The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (32 page)

But Jav was gone, leaving Hilene alone with Gran Mid. She sighed. She had little time to be upset, though. Successive booms rocking the ground alerted her to the approach of several of the giant machines from behind. She turned reflexively to look, counted three of them coming her way, and sighed again. She quickly scanned for Jav, found him where she half-expected to, hovering in front of the building from which the terrible green light emanated.

She looked down at Gran Mid briefly, shook her head, and raced off towards the oncoming machines.

Jav floated before a great pane of glass, stared through it, into eyes which were doorways to salvation. Hope built behind them like a like a tidal wave rush, promising to wash over him, to cleanse him of ignorance, of the weariness of being, of right and wrong. The hole inside him, festering for so long now, would be filled with that rush, with what was about to be transmitted through those eyes, but another pair of eyes caught his attention and told him otherwise. For a moment, Jav and the other locked eyes, the skull pit-sockets of the Kaiser Bones and the surreal, living soot marks against eddying, nearly-black smoke.

He registered the knife without breaking eye contact and gave the slightest shake of his head, pleading with the other. He saw regret in the soot eyes, perhaps even tears, but no mercy. Jav understood that this was the agent responsible for each and every piece ripped away from him over the last hundred years or more, but was overwhelmed by the fleeting promise of what the girl had to offer. He shifted his gaze back to her, wanting to drink her in and all that she brought with her, hoping against hope that even a fraction would escape before the blade sank and closed the door. She was suffused with rapt anticipation, seemingly oblivious to all but Jav, in spite of his monstrous appearance in the Kaiser Bones. He reached out for the window with an unconscious application of AI and shattered the glass. He slowly entered the chamber, not wanting to force the other into any sudden movements, not considering that the exploding glass might have provoked such.

Everything ended in a blood-washed instant. The knife was driven through the girl’s temple, somehow not killing her outright, but extinguishing the light in her eyes and forever closing the doors they had become. The blood came in a jet from the woman next to the girl, from her throat, and it pumped insistently. Jav ignored her and rushed to the girl, catching her as she slumped awkwardly against the animate shadow, now retreating. Both Jav and the girl were bathed in the other woman’s life as it spilled out of her, but neither noticed or cared. He gripped the girl’s shoulders and she looked up at him with now-vacant eyes. He eased her down, dropping down to one knee, wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight. She was gone, he knew, but he couldn’t let her go.

The Kaiser Bones hid his tears, which flowed unchecked. He knew he’d been close, that an answer had been within his grasp. Grief, real and deep, stabbed at him, for her waning life and for his loss. Anger—at having been robbed, at the sense of being cheated at the very last moment—boiled up like bile inside him and nearly caused his mind to split in two. At the pinnacle of his rage, he gained a kind of clarity, as sharp and clear as a razor’s purpose. He gently lowered the girl to her back on the floor, but before he was ready to release her, the room exploded around him.

Chunks of concrete shot with rebar rained down from the crumbled walls and ceiling, cracking the floor and threatening to cave it in. As it was, Jav thought that the whole building had been knocked off its foundation. Perhaps not quite, but smaller debris bounced and rolled away from him, down a noticeable slope. Still holding the girl, Jav turned his head to see great metal fingers splaying, readying to close on him. He considered letting them, using the Ghost Kaiser to get clear, but he was too enraged by all that had transpired and then by this foolish move which ignored entirely the safety of anyone else still alive in the room. He swung around raising his hand in a similar fashion, calculating AI, first to prevent the fingers from closing, then to compress the arm upon itself. Jav watched the unreal ripple move down the massive black arm as he exceeded infinity. Metal exploded in shards and splinters in every direction except from where the ripple originated, until it had gone the length of the arm, obliterating it to the shoulder. The force of the spatial assault forced the robot backwards, exposing the ruined room to the outdoors.

Dizziness spread through Jav’s head like a kaleidoscope show and he nearly collapsed down upon the girl. He shook his head to clear it, but couldn’t completely banish the muzziness. He’d been pushing himself pretty hard over the last twenty-four hours. Perhaps it was catching up with him. Exhaustion would have to wait, though, at least until his rage had been satiated.

