Emerson Fortier
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Chapter 35 - Agate Stones
🕑 Added 2022-10-01 17:00:18 +0000 UTCFeiruhn sent them to a hall devoid of down.
People still moved through the concourse. They swam through the air, in lanes of traffic defined in lines from loops that hung from the ceiling and huge fans shoving air through the open tunnel in the rock like the current of a steam. Everything moved in that current. Lights bumped along it like boats, people surfed it, and machines with huge containers strapped to them plowed through them like barges on a narrow channel. Windows along the entire concourse looked out onto a network of other pipes like this one tying the disparate pieces of the splintered planet into a messy tangle.
Yi Cao clung to a handle beside one such window and fought to keep his stomach down while his brain fought to find some sense of up and shapes zipped by through the dust and debris that drifted just outside.
Zihan hung upside down just beside him, slowly turning as he waited in the novel environment, half a smile plastered across his face as he watched the stream of traffic moving through the center of the umbilical tunnel.
They’d been given a day and a time, something Yi Cao had begun to suspect didn’t actually exist on the station until Zihan asked TC how to read it. As it turned out there was a system of day and night in the tangle, just one that didn’t have any meaning outside of meetings like this. Twenty hours to a day, ten hours to a shift, usually split into a sleep shift and a work shift, with every tenth day marking the end of a station week. Rigid easy math. Yi Cao could appreciate it, even if it made little difference for him. He just went where Zihan told him to when Zihan told him to, and Zihan told him to go here.
They waited. No way to tell if they were early or late. They’d left with plenty of time. Moved quickly and reached the massive artery, found the window marked “86C”, but no way to know if they’d missed their deadline or gotten there obscenely early. Zihan spun, occasionally touching the edge of the window to pull himself back in, and Yi Cao stared out the window, focusing on the horizon between two chunks of rock to keep from throwing up.
Ships flew by, conical things that gleamed with pitted chrome. Constructs with articulated arms and peeling orange paint and men in work suits that turned them to orange painted cubes from their hips up. Rocks and bits of dust ran against the window like silt, shifting as they touched some field that extended beyond the glass and sliding gently away to be replaced by more.
A couple of men in worksuits flew by, so close he could have reached out and touched them, then one of them banged into the window and Yi Cao scrabbled back, heart thumping in his chest.
Zihan turned to the window with interest as the man beyond extruded arms the same orang as his suit and grabbed at something around the window, twisting until it had oriented itself looking in. It wore a faceless plate of black glass where it’s face should have been, somewhere near the center of the massive orange box.
A metallic hand, half claw and half armored fingers, plucked something from its suit, fiddled with it as it drifted with the undulating tube, then touched it to the glass.
“You can hear me?”
The voice grumbled through the glass. Staticky and inhuman.
Zihan grabbed a handle around the window and pulled himself closer.
“I can hear you. Can you hear me?”
“I can.” The window rattled. “I believe we have a mutual friend.”
“We do indeed.” Zihan twisted until his head matched the orientation of the figure floating outside, and Yi Cao felt his stomach twist at the change in perspective. He’d drifted too far and had to kick off of a passing freight construct to get back to the window. Even so he missed and needed to grab Zihan’s leg to keep from drifting off course.
Zihan ignored him, and Yi pulled himself even with the window just opposite the Young Master.
“An odd way to meet.” The Zihan said. He touched the window. “I was expecting a face to face.”
The window rattled something garbled until Zihan took his finger off the window. It stopped. Said again; “Please do not touch the window.My voice is projecting through the glass. My suit thinks it’s farspeak is broken, which means it can’t report back to the governor while I’m out here.” The voice crackled with the thrumming of the glass, half fuzzing as the figure outside readjusted itself and a pair of ships went by on legs of brilliant flame. “I get the safety of the void, and you get your chance to convince me we should work together. Are you ready?”
“Of course.” Zihan replied, but he’d crossed his arms over his chest and now twisted clockwise as the wind caught at his legs. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “but I’m not strictly legal around here. How can I trust you’re not going to turn me in to the piss bot governor?”
The thing waited, a shrug conveyed in silence and stillness instead of motion.
“Then don’t.” It rattled. “Enough risk out here for all of us. Thing you want to do is mad stacked on crazy built on a foundation of insanity, but the payout is enough, if we think you can cut it. You don’t want to trust our little gang of thieves you can go back where you came from. Be safer for the rest of us, but if you want to try it, we need to know you’re willing to take the risk, and capable of pulling your side of the deal we’ve thrown together.”
