[Part 4: The Narrative] Chapter 35

  Part 4: The Narrative

  You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.

  - Richard Adams, Watership Down

  Day 19

  AC: We should not have killed Arcadelt.

  ZA: He was dangerous.

  AC: Perhaps, but not to us.

  ZA: Derxis was terrified of him.

  AC: Of course. And Derxis is a paragon of rationality.

  ZA: Was that a joke, Acarnus?

  AC: Why does everyone act surprised when I make a joke?

  AC: I have made seven jokes since our arrival here.

  ZA: ...

  ZA: Was that another one?

  ZA: It was your idea to kill him, anyway.

  AC: Yes.

  AC: And it was a mistake.

  AC: I feared his potential for harm, knowing as I do what damage may be done with the misuse of such powers.

  AC: But it has become clear that the purpose of Arcadelt was to guide us.

  AC: And we have gone astray for his lack.

  ZA: How has that become clear? Through your memories?

  AC: Primarily.

  ZA: Are you getting them sorted out?

  AC: Somewhat.

  AC: It is difficult.

  ZA: In what ways have we gone astray?

  AC: The stars are falling. We do not know why.

  ZA: Yes...

  AC: We do not know how to fix it. We do not even know what the result of this will be—only that it is unfavorable.

  AC: That is one example.

  AC: An example of something Arcadelt would have explained to us.

  ZA: Have you tried asking the Lords?

  AC: Some of them. Their knowledge is generally limited to their role.

  ZA: What about the Bright World?

  AC: That will be my last resort.

  ZA: At least we can all talk through things together now.

  ZA: Good job on setting up the relay.

  AC: Thank you. It was difficult.

  AC: I must go.

  ZA: Let me know if you learn anything new from those old memories.

  ZA: Anything could be important.

  Someone approached from the lower bridge. Acarnus remained perfectly still in the darkness of the rafters. His auto-camouflage blended his form into the shadows, and he was comfortable enough in his adhesive tethers to sleep there. He had a perfect view of this corridor and all those connected to it. Feed from five of his drones flickered before his eyes whenever something moved. He could see in any spectrum he desired: infrared, ultrasonic, microwave, fluoroscopic, bluetrace, thermal. He saw everything.

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  He detached himself from the ceiling and dropped silently to the ground behind the Darkworlder after it passed. This Darkworlder wore a helmet, as most of them did on the Destroyer cruisers. Acarnus darted aside into the shadows. The Darkworlder stopped to input his code at a security checkpoint prior to the gen-ops door. Acarnus’s drones saw the code. They scanned the ID card. One of them slipped through the door without Dr. Cortosis noticing.

  Easy. Security was lax, as he had expected it to be, onboard a cruiser stationed so far from both Ardia and the Dark World. He waited a minute, then activated the previously formulated interference channel. All surveillance monitoring devices in the area shorted out for exactly the amount of time it took for Acarnus to pass through the checkpoint. The simultaneous outage of the surveillance network would be noted as suspicious, as would the fact that Dr. Cortosis just entered the gen-ops sector twice in two minutes without ever leaving it. If standard protocol was followed, the lockdown order would be confirmed within seconds.

  Standard protocol would not be followed on this day; Acarnus had made sure of it.

  Easy. A little too easy. His mind wandered as he dodged cameras and laser detection systems in the labyrinthine gen-ops offices. He thought about his memories.

  He had received from the Desert Watcher what he had asked for. He remembered Anthea. He remembered all of it, including his encounter with Akkama at Prax. And now he could count himself among those who knew firsthand that every wish granted by the Desert Watcher was a curse in disguise. He remembered Anthea; he remembered talking with her for long hours, watching the skies, playing games, sharing their songs. The memories had been restored, but memories did not equal emotions. He felt nothing toward Anthea now except for pity. Even if he had felt something, some lingering trace of the love he had never quite dared to profess, it could not now be reciprocated.

  A door to his right slid open suddenly to admit two witless technicians. He disabled them before they became aware of his presence in the corridor. He took their keys, just in case, and locked their unconscious bodies back in the office. He checked his network tap. About three minutes until the alarm sounded.

  Perhaps the most brutal unfairness was that he could not hate Akkama. He had lost all attachment to Anthea, yet he had spent six months with Akkama. She was reckless and arrogant and petty, but this was not the complete picture. She didn’t know, for he was not fool enough to tell her, but he had seen her cry. He had seen her stop to pet a cat, and share her food with starving jackals. She was instinctively violent, but also fearless, and protective of those few things she loved. She battered herself against the limits of reality. In her mind, there was nothing she could not do. Erroneous. And yet…something about her fierce rejection of her own limitations had come close to inspiring him. Even now, she played gleefully with fire as she meddled with dangers like Abraham Black.

