“Above us, haughty regnant men connive
In dying stars by angry fires devoured;
Below, O wretches, take heart and revive,
And follow — our salvation this bower
Hides. Let them have the sky; the ground
Is ours. Wisdom we sought — Wisdom we found!”
—Cassilda’s words to the outcasts, The Heavenfall
----
Acerbian Center of Inquiry
Tumbling Seeding 20, 1885 CE
Before yesterday, Maga Senrii Generosus Ortus Nethress had never seen an evergreen in person, but it seemed as though the entire aesthetic was built around the species here in the laboratories of Acerbia, a city that her family, Gens Nethress, had held for centuries before their sworn enemies had conquered it. Needles of green snaked in dizzying starburst patterns across the bone-and-marble floors and walls.
Evergreen. The scent of it stirred some memory deep within Senrii’s SOPHIOS. The symbiotic organism distributed throughout her body was wide awake with the sheer number of temporary genetic enhancements that Senrii had actuated for the sake of her infiltration, and an electric surge traveled up her spine as her Wisdom realized that she was considering it.
Me, it seemed to say in that shiver. I am.
Not today, you aren’t, Senrii thought, forcing the Symbiont back into the deepest state of quiescence she could reach without deactivating a single enhancement — a single STIGMOS, a Splicing Template Informed by Genetic Markers in Organic Structures. She needed to keep her enhanced strength, eyesight, speed, and stranger organs running in order to complete her mission, even if that meant risking a control struggle with the SOPHIOS.
She needed every advantage to successfully complete her Prime Assay.
Senrii’s skinsuit, normally black and form-hugging, was camouflaging itself as a formless, undecorated white garment, its semipermeable material concealing her forgebone sword and pistol against the skin of her back. As she stepped out of the way of a bald, red-coated Gens Nxtlu inquirer coming down the hall, she garnered barely a second glance. Apparently Nxtlu didn’t find pale skin or chestnut hair odd on a bloodless slave like the one Senrii was pretending to be.
Blood and bile. It was a good thing that baldness was only expected among high-born members of Gens Nxtlu. She would have hated to shave her head.
As she pressed herself against the green-veined wall, Senrii spied a jungle wolf’s head in marble relief next to a forgebone door a few steps down. The Nxtlu idiots hadn’t even bothered to purge the Nethressian symbol-memes. They probably considered it evolutionarily inefficient to spend the energy.
As inconspicuously as she could, Senrii slipped to the door. Ping, she commanded her SOPHIOS, and in an instant her mind’s eye held the layout of the hallway. Of the textureless, faceless men and women frozen in mid-motion, none appeared to be in a physical position that would have indicated interest in her. It was probably safe.
Probably. And that was a good thing. If it was totally safe, where would the fun be?
Oh, Senrii was itching for some gunplay. Or maybe even some swordplay.
Senrii stuck her finger in the dire wolf’s open jaw and prayed that her blood would work as a needle pricked her skin. Even if Nxtlu hadn’t managed to clear out the Nethress genetic Keying from this door, there was no guarantee that her blood would open it.
Her dad’s genes were notoriously unreliable that way.
Against all odds, however, the circular door dilated open, the slippage of the plates making just enough noise to mask Senrii’s sigh of relief. Success! She stepped inside and pressed the button to close the door before any of the Nxtlu Generosi outside could stop her and inquire as to why a woman so clearly not of their extraction was entering the most sensitive lab in the building.
Senrii turned to survey the room and lost her breath at its circular vastness. The floor beneath her was wood, hard and smooth, and it curved gently downward to an enormous ovoid kernel of kiosks, a dozen stories tall, in the center of the room. To her left, to her right, above her, and, presumably, below her, for ten stories up and ten stories down, similar wooden platforms extended from the central walkways to the edge of the chamber.
She was standing on one petal of an enormous pine cone. Evergreens, again!
There were no railings on the platforms, either. If she fell, it would be a long way down to the bottom of the chamber.
Senrii knew that she had entered through only one of dozens of doors, that there were likely hundreds of inquirers working in the center of the pinecone. Time to move. She walked swiftly down the ramp to the central repository.
