned to regard me with eyes black as coal.
Eyes that knew me.
“Sagara?” I asked.
That square-rimmed, monstrous grin.
But which one of him?
“Harendotes?” He had slain the woman’s soldiers, after all.
The smile did not falter. Neither did he speak. Instead, the man turned—naked, still-bleeding—and rushed his nearest foe. The SOM fell dead by his hand, and on he flared, carving through the enemy.
“Go on now!” I said, urging Cassandra on. “Back to the control room!”
“Was that him?” Cassandra asked. “The Monarch?”
“Go!”
I had no time to ponder her question. All about us, the scions of House Sagara were rising, following the lead of the yellow-haired goliath. Men and women, dark haired and fair, black of hide and pale, red and golden. There was the one who so resembled our Emperor, beside a boy who seemed no older than five. One man—for man he seemed, though no sex hung from his loins—leaped from the rail above and tossed his long, silver hair from his face. His eyes were green as beryls, his teeth like mother of pearl.
“There is no need to run!” he said, his voice fell music. “We have her outnumbered!”
I ignored him. “Ramanthanu!” I called. “Daaxam! Men! To me! Here! Here!” Again I urged Cassandra toward the door, spurred one wounded man after her. “Pavo!”
The Latarran man did not respond.
We. The androgyn’s voice resounded in my head.
I thought I understood. Searching for Pavo, I looked to where Calen Harendotes lay upon the floor. He was still there, the body of Pavo slumped over his. I felt a pang for the poor boy, the common soldier who had the misfortune to have pledged himself to so fell a master. Calen Harendotes—Kharn Sagara—had promised him life unending. He had given him hardly more than an hour.
Whether Sagara’s daimonic spirit remained in the gilded body of the Monarch I did not know, but when he had thrust his cable into the console that governed his Tree of Life, he had taken control of all his scions, was puppeting them just as his sister-self had taken hold of 2Maeve and her people. It was that spirit, that will, which now animated the bloodied, naked force of men and women arising from its slumber. Harendotes had not brought us to the tree to cut off another avenue by which his sister-self might escape, but to claim an army for himself.
An army of himself.
Harendotes had played no simple gambit, no pawn sacrifice.
He had surrendered his king, flipped the board, abandoned all the rules and lunged at his opponent.
And we were caught in the middle of it all.
“Emergency Power Enabled. Emergency Power . . . ”
We passed under the arched support holding up the gallery above, behind the columns that held the open pods. The door to the lift was open dead ahead. Cassandra was leading, twin swords blazing in her hands.
Before she could reach the iron grate, a ray of killing light sliced across her path, its azure radiance hemming us in. Cassandra skidded to a halt, turned to face the source of that beam. My own eyes followed her gaze. I half expected to find Harendotes standing there, eyes blazing. If he indeed had control of the newborn horde, he outnumbered us nearly twenty-five to one.
But it was not Harendotes.
It was not even a man.
That ray of light had emanated from a teardrop shape of dark metal—no larger than a fig. It floated on the air, gliding toward us, its intent plain.
“Cassandra!” I cried. “Get back!”
The teardrop’s weapon lens flared, threatening, but did not fire. Nor would it let us pass. That beam might carve its killing path in an instant, making of itself a fence to trammel us in place.
I knew what it was at once then, and what it meant.
It was one of the king’s ten thousand eyes.
The other Sagara had come at last.
For a moment, the black intelligence that guided that roving eye swiveled to look at me. There was nothing human in it, nor behind its aperture. The will that regarded me was alien and cold as some beast of the deep sea.
“You.”
The voice that issued from the device boomed far louder than it had any right to be, deep and dark as the pits beneath that hideous world, flat of all human feeling and pitiless. But it knew me.
Seeing her chance, the other Sagara wasted no time.
Bright her one eye flared, and I rushed toward her weapon, knowing the gaze of that cyclops’s eye would burn through shield and armor and flesh in an instant. Its radiance washed over me and through me as I rushed toward it, fanned past me just as Cassandra’s sword had done. I raised my own, slashing low-to-high in an arc that cleaved the metal eye in two.