He laid the girl down carefully, placing her arms over her chest. She still breathed. Her eyes were still open, but they were dull and as good as lifeless. Jav gave her hands a farewell squeeze and rose to his feet. He walked to the edge of the broken floor and stared out at the robot he’d just crippled and another one just like it.

They were nearly identical, armored with some glossy black metal that looked like smooth sheets of interlocking obsidian. Only their heads were noticeably different. The one minus its left arm had a great, jutting lower jaw that flared at the bottom like a stylized beard and its crown was topped with a tall conical spire. The other had a pair of segmented horns that curved out and then back in with each segment as they rose. A vertical grate covered the lower half of its face and butted up against strangely living green eyes. Both machines, though sleek, streamlined figures with the exception of their elaborate joints, were shot with green “veins”, lines that throbbed in complex, irregular rhythms and may have acted as a circulatory system for power.

Jav had become aware of a rush of words, either directed at him or passing between the two robots, which were at first incomprehensible but were fast beginning to make sense to him. He heard something like
Godsort
, referring to the giant robots, then the word
sister
then
kill
. He watched the pristine Godsort focus on him and gathered that he’d just been accused of murder. Of murder, Jav was certainly guilty, many hundreds of thousands of times over, but not this time.

The Godsort drew back its arm to strike, and it or its pilot cried out, “High Formation!”

Jav cocked his head and said simply, “No.”

Despite the haze in his head Jav calculated hard and fast and true. The Godsort was at a distance which provided him with all the necessary reference points, so he pushed it bodily, virtually reducing the space between it and the remains of Gran Mal, bumping it up and behind, then releasing it, much in the way he’d practiced Cov Merasec’s Copy Twin so long ago.

The strain was incredible, and he was pretty sure his nose was bleeding beneath the Kaiser Bones. He’d never moved something so large so far, but the effect was more than gratifying. From Jav’s perspective, the giant machine shot from its place on the ground, moved linearly as if being drawn by a powerful magnet—narrowly missing Gran Mid—rose up above Gran Mal to avoid crashing into it, then dropped down behind it. When he released it, the virtual space returned to actual space and the Godsort attempted to snap back like a rubber band, straight to its origin point, without the additional up and down Jav provided. From anyone else’s perspective, the Godsort was standing next to its one-armed fellow one moment, and erupting in a spectacular shower of shredded steel up against Gran Mal the next.

When it struck Gran Mal, even with only a few meters separating them, the impact was devastating because of the return velocity, which was well over a kilometer per second. Gran Mal’s armored shell blew apart, sending great hexagonal plates spinning through the air, and chinking into the marble square when they came down on edge. Hydraulic systems and other machinery built around Gran Mal’s chassis shot out like shrapnel, some bits as big as houses.

Just to the left of the Godsort’s flash-trajectory, Hilene was engaged with the last of the three robots that had come to protect the fortress—the other four were making an assault on the Root Palace. Hilene, with her already hyper-sensitive perceptions combined with those developed during her studies and application of Approaching Infinity theory, had seen what Jav had not. She had seen the Godsort transform, had seen the green light veins running up and down its limbs and torso surge with power. She felt the rise in power sicken her, both physically and with raw dread. She saw the Godsort expand about the veins and become something more, something beyond mere mechanization. It was a fusion of man and machine that she could not help but compare with divinity. So she knew, even as Gran Mal was blown to pieces, that the native machine would emerge from the impact with little more than scratches. She thought of Vays when he initiated his psychic power while Dark with the Titan Star, but she laughed a laugh born of hopelessness, thinking that Vays’s paltry 120% would be much preferred over what was to come.

She hurried with her present task, glad beyond measure that the machine she was facing—piloted by a child!—had not powered up similarly, and that he was preoccupied with the noisy spectacle Gran Mal had become. She executed the Ten Deaths, careful to avoid the green power lines and the pilot compartment, targeting the joints off the torso, and various other central points. Her target choices were perhaps unwise, but the power lines radiated death, she was sure, even to her, and she couldn’t bring herself to murder a child, not by direct action, no matter the circumstances. She was confident, though, that she’d crippled the machine, at least for now, and made her way back towards Jav.

She had to hurry. She had to tell him. The sickness she felt was creeping in from every direction. Her ears tickled and she thought that they felt warm and wet. Her nose, too. Very strange as she was still Dark and completely intangible. She shook her head and forced herself to go faster.

