Dusk (14 page)

But it was far from over. Almost as soon as
he realized what was happening, Cyrus issued commands to the
peasants that had been farming and harvesting wood from the forest
around his fortress. The men that had ambushed his defenses came
out of the hills and made their way to the front of his fortress.
They had already constructed a battering ram and had made short
order of the door, but as they rushed in and dispatched the
defenders of the base just as quickly as they had dispatched door,
they discovered Cyrus’s standard was nowhere to be found. By the
time Jang realized the unarmed peasants that manned his bootleg
siege engines were being hacked to pieces by Cyrus’s lumberjacks,
Jang’s own engines had already been turned against the fortress he
now occupied. The engines quickly finished what Jang had started,
destroying Cyrus’s former keep and taking Jang’s best men with it.
After the destruction was over, Cyrus left the engines where they
were because they were well out of the fray.

Cyrus had routed Dr. Cohn and Davidson’s
forces earlier, and Torvald was fighting a losing battle against
the forces Cyrus had sent just before Jang’s anachronistic siege
engines had appeared. And while Cyrus attempted to recover from the
assault on his main fortress, Jang and Koresh’s combined forces
turned on Milliken.

Jang’s men scoured the battlefield in search
of Cyrus’s standard bearers while Koresh replenished his ranks.
Then, suddenly, a message went through to the three remaining
scientists’ cubicles ‘C. Chamberlain:’s forces have been
eliminated.’

Jang let out a long stream of curses in
Korean. He was so incensed that he didn’t notice the message was in
the wrong color. He didn’t wait until his anger subsided to turn on
Koresh while he uttering something in mixed Korean and English to
the effect of, “The cup is still mine!”

But Jang had let Dr. Koresh build up for too
long. His forces were more than formidable, and since they were
sharing fortresses, the battle quickly became miserable. Jang had
created more of his bootleg siege engines and was now using
peasants to bombard Koresh’s vanguard in a fortress Jang had lent
to him, which Koresh was now trapped inside because Jang had locked
the gate. At the same time, Jang sent a search party to finish off
Torvald. As soon as Jang’s soldiers had routed Torvald and hoisted
his standard above their heads, Cyrus showed his hand. Assassins
appeared from the shadows inside Torvald’s fortress and killed the
unsuspecting soldiers with alarming speed and efficiency.

“What the hell!” Jang yelled from his
cubicle. “Assassins?” It was the first time assassins had been used
in a public match because they were considered too weak under
normal circumstances. Apparently to Cyrus, this match had ceased to
be normal when Jang pulled his war machines out of whatever
electronic time portal they had come from.

Because assassins did not wear team colors,
Jang was so confused he did not realize Cyrus was still active
until Cyrus’s peasants were using the imported siege engines to
take out Jang’s catapults and ballistae, which were attacking
Koresh’s men.

Jang, having no idea how Cyrus was even still
alive, gave up looking for Cyrus’s standard. He regrouped all his
troops in front of his own main fortress as the siege engines Cyrus
had commandeered positioned themselves for attack.

Jang was entering the commands to launch a
fire attack against the ill-equipped peasants that manned the siege
engines when it happened. From the shadows of the mineral mine that
Cyrus had blocked with a previously useless, but annoying, keep, a
horde of infantry flooded the battlefield. They completely swarmed
Jang’s better equipped, but less numerous, army. The battle was
fierce and bloody on both sides, but Jang’s unprepared forces could
not hold back the onslaught. Plus, preoccupied with what seemed
like a myriad of foot soldiers, Jang could not stop the siege
engines that crumbled the walls of his last remaining fortress.
When it was all over, Cyrus’s peasants cakewalked into the remains
of the keep and hoisted Jang’s standard high just to add insult to
the victory.

There was a light thump as Jang let his head
fall to the cubicle top in defeat. He didn’t notice the words, ‘T.
Jang’s forces have been eliminated,’ scrolling across his cubicle
in bright red—the color they were supposed to be.

Cyrus sat back in his chair relieved. He
didn’t realize how nervous he had been until now as a chill moved
slowly through his body, tracing the path of the subsiding
adrenalin in his blood. He let the wave of standing hairs relax him
as he closed his eyes. He hadn’t noticed before how much winning
meant to him—not until it looked like it might not happen. He sat
back as various back-pats and kudos were sent his way and the other
players shuffled out of the codex. He didn’t open his eyes until
one hand lingered on his shoulder. He turned to find Jang standing
over him, Paracelsine Cup in hand, offering it to him. “Don’t know
exactly how you managed to win again, but I’m somewhat glad. Don’t
think it would have set well winning this way.”