“Why don’t you tell me the plan before I give you the demonstration.”
“Not the point.” The thing beyond the glass rattled. “This is the deal. Take it or leave it. I’m not giving you more until I’ve seen what you can do.”
Zihan pursed his lips. “Name at least.” He said after a moment. “What am I supposed to call you.”
“Agate.” The thing replied. “Now if you’re ready, go to E-vent seventeen on the nightward side of the tube.” The figure pointed, one orange striped arm unfolding to point away from the primary source of light beyond the tangle. “I’ll be waiting for you there.”
There was no “E-vent seventeen”, but “Emergency Vent Seventeen” sat against one wall just left of the tube’s exit marked in oppressive technomancer script and blocked off in stark black and yellow paint. A red light ticked just above it, on again off again, in an inrritating eye piercing strobe. A panel that might have been a control mechanism sat open to it’s right exposing gears and glittering technomancy to the light.
The door opened shortly after they got there, and the huge orange clad worksuit gestured them inside. They swung in, Yi Cao banged his head against the circular opening in the as he passed inside and rubbed at it furiously as he twisted into the little room beyond
“Watch your head.” Agate told him. It’s voice had lost the rattling timbre of the glass, turned fuzzy from the construct it spoke through instead, faintly androgynous, an odd lilt to it. It grabbed a ring in the top of the door and heaved the massive steel circle shut, then turned its empty glass face to them.
“You’re inscrypti no?” The thing asked.
Zihan kicked off the opposite side of the small room they found themselves in, spun lazily in the air to smile at it upside down. “That’s right.”
“I thought so.” The thing said. “Feiruhn’s boys are always inscrypti.”
“Cultivator is the preferred denotation.” Zihan replied. “But I’ve never really cared, now, why have you brought us into this little box?” Zihan waved around at the steel chamber, a window at one end and four worksuits bundled up on cradles it’s only notable features. “Do you want me to break us out?”
Agate laughed. It took a moment for Yi Cao to realize that was the sound he’d heard and not some mechanism on the work suit cracking to suck air like a frog. “No.” It said. “No no. We can speak here.” It abruptly stopped laughing and seemed to study Zihan. “You understand, I hope, that any sign of this getting out to the governor would be a disaster for everyone.”
Zihan caught a hanging loop from the ceiling with his foot and swung gracefully towards the ceiling. “It’s not really legal for me to be here.” He said. He extended one arm, caught himself, and seemed to lounge on the ceiling while Yi Cao still bounced around the room uncontrolled. “Breaks all kinds of treaties. Would probably get me killed. So, yes. I understand the need not to be discovered by the governor.” He smiled, showing his teeth. “I’m sure I’m not the only one.”
“Makes sense if what I’m told is true.” The thing seemed to consider in silence while vents along it’s back and front hissed. Bumping it around in roughly the same position in the room.
“There have a lot of people tried robbing guild ships since this station was built. People on the station and even other factions, with ships of their own. Rumor says there’s an old Tam ship lost in the dust around rock number two, not that anyonen’s found it. Got shot down when it tried to board a treasure ship same way we’re planning now. Must have figured anything they’re tearing a planet apart to get must be worth a lot to somebody. Same way we are, only we don’t have a ship to try taking it with.”
Zihan stroked one lip as he studied the creature in the work suit before them and let the silence grow.
“You claimed you could hold the ship captive, no?” The thing demanded. “Threaten it with enough power to keep it from acting until we get away?”
Zihan nodded, like a cat. Eyes hooded.
“That’s a bold claim.” Agate told him. “Bold, to claim you can kill something powerful enough to make even the System back down.”
Zihan waved a hand. “The system isn’t a military power, way I understand it.” Zihan said. “Uses honey more than threats.”
“Then you don’t understand it at all.” Agate replied.
Zihan raised an eyebrow, shrugged, looked away. “Maybe not.” He conceded.
“The only reason the System didn’t spread beyond its two worlds is because the guild doesn’t allow anything beyond a certain power level to travel between the worlds, or actively prohibits them from doing so. To do that they have to be tremendously powerful themselves.”
“And to threaten them, I have to be tremendously powerful too, sure.” Zihan replied. “I understand.”
“What do you understand?” Agate asked. “You have never been on a guild ship, no? It is not just a ship, not as you may understand it. It is not a machine. There is no pilot you can threaten, no bridge you can invade. It is a man, one man, so changed by technomancy that his own mother would no longer call him human. Every part of the thing is his flesh, and every machine on board an organ in his body.”
