Greyblade Page 4

  That didn’t really explain why Greyblade felt suddenly unwilling to say the words aloud. What did explain it? Was he concerned that there were surveillance systems tracking their conversation, and that he was revealing a famous but not-specifically-understood weakness in the Angels that the humans might exploit? That was insane. This place was getting to him. The war was over.

  Retired. Retired.

  “Plenty of Dumblertown is still open, and there are wide areas of Adelbairn and the other major cities that still have holy ground,” Gabriel admitted, “but it’s certainly not the whole world anymore.”

  “The world’s not veiled anymore,” Greyblade objected. “Why is the holy ground drying up?”

  “Part of it was an agreement with the national governments, plain and simple,” Gabriel replied. “They wanted official areas – military and bureaucratic, educational and medical – to be secular, and so rituals of deconsecration were performed, shutting us out during the waking hours. Oh, religious nutbars of a wide range of human types can still infiltrate the places and get their agendas served, but there’s no place for wingèd humans in the great institutions of the world.”

  “I see,” Greyblade said. They stepped out into the mellow warmth of the Sprawling Adelbairn night. Traffic, both terrestrial and airborne, swished and rattled past. Gabriel led the way left, along the neat pale paving stones, to a waiting car. “And that was part of it, was it?” he asked. Gabriel grunted again. “What was the rest of the reason you’re only allowed out at night, you old monkey?”

  Gabriel didn’t answer immediately. They climbed into the back of the car, which was actually rather luxurious and had a small bar gleaming merrily in the lights against the far wall. Once the door was closed the vehicle, apparently automated, took off gently and rolled into the busy street.

  “Drink?” Gabriel said, conveniently disregarding Greyblade’s line of questioning and busying himself with the cabinet and glasses.

  “Until a better way of dealing with reality comes along,” Greyblade let the Archangel get away with it. For now.

  Gabriel chuckled and poured tawny liquid into a tumbler, plucked a long straw from a container on the side of the bar, plunked it into the glass and handed it to Greyblade before pouring his own. Greyblade raised his drink in a silent toast, opened the access slit in his visor, stuck the straw through, and they drank in unison.

  “So,” Gabriel said after they’d sat in silence for a time, “where are the rest of the Knights?” Greyblade shook his head, and Gabriel whistled through his thick teeth. “The Ladyhawk wasn’t downed in the war, was she? I’m sure I would have remembered the big metal bitch falling.”

  “The bitch got out intact,” Greyblade said calmly, and sipped his drink rather than mull on that too closely. “Most of us went back to Barnalk. We disbanded. Some units went on to other things, most of the ones who didn’t retire went to work at the Thalaar Institute where the new generation of Burning Knights are being trained and crafted from Áea-folk volunteers and gene templates.”

  Gabriel nodded as the car cruised on into the alien quarter, away from the secure airport. “I heard you went to war one last time, side by side with the Disciples,” the Archangel said wistfully. “After the occupation, but before all this independence nonsense. A secret war. I’ve been itching to ask you about it. The boys are no help. Hardly remember who I am, most of the time.”

  “If it was a secret war, I could hardly tell you about it,” Greyblade pointed out reasonably, “although I will say this: when the revered Firstmades call on you to do battle against telepathic dinosaurs with outlawed aactur-refract weaponry, my advice would be to consider retirement.”

  Gabriel laughed. “I’m so far beyond the consider-retirement stage, I hardly remember what it looks like.”

  “You mentioned the boys,” Greyblade said. “Are they still here on Earth, or did they go back downstairs?”

  “They’re still on Earth,” Gabriel said, “but they’re not in Adelbairn,” he grinned against the lip of his glass, seeming to sense Greyblade’s swift additional micro-scans of the car. “There aren’t any bugs in here.”

  “So now would be the time to ask you just how much you respect the Treaty of Mumbai,” Greyblade said, sucking at his straw.

  Gabriel chuckled. “I respect the Treaty,” he said. “But the Dumblertown articles are such a small part of the accords, and there are so many clauses and loopholes … turns out it’s easy enough to keep on respecting the Treaty, while…”

  “ … while repeatedly breaking it with breathtaking impertinence?” Greyblade concluded.

