Greyblade Page 3

  “I apologise,” the first Molran said, “it was not my intention to reopen old wounds.”

  Greyblade laughed. “That’s what the armour’s for, friend.”

  The Molren introduced themselves – Stañi and Chy – and the next few hours passed pleasantly enough in conversation on more neutral topics. The descent continued from Gorfab’s World, onwards down the near-vacuum steps and into the upper reaches of the Human Territory Interdict, and the checkpoints began once again to increase in number and duration. To Greyblade’s surprise, more than half of the humans disembarked into the grim, chilly series of pressurised habitats on one of these steps. Not a Milky Way Cultist settlement, but some other Eden-Road-dwelling community or other. Chy confirmed that there were many such groups, some of them even more deluded than the Milkies who were the dominant culture of the steps closest to Earth.

  “There are actually almost a million humans spread throughout the near-Earth Eden Road settlements,” Chy said. “The Milky Way Cult accounts for the densest population, but it is still only about a third of their total numbers.”

  They played a couple of games to pass the time. The Molren beat him handily at Blind Beggar, Greyblade won their single cycle of the more tactical Shadowsteps – much to Chy’s and Stañi’s delight – and compatibility issues prevented them from playing the interface-sharing Fall or Fly.

  “So where are you headed once we get through Amazônia Capital processing?” he asked them.

  Stañi and Chy looked puzzled, and glanced at each other.

  “Well, to Sprawling Adelbairn,” Stañi said.

  “Sure, obviously,” Greyblade waved a gauntlet, “but after final checkout.”

  Stañi flicked his ears. “We are there for a month,” he replied, “then we re-ascend the Eden Road, and return to the Quin Cities.”

  “Thanking Jalah and the Disciples at every step that we did not need to be in Adelbairn for longer,” Chy added fervently. This, he pitched low enough for only Greyblade’s sensors, and the Molren’s almost-as-sensitive ears, to pick up. Greyblade chuckled.

  “I’m sticking to Adelbairn myself,” he said. “Not tempted to go sightseeing?”

  Stañi and Chy exchanged another look.

  “There … is no sightseeing, Sir Greyblade,” Chy said. “Aliens are not allowed beyond the city limits.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “After being processed by Amazônia Autoridade Central, we will be transported securely to Old Meganesia and processed a final time before being given a pass to the alien quarter of Adelbairn,” Stañi said, looking surprised. “Were you not informed of this?”

  “My … data sources were out of date and a little sketchy,” Greyblade hedged, frowning and calling up more information. Even now, a lot of it was blocked to his trawling system. He’d been forced to decide between information access and privacy, and he’d gone with privacy. “And since I wasn’t going beyond the city limits anyway … all my associates are in Adelbairn…”

  “Yes,” Stañi said dryly, “there is a reason for that.”

  “Sprawling Adelbairn is not a city, Sir Greyblade,” Chy said, his face grave. “You can leave, but only by the same route we are currently taking. Sprawling Adelbairn is a camp.”

  AMAZÔNIA CAPITAL

  They talked a little more through the final dozen or so painfully protracted step-transits, but Greyblade was distracted. He was taking in as much information about Adelbairn as he could access.

  There was precious little. He’d already read up on the city itself as much as he had thought was necessary, but hadn’t considered from the information that it was actually a sealed system, at least where aliens were concerned. He hadn’t thought to consider it, because it was such an outlandish idea … and yet, not so outlandish, for all that.

  It was, in fact, a very cunningly underplayed and unspoken detail. This small but vital piece of added data actually lent a lot of context to the whole, and explained some of the confusing contradictions he’d previously noted.

  Old Meganesia was, due to its relative hodgepodge of dominant human cultures, less isolationist and more of a mixed bag than the other nations of the unfriendly flatworld. The Old Meganesians were a mix of different demographics, but it was a strictly regimented melting pot where different ingredients existed on painfully segregated layers. There had been too many fights, too many wars between human and human, too many attempted genocides for it to be any other way.