“And part of him is still in there.” Zihan interrupted. “The real, him.” He picked at a fingernail, then flicked his fingers and looked at Agate. “Like an onion, with a worm at it’s heart.”
“An onion made of flesh-metal and interdex engines, and a worm whose been alive for centuries. He will kill us if we get there and you cannot manage your part.”
Zihan yawned, stretched, slipped from the cable holding him to the ceiling and began to drift. “I’ve dealt with immortals.” He replied. “You know what makes them all the same?” He flicked a foot, rotated in the air so that he did a slow motion summersault over the worksuited figure. “They’re old, and their cowards.” He landed in front of the worksuit on the soles of his feet, then caught at one of the wokrsuit’s arms to keep from rebounding back into the air. “You don’t live for a thousand years without becoming cautious. Put me at the center of that ship, and as long as he thinks I can get to the core of it that’s still him, he’s going to do whatever I tell him too.”
“That only works as long as you’re on board.” The worksuit replied. “Once you leave, what’s to keep the ship from blowing all of us up?”
Zihan shrugged. “You don’t have to get me off.” He said. “Just get me on board, and get the material off, and I can do the rest.”
“And if he thinks you can’t get to him?” Agate asked.
Zihan lifted a palm and let the fire Ki spark in his hand and his eyes.
Agate said nothing as Zihan stared up into the face hiding behind its opaque plate of glass. Finally it shifted, waving one arm towards the boxy worksuits stored along the inside of the tiny room. “Can you do it in a worksuit?” It asked. “What I have in mind will require that we go outside.”
“No.” Zihan shook his head. “But I won’t have to. The void holds no dangers for me.” He looked at Yi Cao. “It might though, for you.”
Three figures darted from the emergency vent lock around the tube between Hab 341 and Fragment North Point Nine. Two wore the orange coffins of worksuits, little legs dangling from them like the legs of finger puppets, one of the coffined figures spinning at the end of a line used by the other to drag it through the void, but the third wore nothing of the kind. A shirt, pants, a red vest that puffed up in the sudden vacuum, a pair of sunglasses he pulled from a subspace wallet after passing through a spotlight that apparently didn’t agree with him.
He rode otherwise naked through the void, thin jets of bright red flames extended from his palms like rockets.
Their image sparkled in Hua Feiruhn’s eyes as he watched.
Feiruhn remembered wielding such power. Not the power to step into the void, that he’d never had, or never tested, but the power that flared from the boy’s hands as he maneuvered, looked back, and flew circles around the suited pair. He remembered the beat of spiritual power through his channels, remembered it almost as well as he remembered the twisting sensation and the agony that accompanied those channels ripping themselves out of him as he stood over the mangled corpse of the woman who’d gotten the oath from him before his cultivation really began.
The wound was old, but moments like this still made it bleed, reminded him of old could have beens, and the fate that waited for him in the future.
One of the other audience members, present only in virtual in this rented space, shifted opposite the hologram. “Doesn’t need a hard suit.” The man looked up at Feiruhn, visible to him because he’d paid for this room, invisible to the woman who stood beside him, just as she was invisible to all the others through some technological magic. “How advanced do inscrypti have to be, do that kind of thing?”
Feiruhn met the man’s eyes, present, in this virtual world, yet separated by a distance that could only be measured in miles, if it could even be measured at all, but it was another of the crew he’d invited here who answered, scarred and nasal, four long marks across his face from a run in with some Kispuhru Feiruhn had never asked about.
“Not too spectacular.” The man said. He crossed his arms and glared at the hologram, the arms of his animated cloak coming up to frame his face in angry pointed spikes. “I’ve known other cultivators to do it. There are techniques can keep you safe. Domains. Some.”
The man who’d voice the question swung his head towards the speaker. “Could you do it?”
The scarred man frowned. “No.” He snapped. “I gave up that shit, remember?”
“Oh.” The man turned his attention back to the hologram as the three figures looped and rolled through a mining area choked with moving ships and other suited figures. Stones half processed into cubes for shipment drifting in a loose cloud just off the northern edge of the stone. More like them visible beyond.
“Couldn’t he be spotted?” Feiruhn asked.
