Chapter 30

  His name was Rizko; his title was Captain; his codename was Project Grey—Grey because of his arda and Project because he was the head of the scientific research and development division within the Ephathic Remnant.

  He awoke from a nightmare, hot and sweaty in the cool synth-silk fiber sheets of his bed. He took a deep, shaky breath as he tried to remember what the dream had been about. He stared at the little blinking lights above his bed. Might as well get to work, since he was awake. What had he been doing before falling asleep? He paused, unable to remember. “Lights,” he croaked.

  But nothing happened. No sterile fluorescent glare illuminated his immaculate living capsule. And when he tried to move his arm to manually flip the light switch by his bed, he could not. His arm was pinned to the bed. Both his arms. And his legs. He could not move. Panic, which had not entirely subsided from the forgotten dream, fluttered anew in his chest.

  A match was struck, an old-style match that flared in the dark and brought the acrid scent of sulfur to Rizko’s nostrils. The light briefly revealed another figure in his capsule, who sat in Rizko’s chair and watched him from beside the bed. The match lit a candle—Rizko kept no candles in his capsule—and the flame dimly illuminated the brilliant orange robes of a color priest. A priestly mask glowered at him, stern and threatening in the candlelight.

  Everything about this bizarre apparition radiated menace. The bright colors of its raiment in what should be a grey and dull capsule, out of place. The candle burned with an unnatural orange intensity. The painted wooden face promised punishment, retribution, possibly vengeance. But that laughter, an insane giggle from behind the mask, was the most terrifying of all.

  Rizko’s thoughts swam dizzily. Everything blurred. A tangible fear crawled over him, stealing away his rationality, confusing him. He could only think: why? A color priest? Why is it here? Why me?

  “How about a riddle?” asked the color priest. “I like riddles.”

  Rizko couldn’t speak. He wanted to shout, to call for help. Something was wrong here, but he couldn’t think what.

  “What is this thing that, having it, you can no longer give it away? And yet, lacking it, you can distribute it freely? Heheh… What do you think?” That horrible mask tilted down at him. Suddenly it seemed closer, very close; it filled Rizko’s entire vision.

  “Oh, right,” said the Color Priest. “You may speak. Go ahead. Don’t be shy.” He laughed.

  Rizko found that the priest was correct. He could speak. But he could not think. He could not answer the riddle. Then he found that he didn’t have to. The answer was there, burning in his mind: death. The answer was death.

  “What was that?” The priest leaned closer and theatrically tilted its head, cupped a hand around one ear.

  “D…death,” Rizko whispered.

  The color priest clapped his hands, a sudden and startling noise. Rizko thought again that something was wrong here. The priest was holding the candle. How had he clapped his hands? The candle had not moved. The fuzz began clearing from his mind. It should not be possible for this priest to have entered his capsule, and to have done so without triggering alarms. Where was his security?

  “How…?” Rizko whispered. A great weight seemed to press all over him. It was too dark in his capsule, even with only a candle for light. The flame wasn’t reflecting on any of the shiny equipment in the small space of his living quarters. Too dark, and the color priest was too large for his voice.

  “How did I get here?” the priest said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. The real question is why, don’t you think? How about it? Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”

  Rizko nodded.

  “I am here to ask a single question, and to get a single true answer. Then, once I have it, I’ll leave you alone. Simple, right? Easy, right?” He chuckled. His laugh had the sound of insanity in it. It filled Rizko with dread, and something about that was strange.

  “Fine. Ask.”

  “Okay! Here we go then. Here it is. Ready? I said, ready?” That mask leaned in close to Rizko’s face.

  Rizko only nodded. He tried to feel what the restraints were like on his arms and legs, but could detect no pressure. He simply could not move.

  “All right. The question! Here it comes. It goes like this:

  WHERE ARE THE ANGELS?

  Rizko cried out in pain and alarm. That had been more than sound; more than noise. It had shaken him all through his body and mind.

  Suddenly, he could think clearly. The angels? What did a color priest—of which he had thought none remained—want with the angels? Ah, of course, he was one of them. One of the ten.

  Rizko spoke: “What do—”

  The color priest was holding a micro-flechette handgun. He shot Rizko in the right knee, flensing skin, tearing muscle from bone. His kneecap shattered. The pain was spectacular. It filled Rizko’s mind. He screamed and he screamed. And why did no one hear him? The living capsules were not soundproof.

  Suddenly, he could think again. The pain was still there, still alive and well, but now it was trapped behind a wall in his mind.

  “So,” said the color priest, who sounded as though he teetered on the brink of hysterical laughter, “the angels. I just want to know

  WHERE

  they are.”

