Greyblade Page 2

  “Nope,” Greyblade said, and – not without a certain reluctance – laid his sword on the sensor array. “They told me no weapons. Aside from the sword, which I understand my transit data allows for–”

  “How do I know you haven’t got other stuff tucked away in there?” the human waved a hand at Greyblade’s armour, eyes narrowing as if Greyblade hadn’t gone through multiple scans already and the results weren’t freely available on the human’s computer.

  “All I have in here is hands, feet, teeth,” he said, “and a few other extremities that would be unseemly of me to call weapons.”

  “Alright, fine,” the guard said, and pointed entirely unnecessarily down the stone-and-metal corridor towards the mag-shuttle bays. “Your transfer is down there, it doesn’t leave for another six hours but you’ll want to get a good seat. Unless you, like, switch yourself off or balance on gyros or something.”

  “I … no,” Greyblade said, nonplussed. “Can’t say I’ve balanced on a gyro for–”

  “I’m only trying to help you,” the human interrupted indifferently, “because there aren’t any more stops the rest of the way down the Eden Road and the shuttle goes slow. No alien visitors allowed until you hit bottom,” he eyed Greyblade down and back up again, and this time it was definitely an insulting look and the hand on the awful gun was definitely a fondle, “and even then,” he went on, “‘allowed’ is a strong word. Nope, it’s straight on down to Amazônia Capital, so if you’re not solidly invested in visiting our world…”

  “Do you mind if I ask why there aren’t any intervening stops?” Greyblade asked, dampening his annoyance at that our world thing, and almost everything else in the guard’s words and general attitude. His sword emerged from the scanner and he returned it very resolutely to its sheath, while the officer looked disgruntled not to find a nanofilament or heat element in the weapon. “Not that I’m necessarily upset about it being a non-stop trip,” he went on, “but in that case shouldn’t it be faster than–”

  “The Milkies live on the lower stairs now,” the security officer said. There was a very subtle shading to the scorn in his voice as he said these words. I think the Milkies are idiots, the scorn said, but if I have to pick a side between idiots and aliens, it’s going to be the idiots every time so be careful what you put in your part of this conversation. “We had to consolidate the security checkpoints on either side of their territory and the actual transit is at reduced speed to minimise hostile impressions.”

  “I see,” Greyblade inclined his helmet, considering. “The Milkies. Of course, if the best way to avoid complications and unpleasantness is for the shuttle to simply not stop, that’s … well, I have to confess I don’t actually know what the Milkies are. May I ask … ?”

  “There are other passengers waiting to be processed,” the guard said abruptly, although there were other access points around the concourse and the depressing trickle of Earthbound processees had already practically dried up. “Tell you what, char’flet. It’s a long ride down the Eden Road. You should have plenty of time to do a little research on the world you’re so keen on getting to. The Amazônia Autoridade Central do encourage that. Read up on the Milkies, and Molinée, and all the rest of the ‘M’s while you’re at it.”

  Not wishing to antagonise the officer more than he apparently already had, Greyblade made his way to the shuttle bay. As he passed it, he looked up at a memorial to the Last War of Independence that had ended thirty years ago, almost to the day.

  The memorial, a gleaming bronze pillar unpleasantly reminiscent of the weapons favoured by the human officials, bore several names and places as well as some coded dates between 2580 AD and 2585 AD, or 202 ExE2 and 207 ExE as a lot of humans now counted the years since the lowering of the veil and the end of the Flutter.3 Of course, the dates made sense. They were the years between which the Last War of Independence had been fought.

  Less explicable was the highly-polished silver statue atop the pedestal, depicting a Char-bot in full death-dive. The sentient machine creature – just a few extraneous organic components separated Char-bot from Burning Knight, he remembered joking with his old mechanical comrades in bygone years – was like a small and heavily-armed spacecraft with the upper body, four arms and wide, flat-topped head of a Molranoid extending from its front. Like a Centaur, but with a tiny warship instead of a horse-part and a gleaming metal Molran instead of a human-part. They had been elegant, deadly, and they had defended Earth and the rest of the Four Realms like the fury of Jalah, against foes beyond comprehension.