Before, the experience of bending time to my will had brought pain.
Then, it seemed a clear light poured through me, so bright and plain I thought it must be seen by all who looked on me. Turning, I found the others staring at me. A spay of burn marks painted the wall behind where I had been, a pattern of ripples where Kharn’s coherent beam of photons had been turned to diffuse waves. “To the lifts!” I shouted. “Go!”
But we were too late.
My brief engagement with the other Sagara’s drone had cost us our escape.
The iron grille that divided the hall from the lift platform rattled to, and turning, I saw a knot of naked people standing just behind its screen. There must have been a dozen of them at least—men and women, many bleeding from severed cords like the gold-haired giant. One in front, a girl no older than five standard, or so she seemed, clutched her placenta like a ragged doll.
It was she who spoke, voice lisping as the voices of children so often do. “This is where we part ways, Devil of Meidua.”
Behind us, the battle raged on, strangely quiet beneath the noise of alarm bells. The SOMs did not yell, did not cry out in pain, nor did the scions of Sagara. The only sounds were the shout of plasma fire, the ring of metal on metal, the thud of bodies.
“Sagara!” I said, advancing with the intent to cut through the grate. “What have you done?”
“What we came to do!” said two of the scions together—a woman and a man so like the Harendotes incarnation they might have been twins.
“What we must!” said a third in the same instant.
Their answer stopped me cold.
I knew enough of devilry—of praxis—to know when it was I was speaking to a single, distributed intelligence. I had felt it in the hall above, when the woman Sagara had spoken from the mouths and chestpieces of all the Interfaced at once.
I remembered how it had felt, awakening in the medica aboard the Demiurge, to find both the boy Ren and the woman Suzuha watching me.
What dreams did come? One of them had asked me, representing the other. One question, but unquestionably two wills behind it.
The feeling I had then was the same, staring through the iron grille and the gore-smeared faces of the newborn.
It was not that they were all Kharn.
It was that they were each Kharn.
“What have you done?” I asked again, voice smaller.
“You changed our thinking,” said a tall, dark woman with hair like starlight from the rear of the carriage.
“We have been bound to this planet for far too long,” said another, one of those identical to Harendotes. There were three I saw among those crowded into the lift.
“It is time we changed,” said the dark woman.
“Time we grew,” said the girl in front who clutched her organ, the one with the lisp.
The lift began to rise. I hurried forward, not sure what I planned to do.
Would I have slain them all if I could? Butchered them in the lift? Slashed them all to pieces? Even the child?
Another beam of radiant light slashed cross the air before me, and I skidded to halt. To my left, another of Kharn’s eyes descended, cutting me off.
A ragged cry escaped me, a dismay deeper than any I had known since Perfugium.
The woman had unknowingly permitted her siblings to escape.
“Give our regards to our sister!” said the child Kharn.
I watched them go, vanishing into the shaft above, trapping us with the others.
“What happened?” Cassandra asked, drawing close beside me.
“They’re him,” I rasped, looking back to the vanished lift. “They’re all him.”
I had thought the scions all mere puppets, extensions of the mind of Calen Harendotes.
But they were copies.
For more than fifteen thousand years, Kharn Sagara had ensured his continuity. He had driven his body to its limits, replaced his organs at need, relied upon genetic therapies to cling to life, refit his body with machines. And when that body reached beyond all salvation, he had made another, and started a second life, and a third, and on and on.
That had changed when he met me.
When Bassander Lin had executed him in the gardens of the Demiurge, that continuity had been broken forever. Before there had been but one Kharn Sagara living serial lives, jealous of his uniqueness. The woman had retained that jealousy, and turned her hand upon her brother. In death, the other Kharn had learned a valuable lesson: self-doubt.
He could never trust himself again.
If he could not have Vorgossos, he would scatter himself to the winds.