  A computer terminal. Robots, easily dispatched. A cloudcrash integrated security system, easily overcome. He plugged in his goggles; his view turned digital. The entire Destroyer hovered before him, every system under his fingers. He tried to scope out, to go beyond, but something stopped him. He clicked his tongue in annoyance. This Destroyer had a partitioned network. Why? He unplugged. He’d have to go to the lower bridge directly. That, at least, would be interesting.

  The alarm sounded when he left the room and stepped over the smoking remains of the robots. Slightly ahead of schedule. Probably triggered by said smoking remains. He had just downloaded the entire schematic of the Destroyer. He pulled it up, worked out an optimal route in two seconds. He stepped down the hall, lasered a quick hole at a certain point in the wall, and crawled into a cooling duct. To cover his tracks, he dropped a timed plasma grenade in the hall. It detonated after he had made the first turn, blasting him with hot air. They would not know where he had gone until it was too late.

  The Desert Watcher had given him more than he had asked for. Or perhaps he had simply not been specific enough. The voice of Brother Chain whispered in his head: specify. Yes. He should have specified. The Watcher had flooded Acarnus with memories—centuries, millennia of memories. He was still trying to sort them out. He was learning, learning important things, but too slowly. Much too slowly.

  The memories belonged to the Chained God. They arrived slowly, surfacing into his consciousness like bubbles rising through a thick syrup.

  Acarnus knew that in some way he was the Chained God. All of them, Rasmus and Anthea and the rest, were all the gods. And long ago, the gods had done this exact thing—the Narrative, the doors, the Dark World, the Lords and Arcadelt and Skywater. Infernus had been the result. Infernus and its “gods.”

  Many questions remained, and the answers came too slowly. He had remembered about the importance of Arcadelt only after they had killed him. Perhaps that too was part of the curse of the Desert Watcher. He had asked for his memories—all of them—but had failed to specify when he received them. Specify, said Brother Chain. And the conviction grew within him that they were making some crucial mistakes.

  A drone joined him inside the shaft. He hooked a hand into its fin and let it drag him the rest of the way. He inspected the lower bridge through his goggles, his sight not inconvenienced by intervening solid objects. Thirteen targets, mostly lower-ranking officers, scattered about the command bridge at the heart of gen-ops, near the core of this Destroyer-class cruiser. Four targets were Ashen Troopers, elite squad. He had hoped to avoid those. He had two drones in the shaft with him, two already hidden in the bridge, and two waiting outside the two main entrances. He flipped rapidly through their respective video feeds.

  Reinforcements on the way. Time to act.

  He triggered the proximity warning in the bridge. The sudden light and sound provided a distraction to cover the sight and sound of plasma beam slicing through a few layers in the ceiling.

  Hot circles of metal dropped to the raised deck of the bridge, where they nearly struck a hapless officer. Two drones exploded into the room; two swooped down from the fresh hole in the ceiling, and two revealed themselves from within the bridge.

  Chaos.

  Acarnus dropped into view from the hole and hovered in the air. Two Ashen Troopers opened fire, but it was only a hologram. The real Acarnus swung down as drones engaged the two who had fired.

  Three drones down already. Stars appeared in Acarnus’s hands. He leapt aside as green lightning obliterated the console next to him. He twisted in the air, flung out his arms. Two shining arcs danced, weaved, and bit into two of the Ashen Troopers at the joint between helmet and collarplate. They exploded.

  Acarnus shone with an aura of grey light. Mist coalesced into a collection of titanium stars, impossibly sharp. They scattered through the bridge in blurs of speed, weaving like birds, striking like serpents, biting like wolves. Each one found a target and inflicted a precise, lethal wound before dissolving back into mist.

  He was plugged into a console before the last officer struck the charred, bloody deck. Downloading, searching. One drone left, and it watched all the exits.

  There. Locations, names, data. Dark World agents. Abraham Black’s internal status. The Mandragoran. Fjellheim’s strategic suggestions. Chrestomanci. Proof of Lord Foe’s treachery. Most of all—intel that made the rest pale in comparison—details about the Dark Ruler, his citadel of Storisende, its defenses.

  Reinforcements on the way, many. An entire squad of Ashens, and Acarnus with one drone remaining. Time to make an exit.

  He opened the blast windows. Ahead, grey plating slid aside to reveal a starry expanse.

  The final drone sacrificed itself to break open one of the windows. It wished him luck as it died.

  Acarnus dove through. A few energy beams chased him outside, but the reactive closure of the blast windows swiftly cut them off.

  The Silence IV scooped him up outside and vanished into the void. Acarnus could not help but gaze at the Narrative’s crawling stars. Here near the Empyrean they glittered close and bright on one side, but were distant pinpricks on the other. It was obvious from out here that everything was a sphere, closed in by the stars. And there were far fewer stars than there had been at the start. Even now he saw one fall; it dropped away from the firmament toward Ardia.

  They had escaped one dying world and entered another. Acarnus breathed another of Brother Chain’s sayings as he left the Destroyer far behind. “We cannot escape entropy.”