Large blood-vein letters read “1885RS”; below them, a series of tiny vials inhabited rows of niches, each one marked in the same manner by a day of the month of Rising Seeding. How lucky. Senrii smiled to herself. Purely by chance, of course, she had just so happened to come in the door so very, very close to…1885RS17. Of course, no self-respecting bloodless Nxtlu inquirer-slave would be stupid enough to lose track of these, would she?
Senrii grabbed all six of the 1885RS17 vials and shoved them underneath her lab coat into a pocket she’d secreted within her skin-suit. Objective accomplished. Time to get out.
The sound of the door opening at the top of the lip behind her and the scent of adrenaline, acrid and pungent to her enhanced sense of smell, implied that somebody else had other intentions for her.
Senrii spun, prepared to sprint up the wooden leaf to the door, but an ear-shattering ping caught her off guard. She flinched, tumbling to the side, and the motion saved her life as loud cracks filled the air and bone bullets ricocheted away from the spot where she’d been standing.
Of course they’d have people Stigmatized with sonar down here. When she’d pinged the hallway, she’d broadcast her location to the entire building. By flinching at their response, she’d just confirmed her ability to hear those wavelengths. They knew she wasn’t a slave; they knew she was a Maga.
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And that meant they knew she wasn’t one of theirs.
Senrii rolled to her feet and caught a brief glimpse of the scene at the doorway. A lab-coated inquirer, dark-skinned and shaved bald — that one had to be well-bred, though not well-bred enough to be worthy of the Nxtlu feathered headdress; probably a purple-blooded half-Bound — was holding his hands to his ears as an enormous bruiser rapid-loosed bone bullets from a gigantic, multibarreled gun. The rhythm of the mantis-shrimp strikers slamming bullets out of the barrel was a murderous drumbeat; the scrapes and indentations that slashed across the kiosks behind Senrii were squeals of a disharmonic string section.
Barrier! Senrii commanded, and her Symbiont obeyed, manifesting a circular forgebone shield on her forearm in accordance with the proper STIGMOS and tearing an enormous lacuna in her skinsuit’s arm as it did so. She swept the shield before her; bone bullets, unable to penetrate the forgebone buckler, impacted and disintegrated.
A jungle wolf’s howl began to resonate throughout the building, a hungry woodwind section joining the mad symphony. Seriously, they couldn’t even replace the alarm system?
Senrii had her Symbiont lengthen the shield as she sprinted up the ramp toward the bruiser. Even her augmented hearing couldn’t catch the inquirer’s entire sentence, but the final words “—gas lock!” and the ensuing lack of bullets told her enough.
The shield disintegrated back into her body through the skinsuit and Senrii flung her arm toward one of the neighboring platforms and actuated another STIGMOS. Webbing, over there! The SOPHIOS obeyed, flinging out a spray of ultra-sticky silk that caught on the nearby wood.
Newly-forged organs reeled in the strands and yanked Senrii off of her own leaf, and her feet barely cleared the walls and ceiling that were rapidly extending to cover the platform on which she’d been standing. She left behind a covered tunnel filled, no doubt, with poisonous gas. So much for 1885RS.
A slackjawed inquirer stared up at her from the kiosks down below. Senrii waved. “Don’t mind me.” She jammed on the button to open the door. “Just, you know, stealing your stuff. See ya!”
Her father’s voice echoed in her head as she ran into the hallway. We do what we must, but do not exult in it. She knew Dorsin would disapprove of her flippancy, but then, he wasn’t here, was he? Unlike, oh, a dozen half-bald Nxtlu warriors in small headdresses and red-and-black skull masks taking aim down the green-veined hallway.
She charged them, commanding her SOPHIOS to strengthen her arms and legs as bullets ripped the air around her. Forgebone beat bone, but bone sure beat soft flesh, and while she didn’t need to worry about weight — she could only manifest as much mass as she already carried inside her — air resistance, and balance, were as important as ever. No unwieldy shields in this race.
Sharp flying bone met skin and blood behind her. There was a high-pitched scream, a thump, then another. Still Senrii ran on, dodging side to side, ripping her pistol from the small of her back through the skinsuit and taking a pair of potshots as she came on.
One Nxtlu beast went down clutching his neck. About a million to go.
The soldiers loomed in her vision. Her heart pounded as if it was fit to burst. A bullet grazed her leg. The SOPHIOS immediately dulled the pain while the skinsuit closed above the wound, but it was a warning: she couldn’t afford predictability.