“Where are they going?” Cassandra asked. “What are they doing?”
“They’re running,” I said, eying the drone.
“They will not get far.” The voice of the Undying emanated from the drone, and from other drones in the air of the gallery at our backs. “Why have you come?”
Before I could answer that question, a flash of light lanced through the air. The drone erupted in a fireball of oily red, blew to pieces. Turning to look, I saw Calen standing there amidst the carnage, supported by a trio of his naked brothers, his eyes blazing. The Latarrans all were dead, killed by the SOMs, or perhaps by the scions themselves, who no longer needed them.
“For you, my sister!” roared Calen Harendotes. “We’ve come for you!”
“And when you’ve beaten me?” asked the black, iron voice of Kharn Sagara—not the voice of the woman, but of the machine. “What then? Which one of you will rule?”
A dozen of the teardrop drones scudded through the air above on silent repulsors, two dozen. Perhaps more. I saw them moving through the branches of that emptied Tree of Life, along the railings of the gallery above. Once or twice, one fired, and a slim, coherent beam of light cut one of the scions down.
The alarms had fallen silent. I cannot remember precisely when it was they’d ceased, only that they were silent then, only that the black, metallic voice of the Undying had resounded in the air alone.
There were far fewer of Kharn’s scions remaining in the laboratory than I had expected, and fewer still left alive. More than the dozen that had reached the lift had made their escape, it seemed, through the hatches on the level above, or perhaps down the other lift that ran as deep as the power station . . . and the reservoir where Brethren dreamed.
“Not one,” answered the golden king, the Monarch who was Monarch no more.
Not one, but out of one.
Many.
“Not any!” the Monarch shouted, and I knew that this was why he had come. “Vorgossos must be destroyed!”
Without Vorgossos, his numberless selves would have no center, no home to return to. Bereft, they would be driven outward, driven as he was driven to Latarra. To conquer. To build. The time of the Undying was done. He had changed, had evolved, had become something else entirely. Something new. Each scion would go forth and chart his own way, forge her own path—and each would carry with him, in her, within its breast a piece, a part, a little copy of the dark lord that had been. Though many would die that day—had died already—though many more would die in the escape, many yet would live, and go on to forge their own empires, their own kingdoms and orders, their own little copies of the Vorgossos-That-Was.
This was the victory Calen Harendotes had fought for, this the goal he sought to achieve, a victory not over his sister, nor over Vorgossos. A victory not for his people, for Lorian and 2Maeve, for Absalom Black and Jamina of House Ardahael, for all the poor Normans, Extras, and Sollan refugees. But a victory for himself.
A victory over Death.
“Vorgossos will be destroyed!” the Monarch shouted. His reply had stunned his sister-self to silence, or so it seemed. In all the years—the centuries—since she had murdered her brother-self and driven his shade from Vorgossos, she had been consumed by terror at the thought that he must one day return. The thought that he should return to Vorgossos not to conquer or reclaim it, but to put it to the sword and scatter his essence across the stars like grain had not so much as entered her darkest dream.
It had not entered mine.
“We have lived thus for far too long,” he said, standing amid his naked fellows. “This place has ever been our prison! Always we have feared to leave it, have feared to lose what we have.”
“What have you done?” the woman asked in that iron voice.
Of course, she did not know. He had isolated her from the laboratory’s systems, locked her out. She doubtless believed as I had believed a moment before, that the others were only puppets, slaves to her brother’s will.
It was what she would have done, but she had killed her brother-self, and not been murdered as he. They had gone their separate ways, changed absolutely and forever. They were both Kharn Sagara, but they were not the same.
Would never be the same.
“I have set us free!” said another voice, one of the women standing by the Monarch’s side, black of hair and high breasted, one hand on her wounded belly.
“I have given us a future!” said another, a man green as Ilex once had been.
“I have given us every future,” said a third, a naked boy crouching on the banked consoles before the rows of Mericanii pods.
“You didn’t,” the voice said.