Cyrus nodded, accepted the cup, and shook
Jang’s hand. “You gave me a run for my credits this time,” he said,
a firm grip on Jang’s hand as he accepted the cup with his
other.

As they released, Jang sat on the cubicle,
“Porting those catapults over seemed like a good idea at the time,
but how did you know you could use them against me?”

“I didn’t. But I figured in the level they
came from, there are no peasants. You need specialized jobbers to
operate the siege engines. That’s why we never play that level in
the public matches—takes too long to build up the specialty
classes. So whatever port you used had to have had controls that
were somewhat ubiquitous. I gambled that you hadn’t put a
restriction on them so that only your peasants could use them and
my gamble paid off.”

“I feel bad because I cheated.”

“Well, for better or worse, half of the
Unification War was won from breaking the rules,” Cyrus held the
cup up so the light of the codex sent a gleam across it, “A true
champion handles whatever is thrown at him in stride.”

“That makes sense,” Jang said as Cyrus set
the cup back on the cubicle, “But I still don’t know how you faked
your elimination.”

“Well, that was easy. You were so intent on
finding my standard and beating me that you didn’t notice the colon
after my name and the color of the public message that I sent. All
I did was type apostrophe ‘s’ and ‘forces have been eliminated’
hoping you would take the bait and turn on Koresh, because even
with the infantry I was rush-building in the mine, there was no way
I could stop both of you.”

“I’m impressed,” Jang brushed his hair behind
his ear and scratched his cheek, “I don’t feel so bad about losing
now.”

Cyrus stood from his chair, picked up the
cup, and patted Jang on his back, “Well, the day you do take the
cup, you’ll know it won’t be because I fell for some monkey
business, or some hound-washed scheme. You’ll know it’s because you
beat me, and because you deserve it,” he tipped the cup to Jang,
catching another gleam. “Until then, if you want to have a good
image of it for your dreams, it will be in my room, on my desk.”
Cyrus smiled and left. His smile was genuine, not smug or snide.
Jang sighed and chuckled to himself at the joke, with full
knowledge that as diplomatic as Cyrus had been about the cheating,
and as arrogant as his response might have seemed to anyone else,
he meant every word he had just said, and if he had disapproved, he
would have said much more.

• • • • •

“Can’t we program the Shipmate to build
this?” Dr. Winberg complained, standing over the pile of poles and
panels that were organized on the floor in a manner indiscernible
to his untrained eye.

“It
is
programmed to build this, but
it takes him too long for him to build it by himself, and we need
to understand the intricacies of the design and the construction in
the event of Shipmate failure.” Most nodded in agreement with Dr.
Tsuchiya, but Dr. Winberg seemed perturbed.

The entire group was there, divided into
groups of three with Dr. Thompson and Dr. Tsuchiya wandering from
group to group with schematics, helping each group assemble its
respective parts. Cyrus stood over his section of neatly organized
poles, rigging lines, panels, and links while Tanner and Davidson
assembled sections of panels. Cyrus’s brow furrowed as he tried to
connect two poles at a linkage. “Bunkus!” Cyrus exclaimed.

Dr. Tsuchiya walked over looking at Cyrus’s
schematic. “This is the linkage for the south wall of the longhouse
shelter.”

“Lav-reek is what it looks like to me. What
moron designed this thing?” Cyrus belted. Tanner shook his head and
Davidson laughed. “Actually,
I
was the moron that designed
it,” Dr. Tsuchiya scoffed, “
You
, however, appear to be the
moron that is putting the anchor pole in backward. The rigging line
is supposed to go into this hole here. What good would it do in the
middle
of the long house?”

Davidson tried to quiet his laugh but it
burst from him like a sneeze. Even Tanner smiled a little. Cyrus
would have laughed as well, but it didn’t seem like Dr. Tsuchiya
had meant much humor in his comment. When Dr. Tsuchiya had moved on
to Dr. Winberg, Dr. Rousseau, and Dr. Koresh’s section, Cyrus shot
a glare over to Davidson who was still trying to hold back
laughter. “Chortle it up, you disease ridden Fringe monkey.”

“You know, if your mechanical skill was half
as sharp as your wit, we might have our section done already,”
Davidson retorted.

It was hard to tell if Cyrus scowled from
Davidson’s jest or from the trouble the linkage was giving him, but
Davidson assumed if he had been truly offended, or even marginally,
the remark would have received an instant, biting response.