  And now, they were all gone.

  Greyblade frowned behind his visor, and took up a tighter-scale examination of the statue at the top of the memorial pedestal. The strip of red sensors in the place of its eyes was alight, probably running off a chemical cell or a microfeed. Its graceful dive was frozen in place with all four arms outstretched and weapons shining like mirrors. Clean, sharp – nothing like the grotesque things the humans carried. It …

  It wasn’t a statue, he realised. They’d restored the shattered carcass of an actual living Char-bot, its spark long extinguished, and stuck it on a pillar like a stuffed trophy. They’d posed it and polished it and stuck a battery-operated lamp behind its face and now it was commemorating a nonsensical war in which it had been one of the human race’s staunchest allies, only to be demonised and destroyed in the final tragic months. Another victim of faith in humanity.

  He turned away from the ghastly display, strode for the shuttle docks, and immersed himself in his helm-fed data. What he learned there almost made him wish he hadn’t bothered.

  The Milkies, according to the local info feed, were another of the apparently innumerable human cults that flourished around Earth. It was getting to the point where each cult only seemed to have a single member. A multitudinous horde-cult of me, every one of them at odds with the rest … but the Milkies, at least, numbered a few hundred thousand and had a more or less cohesive ideology. Their customs and beliefs were such that they had voluntarily moved onto the Eden Road. Now, by mutual agreement, they owned the near-Earth stairs and occupied every step-nation in possession of air thick enough for humans to breathe. They were a particularly belligerent variety of past-worshippers, clinging to a fantasy of bygone years that had never really existed.

  For slightly less than twenty-four centuries, the period known alternatively as the Flutter, the exile, the veiling, the Desertion, or by a half-dozen other names with aggravatingly inconsistent noun statuses, Earth and the flatworlds beneath it had been … well, gone. Greyblade didn’t really understand it. He’d been in cold storage at the time, along with his ship and the rest of his unit, and what with one thing and another he’d never really gotten to the bottom of it all. Something about the Pinian Disciples needing time on the holy chill-out bench. There had been much more to it than that, but why was a question outside his jurisdiction.

  During those centuries, the humans inside the veil had been given a very convincing illusion to look at with their fallible eyes and their increasingly clever instruments. It had been intended to satisfy their curiosity and keep them from picking too much at the edges of their prison. A simulated environment, of sorts, conferring the illusion of freedom.

  And it had worked. For generations of exiled humans, the Earth had spun through space against a backdrop of stars, a galaxy much like the glittering wheel of Cursèd’s Playground but into which the Earth was far more closely integrated, in accordance with laws of physics that made sense to them and in order to account for assorted physical and mythical phenomena preceding the veil’s placement. There had been questions – there always were, with humans – but they’d come up with their own answers for the most part, and the illusion had held.

  They’d called that fictitious galaxy Via Lactea, the Milky Way. Now that he was paying attention, Greyblade did remember hearing about it from time to time since his return to active duty. From exiled Earth, according to the material Greyblade absorbed, the dec
oy galaxy had been visible as a misty band of stars too distant to distinguish individually until human civilisation had rebuilt itself sufficiently to bring telescopes and other instruments to bear. Even then, the illusion had endured. It had helped that, as time went by and human culture stagnated, fewer and fewer people even looked at the Milky Way, much less attempted to reach out and touch it.

  But now, hundreds of years after the lifting of the veil and the return of the Earth’s true sky, there were still humans who refused to accept it. This was staggering on multiple levels, not least of which was the fact that none of them had even been born during the exile. This was something their grandparents and great-grandparents would have had to deal with, but which their grandparents and great-grandparents had evidently opted to pass down in the form of an obstinate, pointless objection to reality.