She would give them something they wouldn’t expect. Senrii leapt toward the wall, clearing four vertical feet and pulling herself completely out of the stream of bullets. Never missing a step, as the men brought their weapons to bear on her, she leapt from the wall, bounding to the opposite one.
She shoved her hands out in front of her as she impacted. The force was greater than she had anticipated, and it caught her off guard; she fell to her bottom in the midst of the warriors. They swung the guns around on her.
She grinned, released a hefty cloud of flesheater bacteria, and sprinted out of the green cloud as the men began to scream, their blood staining their red uniforms with a thicker shade.
“Tell your Dux I’m looking for him,” Senrii shouted over her shoulder as down the hallway, doors began to open.
Senrii raced screams of anger and pain and the cracks of mantis shrimp strikers lancing bone bullets to the elevator at the end of the hallway, which naturally refused to open for her. Of all the rotten luck. She elbowed through the doorway to the stairwell and took the steps two at a time toward the roof, passing door after door after door as she cleared one level after another. “Ready for business, Sophie?”
She was fairly certain that the surge in energy from her SOPHIOS signified agreement, but in the instant that she had to divert her attention from the task at hand in order to keep the Symbiont from overwhelming her, her focus slipped.
So did her foot.
Senrii crashed back onto the nearest landing next to a door. By the time she had regained her bearings and her feet, she could hear heavy footfalls both above and below.
She rammed through the door.
The room was dark and musty, but the gloom was nothing that her enhanced night-vision couldn’t pierce. Steam and ichor pumped through tightly-bound bundles of venous piping; dilation gauges tracked the pressure at release valves.
By the time the soldiers busted down the door, Senrii had opened every valve and sphincter she could find. The men slipped and slid on the blood, plasma, fuel, and sap spraying across the floor, and a hot steam bath managed to melt a face or two. With a stab here and there from her forgebone blade, Senrii slipped past and out while her pursuers struggled to right themselves and retreat.
Senrii had the vials, but she still needed a Nxtlu Generosus in order to complete her secondary objective. At the top of the stairwell, she crashed through onto the roof of the building.
Acerbia stretched outward and upward before her like an enormous black honeycomb nestled in a mountainside crook. The first rays of the sun were already painting the sky in brilliant reds and golds, and the hexagonal ebony buildings were just beginning to come awake. It was a beautiful sight if you ignored the bullets.
The telltale whipping sound of a whorlboat at the edge of the building informed Senrii that she really needed to be running. Maybe she wouldn’t capture a Nxtlu Generosus today. Too bad.
The whorlboat’s stiff, leaflike rotors rose first into view, right in front of her eyes, and Senrii ducked and shifted momentum in order to run the other way. In the last instant before the vehicle left her field of vision, however, she caught a glimpse of the gunner.
His head was shaven, his skin was dark, and he bore the feathered headdress of the highest-born of Nxtlu Generosi. And those eyes… those gray, piercing eyes. Senrii would have known them anywhere. Hadn’t she been briefed about Gens Nxtlu’s principals over and over again? How many images had she seen of the man?
It was Magus Dux Ilhicamina Generosus Ortus Nxtlu.
Maybe she’d manage the primary and the secondary objective both, then. And if she captured the Generosus in charge of the entire Duchy of Acerbia, then Gens Nethress would have to accept her to the Comitatus.
Senrii shifted her weight a second time and charged back in the direction she’d been running. Wings, gossamer! The skinsuit gave way as a membranous covering, its mass taken temporarily from her bones, meshed into existence between her arms and her sides. All over her body, tiny strands of spider-silk webbing extended into the air, catching the wind and pulling her forward into her sprint.
The Dux was bringing his shredder to bear on her…
But Senrii was at the ledge, and then she was sailing through the air, swaying back and forth to remain a moving target but still driving toward the gunboat. He couldn’t track her like this —
Her heart lurched as her SOPHIOS, her soul, shook with static.
Silver sand. Two bright balls of light burning in an alien sky.
There was no control. There was only the loud crack of the shredder, only the pain between her arm and her body, only the feeling of liquid loss and air spinning around her body and her head as the dawn sky disappeared and black buildings grew darker and darker until there were no more buildings.
After another moment, there wasn’t even darkness.