Stol Kossig didn’t know what to think. Animate human skeletons that could fly? Their giant pet serpents, similarly accoutered? And now a sparkling translucent ghost of a woman, too? Raohan La had assured him that these humans were dangerous, and he knew not to challenge Raohan La’s statements, however farfetched they may have seemed.

The interlopers’ progress towards the Citadel, where he and his family had grown up, bothered him. The Perpetual Motion Machine, housed inside, had been perfectly safe since the war had ended, but years of peace had brought about ever more relaxed security. He knew that it would be a prime target. More than that, though, he feared for his sister, Isleyna, who, hopefully, still slept and remained ignorant of the threat that had come to Stolom.

Stol didn’t know how, but in the span of a single blink, the skeleton was at the Citadel—
at his sister’s window
. His anxiety spiked and he brought his Godsort to a run, calling for his brother and cousin to do the same. The ghost woman turned their way and came at them like a streak.

“Raohan La said they were dangerous, Stol,” Temmus said over the radio. “Let me take her.”

Stol ground his teeth at the flippant confidence he heard. “This is not training, Temmus,” he said more sternly than he meant to.

“I know,” Temmus said, sobering. “Please give me this chance.”

Stol looked at the ghost, at the far-off skeleton man and the massive skeleton serpent between them. He bit his lower lip. “All right. But remember,
Raohan La
said they were dangerous, not one of your schoolmates.”

“Yes, Stol. Thank you.”

He sensed the genuine gratitude and pleasure in his little brother’s voice.

“Enzo!” Stol cried, “Split up and converge on the Citadel. Let Temmus have this one.”

“Understood.”

Stol, leading in the middle, broke right, crossing in front of Enzo and his Godsort. Enzo paused briefly in his stride, then shot left in front of Temmus, who shifted to the middle position then bolted with renewed speed towards the onrushing ghost woman.

Stol watched her do a double take, but she couldn’t be in three places at once, so she ignored the wide-flanking Godsorts, and continued on towards Temmus. Success for now.

He passed the serpent, slowing in case it showed interest, but it didn’t make a move towards him or Enzo, who streaked by much closer—recklessly close, Stol thought. He resumed his previous pace and was coming up fast on the Citadel, but Enzo would reach it before him. Isleyna’s window shattered suddenly and the skeleton entered into her apartment just as Enzo’s Godsort obscured his view. What he saw next, though, nearly made him retch.

Enzo’s Godsort drew back and drove its fist into Isleyna’s room. Years of peace and an impressive ego had spawned an even more impressive recklessness in Enzo.

“
Enzo! What are you doing?
” Stol cried, both over the radio and through the external speakers.

Just as Stol arrived, though, his cousin’s Godsort recoiled from the Citadel, its striking arm disintegrating violently as it stumbled backwards. Stol caught Enzo, halted his backwards progress, and steadied him.

“What the hell are you doing?” Stol cried, again using the radio and speakers.

Enzo screamed back in the same manner. “Your sister, Stol. She’s dead. I saw blood, drums of it, and I couldn’t let that little grave raper get away.”

“You were too reckless! You don’t know she’s dead.”

“Did you hear me?
Drums
, Stol. Several and gushing. How explicit do I have to be?”

Stol paused while Enzo’s words finally sank in. “My sister? Did he kill. . . Isleyna?”

There was silence then as Stol regarded the man who pretended at being a skeleton and who sat atop his sister’s fresh corpse.

“Stol?” Enzo tested, but all that was audible was Stol’s labored breathing, building to a crescendo until the familiar words boomed from him.

“
High Formation
!” Stol cried. Twin nozzles, some fifty centimeters above and behind him, like a pair of horns aiming down at him, snapped audibly, and he felt the sharp work of the pneumatic pumps as they drew a fine mist of blood from a wide dispersion of specially treated pores across his bare shoulders and upper arms. The pumps fed the blood in two streams to the one meter cube of green light outlined with steel—the Godsort’s Kossig Engine—at his back, causing the light to shine brighter and brighter. He felt the merger between man and machine powered by the infinity of getnium rays, his human senses melting away to be replaced entirely by those of his Godsort. He felt like a god and like a god he would judge the guilty, condemning to death those not worthy of mercy.