  None of the bygone inhabitants of Earth had travelled into the hypothetical Milky Way, and none of their descendants were ever likely to travel into Cursèd’s Playground. It didn’t affect their lives in any practical way, and yet they had obsessed over it to such an extent that this manifestly non-real issue had become a fundamental cornerstone of their worldview.

  Now that the great disc of Heaven hung over their world for all to see – for all to walk to, if they could only be bothered – and the Playground turned serenely in the vault of stellar space beyond … now they thought it was a lie, a conspiracy for some unfathomable purpose. A conspiracy perpetuated, supposedly, by the mysterious power-brokers of a world that humans, and humans alone, administrated and were responsible for.

  Greyblade thought he was more offended by that than he was about being called a char’flet. Hadn’t these people fought a war to gain the very independence they were now relinquishing to a wholly imaginary alien-or-possibly-supernatural elite, in the form of this fantasy of manipulation and deception? It was maybe a more familiar human trait, less immediately disturbing than the slur he’d endured … but it spoke of something fundamental to human nature. Something that would never go away, and that would leave them angry and afraid and violent every time.

  The Milky Way cultists lived on a giant spiral staircase between Earth and Heaven, and insisted the world was spherical, and pirouetted through space in orbit around a colossal ball of fusing hydrogen.

  You had to laugh.

  He boarded the mag-shuttle, which was little more than a battered metal tube with a strip of windows on either side and a row of self-correcting electromagnetic impellers underneath, and took a seat towards the back. The other passengers were mostly humans, although there was a couple of Molren sitting stiffly at the front. The humans watched him intently as he shuffled down the tube to his seat.

  “ … gives me the creeps,” he heard one saying to another in a voice pitched sufficiently low that a human wouldn’t be able to hear it from more than a couple of metres away, but which he could pick up quite easily. “You can’t see their faces, they could be thinking anything. They could just be machines in there. Killer robots, like the Charbies.”

  He carried on back, pretending not to hear. That, he thought, was probably safer for everyone. He sat in the rear of the compartment, feeling the need to scrub and polish his armour almost as soon as he lowered himself into the spongy, unpleasant seat. It was going to be a long ride.

  THE EDEN ROAD

  His prediction that it was going to be a long ride didn’t quite do the journey justice. The mag-shuttle pulled out and accelerated unevenly across its bleak little step-nation of origin, before arcing smoothly over the edge and beginning its lumbering descent along the grey crags of Butcher’s Cascade. From there, it levelled out again and started across the mostly-featureless plain of the next step. There were some sealed habitats scattered on the mist-wreathed stone, but Greyblade didn’t get a good look at them from the shuttle’s scratched windows.

  The Eden Road was constructed like – well, it was – a colossal spiral staircase. The magnetic carrier-track for the shuttle and a few similar transport methods, evidently little-used, wound down through the eerie stacked landscape of the step-nations. The track had been built on the ‘inner’ part of the helix, close to the central column to minimise its length. Apparently there had once been a whole series of pressurised and heated walkways, tracks and mechanisms inside the column, spiralling between the worlds and allowing for easy transit, but they had fallen into disuse even before the Last War of Independence had severed a lot of the paths and erected official barriers across the rest. The simple truth was, not many people wanted to take slow-moving vehicles up and down the Eden Road – let alone walk the distance – when faster options were available.

  It was possible, though. Butcher’s Cascade, for example, had an ancient weathered switchback path carved into its surface quite close to the carrier-track. All the other step-nations’ vertical faces had similar features.

  These days the mag-shuttle track was the main form of permitted transport, and it traversed each stair close to its inner junction. Vertical descent flattened out into horizontal traverse, then arced down to another descent, each stretch taking about five minutes plus the additional time for scans and authorisations, all the while circling slowly around the helix. There was a gravity plate in the base of the shuttle that held everything in floor-down alignment and even almost counteracted the vertiginous lurches as they swung from horizontal travel to vertical plunge, then back again. Almost, but not quite. By the time they got to the edge of the step below their starting point and swung nose-downward once more, half of the humans on the shuttle were throwing up into waste pods.