  That ‘where’ hammered Rizko’s mind in a way that excruciating pain never could. He had never been afraid, until now, of crippling injury done not to his body but to his very thought processes. Rizko became aware that tears were rolling down his face.

  The color priest rested the gun casually up against his shoulder and leaned back with a foot on the bed. “I don’t really have all day, so let me just tell you what is going to happen. Once I spoil the ending, maybe then we can skip right to it, you know? I’m going to keep shooting you and asking questions. And you’re not going to die. It’s just going to get worse and worse. And eventually you’ll either tell me or else you’ll really start thinking about where they are, which is the same thing. So just save yourself some trouble, OK?”

  Reasonable. It was very reasonable. Why not just tell the color priest what he wants to know? Even if Rizko somehow held out, endured the torture, wouldn’t this color priest just find someone else? Was it not, in a sense, his duty to inform the enemy, so that afterward he might be in a position to do something about it? Perhaps lay a trap for this very color priest? And if he answered quickly, then perhaps this priest, who had somehow intruded into the Remnant’s command ship, would be caught. And then Rizko would be the one holding the micro-flechette weapon.

  Rizko saw that the orange candle flame glowed brightly, and that the priest seemed to be glowing as well. He thought again: something is not right.

  But he answered. What harm could it do? “The Local Docking Network,” he said.

  “More specifically,” said the priest.

  “We’ve built a specially designed storage pod. In the central hub of the B-section.”

  That fearful mask tilted as though in confusion. “How the hells did the forvalaca get up there?”

  It seemed like a good idea to keep the priest talking. “We make it take the shuttles. It doesn’t like being in orbit. We don’t give it a choice.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Why? Why the orbital docks?”

  “It’s the Grim King.” Rizko had a sense that he was doing something wrong; he shouldn’t be saying this. But he couldn’t place the reason why. It was probably fine. He just had to keep the priest talking. That was what mattered, though he couldn’t remember why it mattered.

  “What about the Grim King?”

  “We’re collecting the angels for him. He wants one. An angel. He says they are like keys. And he needs a key. Because a door will soon be available.”

  The priest, for once, seemed to have nothing to say.

  Rizko realized something: the pain in his leg was gone. It had never been there at all. Understanding came to him in an instant. “This is a dream,” he said.

  The color priest looked at him. An eerie giggle leaked out from behind the mask. “Yeah, well, you’re not leaving it just yet.” He snapped his fingers. “I have another riddle for you.”

  The imaginary restraints holding Rizko vanished. So did the color priest, the bed, his life capsule, and everything but the orange flame of the candle. It hung alone, suspended in a blank void.

  What is the riddle? Rizko asked the nothingness.

  What does he keep way down there in the dark, D-Man?

  Guilt, perhaps, Derxis?

  Nah, not this guy, D-Man.

  Well there must be something down there.

  Yeah. I wonder what it is.

  That’s the riddle, right?

  Every time, D-Man. Every damn time.

  Whatever it is, Derxis, I don’t think he’s going to like it.

  Not at all, D-Man. Not at all.

  Derxis rose to consciousness while rolling on the floor laughing. He muffled the sound at once, stifling his humor as he staggered quickly to his feet and looked around. No one in sight. Good. Might have been suspicious, him laughing maniacally on the floor like that. The thought sent new giggles shivering through him.

  He was alone with Captain Rizko in a small private canteen by the officers’ quarters. A few tables under the bright fluorescents, food synthesizer against one wall. A single door. Very plain, very boring. Very Ephathic.

  “Sweet dreams,” he said as he patted the grey-haired head of the Ephathic officer. Derxis could have killed him quite easily, and part of him wanted to do so, but the officer’s death would be broadcast at once to the entire command ship. Also, the bomb in his brain, installed to make sure he didn’t turn into a voidbound if he died, would explode. Which would be gross.

  Derxis left, but not before stealing Rizko’s left shoe and using his ID card to punch an order for 999 grape slushies into the synthesizer.

  He stepped outside and checked his apparel as the door hissed shut behind him. He wore a bulky grey and black bodysuit with a helmet. It didn’t fit him well, and he didn’t like it, but it rendered him anonymous. He could use his arda without anyone seeing the glow. He’d be back in the robes soon. Back behind a proper mask. Just one more thing to do: he had to tell Anthea. Had to access a secure relay.