Eventually, Cyrus removed the pole from the
end it wasn’t supposed to go in. And eventually, they constructed
their corner of the longhouse. Cyrus had not realized how large the
hangar of the ship really was until, five long hours later, they
had completely assembled the shelter, which along with the ship
itself, would be the cornerstone of their new civilization.

“We need to get our construction time down to
three hours or less,” Tsuchiya reported as they began their
deconstruction. The deconstruction itself only took an hour, but it
felt like longer as, by then, they were all tired and hungry.
Though their bodies had become accustomed to rationed meals and
operating with remarkable metabolic efficiency, the work had been
taxing and it sent them all shambling to the dinner hall or their
beds.

When the work was done, Cyrus stood alone and
weary over the organized pile of metal and composites. The
remarkably strong composite line that would be used to moor the
longhouse to the ground arrested his attention.

The Shipmate washed their clothing every week
without fail, and every week, without fail, the clothes came back
damp. Cyrus assumed this was a function of the fact that the threat
of mildew on a sterilized ship was non-existent, but the threat of
shrinkage in even the recycling dryer units on this vessel was
unacceptably high. Even so, Cyrus could not abide by wearing damp
underwear in a cold room if he didn’t have to—and if he could find
a place in his room to attach the ends of the rigging line, he
would never have to again.

• • • • •

“What do you miss the most from Earth?”
Tanner asked as he hovered over the ephemeris slate in his lap.

“It’s hard to say. I don’t really miss Earth
all that much. Even with Dr. Windbag on the ship, I’ve had fewer
arguments in the past year than I would have had in a week on that
overpopulated rock. I know today being the anniversary and all has
made a lot of us homesick, but apart from my son, I say good
riddance to that festering ball of misery and woe.”

Tanner set his stylus on the two-dimensional,
touch-sensitive screen in his lap. “You don’t miss your wife?” he
asked, a look of concern on his face.

“There are some days where I remember some of
the good times, but then I remember that I know better,” Cyrus
opened his hands, stretched his fingers, and then looked down at
his palms. “I don’t really regret the time I spent, the history, I
just...” Cyrus raised his left hand to his forehead and brushed it
across his face.

“You’re not going to get distant on me again
are you?”

“No, no, it’s not just that. I just can’t
help feeling like I ran away.”

“Well, maybe you did and maybe you didn’t,
but you’re here now and there’s no way we can turn this monkey cage
around. So just remember to look forward.”

Cyrus let his hand slowly slide from his face
revealing his eyes. “You know what I miss the most, other than
Darius? My conversations with my friend from Laureateship—Dr.
Alexander Kalem.”

Tanner met Cyrus’s eyes, “I’m sure I’ve heard
that name before.”

“Most likely, he’s a professor of Near
Eastern philosophy at the Arcology of Los Angeles. He was in
Chicago for a long while after we matriculated, but he moved to Los
Angeles because his lungs could not take the mix of cold and smog,
and the newly terra-formed Los Angeles was a perfect place for a
convalescing asthmatic. There were other Arcologies he could have
gone to, but I think he really moved to be closer to someone he
could talk to and not have to pick his words.”

“Yeah, I could see people who are picky about
words being a little unnerved around you. See it at least once or
twice a week here,” Tanner smiled, but Cyrus either didn’t see it,
or was too nostalgic to notice.

“It
was
nice to just be able to say
whatever was on my mind and not have to qualify it. To just be, I
dunno, understood, whether you were agreed with or not. Never
happened with anyone else—not even Feralynn. Actually, the first
conversation Feralynn and I ever had was an argument. She was
studying with Xander for a class that had something to do with
Aryans I believe. I had come to meet him at the cafeteria where
they were studying to get some money from him that he owed me. He
and Feralynn were talking about the cost of running prototype
atmospheric processors to clean the air in Los Angeles and
Pittsburg. I said something to the effect of ‘if only poor people
were dying from the deteriorating air quality, they would just
increase production in the factories and cut their losses, and that
only when the rich people started dying would they actually even
bother.’ Well, it turned out her uncle had been one of the first
publicized victims of the pneumatic consumption that came from the
smog, and that her father’s involvement was why they had been
talking about it in the first place. After I removed my foot from
my mouth, I joined the conversation, but it wasn’t for another
month or so that we started to talk to each other when Xander
wasn’t
there.” Cyrus smiled to himself, “Xander would always
joke that the first thing my wife ever said about me was that I was
an arrogant hound’s ass.”