  Gabriel grinned again. “I don’t know about breathtaking,” he said, “but let’s say … eyebrow-raising.”

  The car rolled on into the alien quarter. Greyblade had to admit, when he’d found out the place was a sealed camp he had expected to find something a lot more squalid and shantytown-like. The great seething expanse of Slumsville outside Capital Mind was fresh in his memory from their campaigns in The Centre. What he was seeing of Sprawling Adelbairn, however, was surprisingly modern, spacious, and clean. He couldn’t see many people on the streets, and wondered if this meant there was a curfew.

  “So the boys are outside this internment camp?” he asked.

  Gabriel’s smile turned into a grimace. “If you insist on calling it that … yes, they’re outside. But they’re close.”

  “Close where?”

  Gabriel raised his glass again. “Where it all started, of course,” he said. “The boys are in Vanning.”

  THE BOYS

  Sprawling Adelbairn had several smaller settlements scattered around its outskirts. Vanning was one of them.

  The town had grown in the years since the veil had come down, but it still hadn’t expanded enough to be engulfed by the megalopolis. It was still a small town, steeped in recent history but with nothing of much interest in its long and dusty life’s story leading up to August 13th, 2378 AD.

  “Wasn’t Vanning declared a holy site in the early Twenty-Sixth Century?” Greyblade asked.

  “Yep,” Gabriel agreed easily. “Sacred City. Off-limits to all but the citizens and citizens-by-descent, and the holiest of holy pilgrims. Also off-limits to actual servants of Jalah, like ol’ Short, Dark and Hairy here.”

  “A holy city,” Greyblade said blankly, “off-limits to Angels.”

  “To add a bittersweet glaze to the great big irony cheesecake,” Gabriel went on, “the whole place is still completely consecrated. I could walk down the main street in broad daylight if I was allowed inside the city limits.”

  Greyblade shook his head in bewilderment. “How is that in any way a recognition of the revered Firstmades?”

  “I guess they’re lovingly and ferociously safeguarding the birthplace of the three Disciples,” Gabriel shrugged. “Or at least their final set of human guises, before the veil lifted.”

  “Even so…” Greyblade insisted. “It seems crazy.”

  “It’s pretty crazy,” Gabriel admitted. “Lots of things are crazy,” the car turned onto a smaller street and began decelerating through a relatively bustling market area. Greyblade saw a few humans, but most of the crowd was made up of Molren, Gróbs, a scattering of Heaven-folk and a couple of miscellaneous species. “But it means Vanning is relatively quiet, population controlled, and nobody asks many questions. We’ve managed to get a decent number of our people in, and they’re helping the boys to hide. It’s dangerous for them to be out there.”

  “Dangerous,” Greyblade said blankly. “For them.”

  “Okay,” Gabriel conceded. “Dangerous for everybody else. But for them too. Not even Ogres can stand up to human weaponry.”

  “And when you say ‘our people’…”

  “I mean humans make factions almost as enthusiastically as they make new humans,” Gabriel replied. The car pulled into a small yard surrounded by the backsides of buildings. It was a space, Greyblade thought with unexpected whimsy, that seemed to have committe
d some sort of architectural sin, and was now being shunned by the structures around it. It was hard to tell which of the three backs-turned structures they were parking at – if any of them.

  The car purred into silence, and for a moment they sat without disembarking. “So why aren’t they in here with the rest of us dumblers?” he asked Gabriel, just a little sarcastically.

  “It’s dangerous for them to be in here too,” Gabriel said. “Probably more so – Ogres don’t take well to being fenced in. Which is unfortunate, given their current circumstances … but it is what it is. They’re nothing if not stoic.”

  “How are your people managing to hide them?” Greyblade asked. “Or feed them? How many of them are there?”

  “Four.”

  “Four?” Greyblade exclaimed.

  “Easier to hide than five,” Gabriel said dryly.

