“Behold,” says the man in the red cassock, whose name, we’ll find out eventually, is Sanguoît. “Your chance at freedom.”
Yael and Silhouine, dehooded, are busy blinking and making faces in the afternoon sun.
“I said behold!”
They behold it.
“Freedom,” notes Yael, “looks like a cave.”
“A cave wherein the last of the masters of the High Age hid his masterwork: the means to challenge the Iron Heart in its own–” (he continues in this vein for a while here) “–OUR FREEDOM.”
“Wait, whose?” says Silhouine. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
After that the cave seems like the safest option.
A typical candle emits light at a luminous intensity of about one candela, in every direction except down.
One can leave oneself a trail in wax, if one tilts the candle, or detect the presence and vector of microcurrents in the air. (It could also effect euthanasia, were one trapped and suffocating.) Ptarmigan is grateful for the candle: it serves as both canary and guardian.
These passages look all alike to her, but the wax trail wouldn’t lie. There are grues in here, somewhere very close. They’re playing a game with exactly one rule.
A typical candle can last for hours.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The California Civil War isn’t nearly as organized as the other one, but does have the advantage of nice weather and cell phone coverage. The Battle of Los Angeles isn’t as big as everyone sort of wants it to be; Nora’s squad spends most of the week doing mopup.
Which is why the ambush outside the big theater hits them so hard. Nora leaves bloody handprints on the sidewalk, but the med squad is snappy.
“Fucking idiotic,” she curses herself.
“Relax,” says one of them, “don’t you get a Purple Heart for this?”
“It sucks,” she winces, “just to be nominated.”
“So where am I in the initiative order now?” asks Bronwen, frowning, doing arithmetic.
“You pulled out the quorum call last round, so you moved down to fourth,” says Daffyd. “That means Knox has the floor.”
“Oh, okay,” says Knox. “I’m using an encounter power… uh, Force Recess.” Dice clatter on the board. “Hit! Seven votes!”
“Reduced to two,” smirks Daffyd from behind his screen, “they’ve got defection resist 5.”
“Aren’t you at least going to roll a morale check yet?” says Bronwen. “We outnumber them now, and–”
“No morale check.”
“Why not?”
“These guys,” says Daffyd, “fight to the death.”
They’re deep in the Uncanny Valley, deeper than any manned survey has plumbed, and the walls of their bathysphere are three feet thick and groaning. The spotlamp is low. Things that aren’t quite human flicker by, curious, providing their own illumination.
It is very cold.
“Are we even sure this thing has a bottom?” mutters Iger, glancing again and again at the pressure gauge on his dash.
“I keep telling you,” says Noam, “its depth is subjective.”
“I can’t breathe.” Iger struggles with straps. “If I just–”
“Don’t take off the mask!”
Iger stops, swallowing. Surely he still has a face.
“We thought they’d just want a little graft and service off the top–protection, you know, not unusual in these parts–but they won’t leave us alone.” Jay shakes his head. “They want more. They want too much, and the things they want to do with my boys ain’t right. So I get to thinking that for less than what they’re skimming–”
“You could just hire a gun hand,” Pimal nods.
“We can pay,” says Jay.
“Well, I have to say,” she says, split by a crooked smile, “that’s the first time I’ve ever had a whore say that to me.”
This is the Flood. There’s a lot of expensive data in it, most of which you can’t read because of extremely large numbers. You could maybe figure the numbers out if you had more time than the lifespan of the universe.
These are the Nameless. They slumber in the deep. They dream of things lost and unknowable, of casual anathema, of alphabets whose mere numerals can erase your mind; they are quantum, though they cannot be quantified.
They dream of numbers from beyond time.
Do you see where this is going?
This is Ashlock. She’s terrified.
She really, really should be.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
“I’d love to have you as our guest at the seaside,” says Stavros.
“Would you?” says Xylia, at which point the demon of courtesy jams a hot spike into her antitragus.
“I mean,” she says, teeth grinding, “that’s so generous, but we couldn’t possibly–”
“Oh, I insist,” says Stavros, desperate, literally spurred on by a demon of his own.
“You’re too kind!” Xylia shrills.
The lights of the lobby pulse; with relief, they nod to one another and begin to navigate back into the theater.
“We’re three minutes early,” the stage manager reproves.
“You’ll live,” says the demon of small mercies.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