  Greyblade had missed most of this history as he’d passed through it on his earlier tours, mainly because he’d had enough to digest just dealing with the present, and the battles going on right under the tip of his visor had been more than enough to distract him from what the natives would have thought about each other under more normal circumstances.

  Still, that was why it had been relatively natural for Old Meganesia to take on the role, and that was why they had the camp. The almost clinically isolated and regimented alien quarter of Sprawling Adelbairn.

  “They call it Dumblertown,” Stañi said with a little sarcastic lift of his ears.

  “Are they aware that that’s not what dumbler means?” Greyblade asked. “From what I’m seeing, since the end of the war it’s really the entire rest of Earth that’s more like a dumbler community.”

  This much was undeniable, and yet it was equally evident that the humans had decided that wasn’t what dumbler-folk were. The world’s general population was scarcely even aware that aliens existed, and were quietly coming and going in sealed vehicles between the Earth-landing of the Eden Road and Sprawling Adelbairn. And that ignorance was spreading and deepening. The people of Earth were growing steadily more oblivious to the urverse that was carrying on without them beyond their skies. They weren’t even really acknowledging Heaven anymore, and Heaven was quite literally hanging over their heads.

  They’d turned dumbler into a synonym for outsider, and a not-insignificant number of them lived up on the steps and insisted that the Milky Way galaxy was real.

  Dumbler-folk, or dumblermar, had long been a gentle way of categorising a species or group separated from the urverse and living without knowledge of the Corporation that unified the innermost ten million Dimensions around The Centre. Earth, as a part of the crown jewels of the Pinian Brotherhood’s mortal domain, should definitely not have been considered a dumbler world. And yet humans were doing their best to make it one.

  And that was their right. Even before the heartbreaking, pointless Last War of Independence, the humans of Earth were a sovereign power. Part of the reason the war had happened, and had been so ugly, was that the humans were already independent and the non-humans had no idea what their actual grievance was. The humans were allied to the Pinians and their priests worshipped Jalah, but they didn’t even have to do that. They had free choice in all this, and many of them chose not to follow the revered Firstmades. Some of them chose to turn their backs on everything, either throwing in their lot with the Adversary6 or opting for almost-as-dangerous neutral ground elsewhere.

  And the Firstmades had allowed it. Humans, they said, had to be free to tread their own path. And after the Last War of Independence, Jalah and the Pinians had let this free rein degenerate into full-blown disownership. If this was the path the people of Earth had chosen, then it didn’t seem like there was much the Firstmades could do about it, let alone Greyblade. He was retired anyway.

  But cutting off their entire world from the Corporation. That was just … self-harm, on a grand scale.

  Retired. Retired.

  Old Meganesia had a history of strange immigrations, invasions, and internment, and a naturally isolated geography that lent itself to cultural and literal quarantine. Sprawling Adelbairn, with its impossible-to-ignore alien quarter, was one of the most cosmopolitan city-states of Old Meganesia, and that wasn’t saying much. It was one of the most in-touch city-states when it came to matters of the wider Corporation, right up there with Amazônia Capital – and that wasn’t saying much either
.

  But it had a history – and on a world like Earth, with history dripping hot and red from every tortured stone, that was saying something. Yes, they had an alien quarter, their Dumblertown. But it was hardly an open and diverse tapestry of multi-species harmony. It was … tolerated. Its every facet was extremely regimented, and that became apparent to Greyblade from the moment the shuttle arrived on Earth proper.

  There was no exposure to the locals. Transit occurred smoothly and with a military precision Greyblade would have approved of if the context didn’t make it a bit creepy.

  The Eden Road’s Earth-landing, in the great dustbowl of Amazônia Capital, was nowhere near the island continent of Old Meganesia. But it was where the flatworld opened in a great ruddy bore and the stairs continued on down towards Hell, and Hell didn’t have an immigration policy let alone a tourism industry, so this really was the end of the line unless you had some extremely specialised permissions. Travel between Heaven and the seared realms, and indeed anywhere else in the urverse and the seared realms, tended to bypass the Interdict entirely, and travel by the Eden Road was long since discontinued.