  “Let’s see if I can guess,” Greyblade counted them off on his fingers. All of them, he reflected in disbelief, on one hand. “Big Thundering Bjørn. Fat Tuesday. Brute Hungry. Colossal Pete.”

  “Colossal Colossal Pete,” Gabriel corrected him with a smile.

  “Right,” Greyblade said. “Where are the others?”

  Gabriel looked at Greyblade wearily, then finished his drink and put the glass down firmly on the bar.

  “Dead,” he said. “Bjørn, Tuesday, Pete and Brute were airlifted out of the Unified Nations right before the Battle of Darling’s Day. Some sort of summit, which was a joke because sure, they were the Ogre leadership but who really wants Ogre leadership at a summit…”

  “Darling’s Day was in ‘83,” Greyblade objected. “We were still running operations then.”

  “Not in the Unified Nations and Sundered Commonwealth of America,” Gabriel said ponderously. “You were over near the staircase for most of it. We sent word but there was a lot of misinformation flying around. A lot of not wanting to believe. The rest of the Ogres were rounded up, cornered in the Dragons’ nests outside Detroit, and the heat in the stones made them sleepy. For all I know, they were still sitting there when the Unified Nations cleared those caves out once and for all.”

  Greyblade looked down at the empty drink in his hand, its straw swinging pointlessly. He’d known returning to Earth would bring back unwanted memories, serve up information he’d hoped to die without ever learning. It was true, what Gabriel said. Not even Ogres could stand up to the hideous weapons the humans had brought to bear in the last hours of the war, and still carried on their hips to this day.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  Gabriel took pity and permitted the change of subject. “My place,” he replied, and shoved the car door open.

  Gabriel’s ‘place’ turned out to be a tidy little flat on the upper storey of one of the three buildings, which on casual inspection and a brief tour turned out to be the same structure, a U-shaped block with a yard of cracked concrete in the middle. The Archangel led the Burning Knight into the building and up to the apartment, and Greyblade took it in with a slow, disbelieving swivel of his head.

  “This is a retirement home,” he said.

  “I told you,” Gabriel growled, “I’m way past the point of considering retirement.”

  “The kitchen has safety-sized appliances,” Greyblade pointed out in mounting hilarity. “The media system is covered in dust, and so is that pot of plastic flowers on the table.”

  “I don’t get in here very often.”

  “A pot of plastic flowers, Gabriel.”

  “We can’t all be cybernetic interior design masters.”

  “If I go into the bathroom and find a med-dispenser…”

  “What do you mean, if you go into the bathroom?” Gabriel snapped. “Do you see a spare room? Where do you think you’re going to be staying?”

  Greyblade chuckled briefly, and crossed the neat, sterile, forlorn little apartment to lower himself onto the couch. The couch had synthetic sleeves on its back and arms, and Greyblade leaned to one side and withdrew a single large grey feather from between the cushions.

  “Thanks for coming to pick me up,” he said finally. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d gotten on the right ship. Is this really Earth, Gabriel?”

  “Yes it is,” Gabriel swung across easily and threw himself into the couch next to Greyblade. “And it’s everything I ever dreamed it would be.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” the Archangel scratched his stomach, smooth finger-pads working the soft material of his robe against the thick hair of his torso. “Only I expected the war to end with the humans leaving, not barricading themselves in.”

  “You can trust a Damorak to be a Damorak, and a Molran to be a Molran,” Greyblade remarked. Gabriel grunted. “So what else do I need to know about this place? Are there inspections? Raids? Any local customs I should prepare for? What are the neighbours like?”

  “No inspections,” Gabriel said. “The authorities don’t come in here very often, although like the airport, there are a few government buildings where there’s always a security presence. Last time we had any major issues in the streets, they sent in a couple of peacekeepers from Adelbairn proper. We haven’t had a disturbance since.”

  “I saw a lot of Molren and Gróbs,” Greyblade said, and Gabriel nodded.

  “Yeah, they’re pretty peaceful. This block is mostly empty – the apartments on either side actually belong to other Angels but they’re not here right now – but the couple of occupied units are Molren. Nothing much to tell you.”