“I have changed, my sister!” said Calen Harendotes. “Don’t you see? We’re free at last! There will always be Kharn Sagara now. We have conquered Death! What matters if any of us dies? We will live forever!”
A single ray of light burst forth from one of the Undying’s drones, left its hole clean through the chest of the black-haired woman who had spoken. She fell to the stone floor, groaning, coughing as fluid filled her punctured lung.
“I can kill all of you,” said Kharn Sagara. “Every one.”
“You can try,” the Monarch said, “but can you beat a hundred of us? Who knows Vorgossos better than we?”
The woman answered. “Things have changed since you went away.”
“Since you murdered me,” Calen said. “But they have not changed enough. Every one of us knows the secret ways from this place. The ships. The broadcast terminals. If even one of us escapes, we will return. You will never know peace, my sister. Not so long as you live. We will not rest until we have taken all we need from Vorgossos and blown this planet to atoms.”
“Why?” asked the woman. “Why destroy our home?”
“Because so long as it exists, we will fight for it,” Calen said. “Any one of us might decide, as you, that he alone has claim to our soul and name. I will set us free. Of this place, and of you.
“We might have ruled this place together!” he said. “But you betrayed me! Killed me!”
“And I was right!” the woman said, voice thundering from her machines. “Look at what you’ve done! How many of us are there now?”
“Hundreds!” said the Lord of Latarra. “You cannot win, sister! The world engine is crippled! You cannot flee, cannot broadcast yourself through the ion cloud. I have brought the dogs of the Imperium. My fleet will be victorious!”
“Your fleet,” the machine voice answered. “Your fleet will not survive. I have set the Demiurge against them.”
Placing a hand on the shoulder of the man before him, Calen Harendotes stepped clear of the knot of duplicates clustered about him. “But you cannot control it,” he said. “Not from here. I have jammed your signal. The bombs.”
“The ship can defend itself,” said she. “And I have you.”
The instant those words were out, every drone in the hall fired at once. Rays of azure light lanced from every aperture, slicing back and forth across the hall, carving the new-made copies of Kharn Sagara down. Cassandra gasped in that moment, and drew near beside me, while I myself was certain that we, too, were dead. But the drones that circled us had fired over our heads, each one picking its targets with superhuman precision. They fired once, cycled to new targets, fired again. Again. Again.
When they were finished, only Harendotes himself remained. Every one of the Kharn scions that had remained in the laboratory hall—perhaps a hundred in all—fell dead together. The others had barely had time to take two steps.
Like poor Pavo, their eternal lives had lasted only moments.
In those final moments, they had each scrambled to win those last few steps, each man for himself. Harendotes himself had not moved. His hope was with the others. The ones that had escaped that black chamber. He simply stood there, golden hands at his side, face unchanging as his brothers and sisters—his children, in truth—were every one of them cut down.
“Shut your eyes, Cassandra,” I said. “Just shut your eyes.”
“No, Abba,” she whispered, and I could hear the tears in her voice. “I’m all right.”
Slowly, their slaughter done, the eyes of the Undying all turned to look at him, and at me.
“Surrender,” the woman said, “order your fleet to stand down, and I will spare your lives. Even yours, brother.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked, stepping forward, one hand clutching the rod Edouard had given me. “You have us in your power. If your fleet is as mighty as you say . . . ”
I knew the answer.
She was afraid.
Afraid of me. Of her brother-self. Of the hundreds of brother- and sister-selves unleashed in her palace. She had seen what I could do, had seen me pass through her beam, had seen me return from the dead. That was why Calen had brought me. Not only because I might prove counter to any weapons the other Kharn might have derived from my flesh, but because I frightened him.
Frightened her.
“Hadrian Marlowe,” the Undying said, her falsely masculine voice emanating from every one of her machines. “Why have you come?”
It had come at last: the crucial instant. The turning in the play.
The moment of reversal.