  Amazônia itself had once been a patchwork of different nations smothered in a great rainforest, but that had been practically wiped out during the exile. Forced to fend for themselves with no access to the Power Plant, the humans had burned trees for a while to drive back the darkness. Then they’d cut down more to make land for cows to graze on, so they could eat the cows. When the cows had died out the humans had cut down more trees, apparently just because it was so darn fun to watch them go crash. The weather systems of the sealed planetary system had gone haywire and destroyed a lot of the remaining rainforest. Then the humans had had a war, and most of the rest had been burned.

  The war, Greyblade remembered being told once, had been over the preservation of the remaining trees and the biospheres contained in them. This had seemed just about typical to him at the time.

  Now, the Amazônia dustbowl housed a collection of wind-blasted old oxygen farms, great vented-cement pyramids that had once contained some sort of processing systems for pollutants and carbon dioxide. Monstrous biosynthetic gills intended to claw one more breath of friendly air from an atmoplane – no, an atmosphere at the time – that was suffocating in its own waste. Between the massive grey monoliths was a blanket of city, occasionally pierced with the dimly-glinting spire of an energy distribution station. These, like the farms, had been out of use since the veil was lifted and the functionally-unlimited resources of the Corporation had begun to pour down the Eden Road and in from the sides of the world.

  Amazônia was still something of a wasteland even after two hundred and thirty-seven years, but that was mostly because the humans seemed uninterested in restoring the forest. The damage from the Last War of Independence, which had been acute around the ‘secondary invasion point’ of the great staircase, had been cleared up but there was only so much you could do to fix a place you couldn’t move the residents out of first. Because aside from the weather-beaten hulks of the oxygen farms and the haunted mirror-towers of the power facilities, Amazônia Capital was home to three hundred and fifty million humans.

  The majority of the human passengers separated from Greyblade and the two Molren at this point, scurrying away into the corridors of the Amazônia Autoridade Central complex for their own connecting flights or rides home. Greyblade, Chy, Stañi and three humans remained in the Old Meganesia processing point.

  To Greyblade’s surprise, however, after the last of the non-Adelbairn-bound humans had departed without a backwards glance, one of them came hurrying back to the casually-milling group of passengers. He hesitated for a moment in the doorway, then almost trotted up to Greyblade with an expression on his face like he was walking across hot coals.

  “Thank you for your service,” he said in a breathless rush, eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

  “You’re … welcome,” Greyblade said, frankly thunderstruck. The young man bobbed in an awkward half-nod, half-bow, opened his mouth to say something else, then turned and hurried back out of the room.

  Greyblade looked at the Molren, who looked as surprised as he felt.

  “You may have heard the old saying,” Chy said. “You can trust a Damorak to be a Damorak, and a Molran to be a Molran…”

  “But just when you trust a human to be a human, they’ll be something else,” Greyblade concluded.

  It was hard to tell what the three remaining Adelbairn-bound humans thought of any of this, but he thought they looked a bit embarrassed.

  Another repurposed Argo-bot, this one accompanied by a uniformed human with the ubiquitous bronze-barrelled gun on her hip, appeared in a doorway.

  “Passengers for the Sprawling Adelbairn and final alien processing security,” she said in flamboyantly-accented Xidh, “this way if you please.”

  SPRAWLING ADELBAIRN

  There was nobody to meet him at the dock, not that he’d been expecting–

  “Hey, fucko.”

  Greyblade turned, hastily adjusting his sensors … but it was no alteration on his end that enabled him to see the figure standing at the edge of the reception area. His integrated machinery insisted that he’d been seeing it all along – he just hadn’t noticed.

  The Archangel Gabriel swam slowly into long-term-retention visibility, a wide yellow-toothed grin on his leathery old face. He was holding a sign that said KISSER, Greyblade’s old army nickname. Although what good he’d been expecting the sign to do, when he could become essentially invisible to mere mortals, was anyone’s guess.

  Gabriel was … well, Greyblade had never quite gotten to the bottom of what Gabriel was, except ancient. He might have been technically human, but it was a variant of human from so long ago that he was smaller, longer-armed, and far hairier than any human Greyblade had ever seen, several knuckle-dragging steps closer to the species’ forgotten primate origins.