Agate answered, his voice the same semi-androgynous cool it always was as he flew along behind the young man they’d come together to evaluate. “Yes.” He answered. “But also no. He stands out, that’s true, but this whole area is a dead zone. The laborers might spot him, but the Governor won’t. Not until the mess the Pitanmikasi is helping clean up gets resolved and it can re-prioritize for a sensor repair. Could be weeks. We aren’t the only ones out here playing lawless right now.”
The trio swerved around a slurry derrick spewing stone into the gaping jaws of a freight ship then they were out of the mine into the open void.
“Coming up on your boy’s target now.” Agate said. “About to find out if he’s as good as he says you claim.”
A stone appeared drifting in the dusty emptiness between the larger rocks of the tangle. Lights blinked at various points across it’s girth and a single machine sat clamped to one end, flared tubes making its role as a tug for the stone obvious even in its dormant state.
Feiruhn glanced at the girl standing next to him in the virtual space. She wasn’t there really, not in truth, and only half there in virtual, given the ability to see only Feiruhn and the display at the center with none of the access he had to the other members of the little crew Agate kept in the parts of Aarrppaa station no one, not even the governor, ever cared to look for them.
The girl’s eyes danced with the light of the display, oblivious to his attention, or anything else around her.
It was that intensity that had drawn him to her when they met. A washed up, bitter, failed, cultivator with nothing left to live for and a girl bright with the foundation she’d nearly formed by the time she was a teenager. The age difference was not insignificant between them. He’d been an old man, by mortal’s standards, when he lost his cultivation, but he hadn’t lost the touch of youth he’d maintained as a consequence of his advancement. Old age hadn’t started to touch him until he’d been here for quite some time, and by then they’d already established their… alliance, and she’d proven more than willing to make use of his experience over a mortal’s lifetime, spiritual experience and otherwise.
He would miss her, when she was gone.
On the display, Zihan touched down against the stone. The schedule, if you looked, showed the splinter of planetary dross due for splitting in a couple of days. Agate had already explained it all, her confrontation with the young man when they got the suit on his companion and he’d transmitted the entire thing.
The boy looked small against the rock, a speck against an object three miles in length, a mile across. One fleck of the larger rock that was Aarrppaa station.
Feiruhn didn’t feel the Ki flare, but he saw it. Light flashed around the Young Master’s palms, then the stone burst from the inside. Chunks the size of a small ship flew in every direction trailed by spiritual flames, the power on display surreal in its silence.
For a moment no one spoke. Feiruhn watched the suited figures bounce as one of the chunks whacked into them, then the young cultivator was there, splitting the larger chunks with his fist, grabbing the rope between them to drag both suited figures out of the mess on a trail of fire.
The tug, still tethered to a chunk of the rock, came to life as the rockstorm spread from the epicenter of the blast, maneuvering to intercept the larger before they could impact the station or screw up any of the major orbits.
One of the crew leaned forward to change the scale of the display.
“You okay out there boss?”
“Trying.” He replied. His voice came back harsh and out of breath. “Hard to tell this asshole to stop when he won’t wear a suit.”
A moment later the trio slowed as the cultivator caught up with one of the hurtling stones and planted them firmly on the forward facing edge. Agate caught his footing then used the momentum from the stone to pull the second suited figure after it on their way back towards the station.
“We’re fine.” He said over the connection. “Got to clear the area before someone decides to look in this direction. I expected him to crater the thing, not blow it to pieces.”
The virtual space fell silent as they watched the trio head back towards the emergency vent they’d exited, stolen worksuit trailing behind Agate like a twirling tail.
The scarred man opposite Feiruhn spat, cleared his sinuses, then blew his nose into a handkerchief that buzzed with static in the virtual projection. “Least we know he can do the job.” He said. “Blow up a rock like that.”
The others nodded. One man sucked his teeth in confirmation.
The girl at Feiruhn’s side turned shining eyes to look up at him.
“Is that something you’d have been able to do?” She asked.
Feiruhn glanced at the others in the virtual room, shook his head. He’d cultivated from a source with a powerful aspect of stillness, an aspect uniquely unsuited for blowing things up.
The girl looked back at the projection, eyes shining at a possibility she’d been told of all her life, and never seen until now.
“So, he’s powerful.” She said after a moment. “Can we trust him?”
Feiruhn regarded her for a long moment then muted himself to everyone but her. “We’ll have to,” he replied, “if we want you to become capable of doing the same thing.”
The pointed look she’d given him turned contemplative as he unmuted himself and she turned back to watch the spreading cloud of stones.
“It’s time we started talking about the plan.” Feiruhn told the others. “As soon as Agate returns.”