My eyes went to Calen Harendotes, the chimeric Monarch in battered black and gold. Haggard though he was and bloody, still there was a power in him, an awesome majesty and command. He stood among the dead and dying copies of himself, those mayfly incarnations that had lived for mere moments, as I imagined the God Emperor had stood among the ashes of Old Earth. Tall, proud, triumphant. It no longer mattered if he died.
I fingered the telegraph rod Edouard had given me. If Calen truly desired to destroy Vorgossos, then I had no threats to make against him. If I was to win free of that labyrinth—save Cassandra, myself, my fleet—it was the woman I knew I must court. I had known it since we left Latarra.
I had to change sides, if only for a time.
Lorian, forgive me.
“Are you not content to have destroyed us once?” The machine voice shook the air, the whisper of an angry god. “You have come to do so a second time?”
“On the contrary,” I said, watching the Monarch’s face. “I have come to save you.”
If the news of my betrayal shocked the lord of Latarra, his broad, square face gave no sign.
“Save me?” the black voice asked. About us, the drones circled, and the scant men and xenobites of my company drew closer still. “Save me?”
“You saved my life, once,” I said, advancing. “I saved yours once, long ago—both your lives. Third time pays for all, they say. I have brought you your brother. Say the word, and I will put my men in the city at your disposal. Not a one of him will escape. Let us have peace.”
“Peace?” The voice of that deathless queen filled the empty hall with laughter. “Peace, you say? You, who have twice brought death to my door! You offer me my brother in payment. He is in my power already! You are in my power. You have nothing! Nothing to offer me but death.” One of the drones rocketed toward me, halted mere inches from my masked face.
Behind the drone, Calen Harendotes leered at me. I could feel the anger and black amusement boiling from him in waves. I had tried to betray him, but his other self would not have it.
But I was not yet done. Still watching the Monarch’s response, I said, “The Latarran army doesn’t know.” The Monarch’s eyes narrowed. “They believe that they’re fighting for their kingdom, for a new world, for freedom from the Empire and the Cielcin alike. What will they do when they learn they have been fighting for you, against you, Lord Sagara?” The remote was still in my hand. “Even the Imperial fleet does not know the truth! Permit me to return to orbit, and I can end this battle with a word.”
In that instant, twin rays of light slammed into me, radiance so bright it burned, whiting out my suit’s entoptics for a fraction of a second. Had that fraction of a second been less time than my poor shields yet had, I might have died then and there a third time. But my shields held, just long enough for my suit to adjust to the light. Through the pall of false shadow cast by my suit’s projectors, I saw Harendotes still glaring, light streaming from his eyes.
He knew that he was dead, that his sister would kill him once again.
His last act would be to kill me. To stop me destroying his army and the pressure they applied to his sister-self. He had crafted the Latarran Army for one purpose, and one purpose alone: to ensure his shattering. I alone could stop it, could turn the Latarran Army and the Imperial Navy from a blade aimed at the heart of Vorgossos to a wall encircling it.
The meter in the corner of my entoptics’ vision that marked the strength of my shield fell from blue to green toward red. In a second it would all be gone, and I would be burned to cinder. I could not break, for to do so would be scatter the beam across the people at my back, to kill or wound Cassandra, Daaxam, my Cielcin and the three still-standing legionnaires.
I was trapped, unable to rely upon my oldest trick.
It stopped.
As quickly as it had begun, it stopped.
In place of the golden Monarch, there stood the figure of a man, an abstract statue suggesting man’s shape. Light shone through his chest, his face wormed with holes from whose charred edges a thin smoke curled. One passed clean through the place where the right eye had been. The head turned, and for an instant I saw clear air and the pale light of an open pod through Calen’s head.
He fell instead, fell as a bronze statue falls, no bending or crumpling.
“Abba?” Cassandra asked.
“I’m all right,” I said. My shields were nearly dead.
A dozen of the other Kharn’s drones turned their eyes from him. The black iron voice of the Undying filled the chamber, her countless eyes on me. “You will come to me.”