  At the same time, however, he was an Archangel. That meant he had the great sooty-dark wings, the distinguished midnight-blue robes, and a staggering near-radiance that distinguished him from lesser beings in the employ of the Firstmades. Greyblade’s sensors had a hard time filtering anything out of the general glory, so for the most part they shut down. It was, he knew, a reasonable facsimile of what un-augmented organic senses did as well. They could scarcely comprehend that something so flawless and abidingly pure could exist, and so they casually assured your brain that it didn’t. In this way, Gabriel and the other glorified managed to conduct their affairs without having to wade through an adoring mob everywhere they went.

  Greyblade, who had dealt with Angels, Archangels, and even higher entities in the course of his career, was capable of withstanding the effects of a glorified mortal standing in his pitifully unworthy humble presence. But it had been a while, and Gabriel was overwhelming.

  The Archangel broke the spell by slouching forward and whanging Greyblade on the side of the helmet with his placard. “Snap out of it, you busted old crock.”

  “Gabriel,” he said in pleasure, and they clasped hands. The reception area had emptied aside from the ever-present security robots and uniformed humans, Chy and Stañi having bid him a respectful farewell and made their way decorously to the exits and their own pre-arranged transportation and lodgings. “Been here long?”

  “Since shortly after sundown,” Gabriel said, and Greyblade’s visor informed him that local sunset had occurred about an hour ago. The Archangel must have guessed at what Greyblade was thinking, because he went on, “this is a pretty secular district so it’s difficult to get around during the day. But don’t worry. Most of the rest of Dumblertown is consecrated.”

  “Mm hm,” Greyblade said, putting as much disapproval into his tone as he could. They headed towards the exit together. “And what about outside the internment camp? Or isn’t that something you can answer?”

  Gabriel shot him a look that was half-amused, half-annoyed. “You finally figured out enough to get all outr
aged, did you?”

  “I’m working on outraged,” Greyblade said. “At the moment I’m stuck on baffled.”

  Gabriel grunted shortly. “I remain eternally hopeful that the segregation of human and alien is a necessary and temporary evil,” he said, “but at the moment all I can really say is that there are fewer fights this way and I’m in favour of fewer fights,” he gave Greyblade another look. “I was never in that particular branch of Heaven’s military.”

  “Retired,” Greyblade raised his hands innocently. “Fewer fights sounds very … placid. Docile, even.”

  “And why wouldn’t you have judgements to make? You’ve been here seven minutes,” Gabriel said.

  “Do they let you leave the alien quarter?” Greyblade asked bluntly. “You’ve lived on Earth longer than any of them. You’ve been human longer than any of them. And oh yes, you’re a literal holy figure.”

  “Those with authority can least afford to be above the law. I abide by the terms of the Treaty of Mumbai,” Gabriel replied, now giving off a very strong sense of shut the fuck up in his rustling grey-black feathers. Greyblade reminded himself that there were probably surveillance devices everywhere, and his armour was unlikely to be equipped to pick them all up.

  The possibility that the Archangel Gabriel had allowed himself to be herded into an alien camp for the peace and safety of the conquering humans, however – without immediately finding a way to go out into the world whenever he damn well pleased – was frankly staggering. Until given reason to believe otherwise, then, Greyblade decided he would assume Gabriel was flouting the Treaty of Mumbai with all his usual gentility.

  “Alright,” he said, “but what about the holy ground? Are you back to sitting in churches while the sun is out, because–” because stepping onto unconsecrated ground during the daylight hours will put you in a coma, he stopped himself from adding. An Angel had tremendous power while it was on ground consecrated to the God it had been glorified by. For some reason, that power worked on ordinary ground as well, but only at night. And Earth, like Heaven and Hell and even Cursèd, was thoroughly consecrated to the Pinian Brotherhood. There shouldn’t really have been anywhere Gabriel and the others couldn’t go, at any time of the day or night … but that, for a variety of reasons, had not been the case for a long time.