  Greyblade opted not to ask where the other Angels were. “And the quarter’s exits?”

  “Loosely patrolled,” Gabriel said, “on street level and in the air, with occasional checks on the known underground weak spots. There aren’t any walls or barricades,” he settled back against his wings, and crossed his hairy ankles. “Most of the basic stuff you need to know ought to be accessible to your computer system,” he concluded, “but there’s not much. Have you been contacted by Osrai yet?”

  “Osrai?”

  Gabriel twirled a hand vaguely. “Earth’s distributed artificial intelligence system,” he said. “It’s been around for a while but I’m still not sure how extensive it is. Made during the exile, then sort of went to ground when the veil was lifted. I guess it was hiding from the Argos and other machine minds. It may have merged with some of them, taken on a bit of their flavour,” he shrugged. “It plays things pretty close to its chest. But it popped back up after the war and began shoring up economies, coordinating information … it even pushed through the waste management protocols of the vents, and a single miscalculation in the dump sites would have chewed through this world like a jigsaw. As it stands, the sites are stable and we’re all still here, although it was touch and go for a while when the humans thought the waste was some sort of last strike against them. Osrai helped manage the misinformation there, convince people that it was their weaponry that was the problem, help them take steps.”

  “Osrai, huh?” Greyblade said, and skimmed his data. The name popped up a number of times, and knowing it was a distributed AI made its context easier to understand, but he didn’t receive any kind of response to his greeting and handshake signals. Perhaps it wasn’t the turn-up-and-chat sort of AI.

  “Sometimes it goes years without talking,” Gabriel confirmed, “except in specialised machine-ways. It never quite came back out of its shell after its … programmer … died. It talks to me because I was there, but it’s pretty grudging. It only opens up to people with the right kinds of minds.”

  “I’ve always been a bit clumsy when it comes to AI,” Greyblade admitted. “Strange for a cyborg.”

  “I think cyborgs and AIs are like that,” Gabriel sympathised. “Sensitive about getting on each other’s turf.”

  “Like cyborgs and biologicals,” Greyblade quipped.

  Gabriel huffed an almost-silent laugh. “You didn’t get into this game to be popular.”

  “No,” Greyblade said reflectively. “Right from the start,
I was in it because I love to travel.”

  BURNING KNIGHT

  Right from the start, Greyblade had been in it for the same reason as every other Burning Knight in the history of the institution: he had absolutely no choice in the matter.

  He’d never really been a Lowland Elf. The Burning Knights were technically an enhanced subspecies of Áea-folk but they weren’t even genetically compatible. They’d branched off so long ago, they might as well have been different species altogether. The Áea-folk had gone on evolving, vibrant and fierce. The Knights, too, had evolved. But the process had been far darker and colder than their fanciful name would lead the unsuspecting to believe.

  Greyblade’s organic root had been born of a mother and father in the traditional sense, but the process had been regimented. His progenitors had been more machine than organism, great murmuring mounds of genetic catalogues and selection compensators, with centrepieces that were sweaty amalgamations of brains, glands and reproductive apparatus, the discarded jewellery of horrifying titans. He’d been generated, one in ten million, as a Commander. Lord of Legions. The military executor – and executioner – of the Pinian Brotherhood in the mortal sphere.

  And that had been his existence. It wasn’t like you had much of an alternative. You went on living with every last scrap of your feeble and failing energy – or you lay down and died, a failure. That was the biological condition. It was a condition that folded so neatly into being a warrior, he couldn’t comprehend how organisms managed to become anything else.

  Conscious almost from the moment of his extrusion, Greyblade – then Command Unit something-or-other, a string of identity markers he could still recite to a depressing length – was installed in a series of machines. Simple electronic networking webs at first, and then physiology-enhancing frames as his body grew. He remained compact – Burning Knights were little larger than humans, while their Áea cousins towered to Molran-height and even greater – but he grew tougher, stronger, faster. By the time he was two years old, he could have crushed a Lowland Elf in one hand … if his hands, in their metal exoskeletons, had been large enough.