  Greyblade was made of slightly sturdier stuff, as were the Molren, but the wretched state of the humans didn’t make the descent any more enjoyable. Moreover, the gravity plate gave off a harmonic vibration like a toothache, and a smell like burned bread that might have been pleasant if it wasn’t thickly underlaid with the sickly-sweet stink of primate vomit.

  At the seventeenth step down, a near-complete vacuum slab of rock, the shuttle pulled into a pressurised and heated dock like an oversized airlock to allow the passengers to disembark, stretch their limbs, take sustenance and relatively fresh air, and relieve themselves while further automated checks went on. A pair of interface robots had been placed in charge of ‘Gorfab’s World’, as the step was apparently called. The robots were tasked with performing light checks and random interviews with passengers, although Greyblade was not singled out. He was glad enough of this – the robots, bulky humanoid figures of pale, age-battered white composite, were clearly repurposed Argothmod units. There had been a lot of the things left behind on Earth and in Heaven in the closing years of the Twenty-Fourth Century, and the humans had used them rather ingeniously. And Greyblade was sure the machines were harmless4 … but he still had an instinctive reaction to their very presence.

  When they boarded the shuttle and set off once more, the Molren came back and sat near him while the humans – who had up until then been gathered in the middle rows and looking distrustfully at the aliens on either side whenever their faces weren’t buried in puke-pods – unanimously bunched into the front of the tube.

  Molren were arguably the first and unarguably the most numerous and successful of the Elder Races, the first mortal species to emerge and gain sentience in the early epochs of the urverse. They evolved, and were generally considered native to, The Centre,5 but they lived just about everywhere and this apparently extended to places such as Earth.

  They were slender, towering creatures that stood a head taller than Greyblade and head and shoulders taller than most humans – and that still left a second set of shoulders. Molren had four arms and two legs, and their heads were broad and flat-topped with delicate webbed ears at either corner, large eyes and wide, perpetually-smiling mouths. Between the eyes and mouth, their noses were just a soft collection of sensitive skin around slitted nostrils, and from their upper jaws a pair of long eye teeth like fangs jutted down over their lower lips. Greyblade had always considere
d the combination of head-shape and facial features disconcertingly serpentine – but they were, practically without exception, a kindly and honourable species.

  Now, the pair inclined their heads and lowered their bat-wing ears to Greyblade as they sat, and he nodded politely to them in return.

  “You are a Burning Knight of Brutan the Warrior,” one of them said in the soft close-harmony voice that came from having two windpipes.

  “I am,” he confirmed. It was a strange conversation right from the start, of carefully modulated volume. It was as if the three of them were aware that if they talked too quietly, the humans would suspect them of plotting something. But to talk too loudly would also be considered a threat.

  “Sir … ?” the other Molran inquired.

  “Greyblade,” he said. Large bright eyes widened, ears flared.

  “Of the Ladyhawk?” the first Molran asked in astonishment.

  Greyblade was gratified to be recognised, but at once saddened and concerned that all the security checks so far hadn’t gained him the same regard. “Retired,” he said.

  “You commanded the last legion in the liberation of Heaven,” the second Molran said. “You stood with the Pinian Disciples when the Worm Cult returned to–”

  “That,” Greyblade said firmly, all too aware of increasing numbers of furry human heads turning in their direction, “was a long time ago. A lot’s happened since then.”

  The Molren straightened in their squashy seats, as both of them remembered the more recent war that had taken place around the Four Realms – and how it had turned out for the Burning Knights. And all the other aliens who had stood by the humans until it was too late.

  “Do they even know?” the first Molran asked.

  Greyblade shrugged. “It’s not important anymore,” he said. “I’m a private citizen, just travelling to Earth for a visit. Paying my respects to some old friends and remembering the Last War in my own way.”