  He tried not to think about his new information as he stepped out onto the exterior walkway. The Remnant working with—no, for—the Grim King? The very thought made him stop to shake off peals of laughter. And it was bad, it was very bad, because the Grim King was almost here, chasing after Solesta. Only a few days more, at most. And they needed their angels. His angel, and Fiora’s, and Acarnus’s, and Zayana’s. All stolen by forvalaca or Remnant. Derxis shivered at the memory of the forvalaca every time he walked past the coolant systems here on the Remnant command ship. He’d never been afraid like that before. All his powers were useless against that great beast. Yet it had spared him, for whatever reason. It had only taken Clicker the Chameleon.

  Infernus rotated into view under his feet as the walkway circled around the command ship. The floor was a synthetic diamond composite, clear as glass. Auroral sweeps wreathed the entire planet below him. The curtains of color looked almost stationary from this vantage. The rings of Infernus glittered in the sun. Stray debris, pulled by the lingering gravitational influence of Solesta, occasionally plummeted through the sweeps in bright, short-lived sheaths of brilliant light like pebbles dropped into a pond, splashing radiance.

  He had spent long hours up here staring down, drawing suspicion yet unable to tear himself from the sight. Such beauty, so far beyond the ability of any aboard this vessel to appreciate. Fiora would appreciate it. She would sing and dance. This being an Ephathic vessel, she would then be captured and enslaved. But he didn’t want to think about that. Or about the Grim King. Or about his growing mental instability, which he could see creeping up on him like a monster in a mirror, hunting him like the forvalaca.

  He entered the command deck with little difficulty. He was challenged only once, and it was by a daimon who was still mainly biological. A pulse of energy (trust, belief), conservative because the dream sequence had taken a lot out of him, was all Derxis required to bluff his way past. The machines were a lot harder to fool.

  He had to be quick, because he wasn’t supposed to be on the command deck. Really, he wasn’t supposed to be on this ship at all. And even though a crew of hundreds manned this vessel, his presence—the presence of a saboteur—was suspected. After all, comm nodes did not randomly rewire themselves, nor was it normal for crew members to awaken with silly drawings scrawled on their faces in indelible marker. When Captain Rizko awoke up to his knees in cold grape slush, missing his ID card, the chameleon would be out of the bag for sure. Out of the bag and into the fire.

  On the other hand, the thought of someone opening that door and being swept away by a flood of grape slushy made him stumble with hardly-suppressed wheezing laughter.

  He received a few second glances as he wormed his way through the science wing, home of Captain Rizko’s operations. Derxis hated coming here, but there was a comm station here and it was likely to be relatively free of observers. A curious thing about the Ephathites: the average soldier retained sufficient empathy to be somewhat uncomfortable with what went on in the science department. The experiments. The mutations, the gene therapy. The torture, the brainwashing, the breaking of minds and wills.

  Maybe Derxis came here to keep himself angry. A reminder. Lest he forget: the Ephathites were natural enemies of the color priests. They destroyed what Derxis worked to build and preserve. They shattered minds. They ruptured wills. They crushed dreams, and they ground creativity and hope into a flat nothing.

  And now he passed stacked rows of tanks of biotic fluid in which captives were submersed: yellow daimon who had been turned into living batteries, greens forced to heal, a rare purple whose brain had been wired into some kind of overclocking node.

  Derxis stopped in front of a row of green tanks. He wanted to help them, but there was no solution. Some of them were awake in there, and Derxis was terrified to touch their minds. He did not dare open that door. He was afraid it would result in him blowing up this entire vessel, with himself still on it. And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

  In any case, he had no time to help the tormented. No time to be a hero.

  No time. A classic excuse, D-Man.

  No time to even put them out of their misery, Derxis.

  Or are you just afraid of what you might do, D-Man?

  I’m gods-damned terrified, Derxis. But I can’t trust you.

  Nor I you, D-Man, nor I you.

  There is no hope for them, Derxis.

  Fool. There was never hope for any of us, D-Man.

  But there’s always another way.

  That’s right. We go on.

  Gotta send that message.

  Gotta get those angels.

  Gotta keep going. Gotta believe.

  Despite everything. We know, don’t we:

  Faith is madness

  But despair is death.

  And so we must say:

  And we must believe:

  All will be well.

  So Derxis shut his mind against the poor souls imprisoned in that place and hurried on. He found the control station, and he had to use most of the remainder of his powers to convince the daimon there to leave him alone for a few minutes. He wished Acarnus was with him as he worked out the complicated security protocols. But at length, the message was sent. He spent the rest of his time meddling with every system and setting he could find, changing every number he was able to change by as much as he was able to change it. And if this resulted in the spontaneous combustion of the entire vessel, well…that would count as some kind of trick, wouldn’t it?

  Hysterical laughter echoed through the control station.