I woke up lying on my back, several sharp somethings digging into me through my army jacket. I smelled chemical smoke, hot metal, burning plastic. Metallic clangs like dropped tools sounded irregularly, some near and some far off. I stung and ached all over with that weird, taut bruises-forming feeling, and just breathing hurt. Worst of all, a heavy weight lay limp atop me, blocking my vision. I raised my arms and hurled it off before sitting up and rubbing my stinging eyes.
“Oof!” The whatever-it-was landed with a clatter of metal and a very human grunt. I turned to the source of the sound and found Arcadia sprawled against a pile of rusty old sheet-metal shelving, one hand pressed to the side of her head. Her white suit was streaked with dust and scorch marks.
“Was that quite necessary?” she groaned.
“I didn’t know it was-“
“Especially considering I just saved your life?”
“What do you- Oh. Right. Uh, thanks.” I recalled the missile assault washing over us, the slick, wobbly feeling of Arcadia’s translation, the weirdness of shrapnel going through me without going through me, and then…And then the fucking ground collapsed, and Kings know how far we fell, and now we’re wherever this is.
A cursory glance around didn’t do much to enlighten me. The floor was a shattered concrete pad scattered with unidentifiable bits of metal and plastic detritus. The ceiling and walls were rust-eaten sheet metal braced with half-crumpled steel trusses. Streams of water trickled from above in a few spots, puddling and flowing strangely on the off-kilter floor. The room seemed to contain nothing but the scrapheap Arcadia sat against and a few decrepit pieces of machinery shoved into one corner. The only other things of note were the doors to my left and right, a big hole in the wall across from me, behind Arcadia, and- oddly enough- the flickering mercury lamps in the ceiling that let me see it all.
“I’ll come up with a suitable way for you to pay me back. L-later.” Arcadia finally opened her eyes, though she kept slowly rubbing her head.
“You brain yourself on the way down, Arc?” I asked, concerned despite myself. I still had no idea what she wanted, but she hadn’t gone back on her no-stabbing promise yet. Quite the opposite.
“No clue, but it seems likely, doesn’t it?” She moved her hand and checked the palm for blood. “I’m not bleeding, I think…and Arc? Oh. Right. Arc.” Even in her state she managed to raise a dubious eyebrow.
“Easier than ‘Arcadia’ every single time, isn’t it?” I gingerly got to my feet one-handed, though a glance at my bad arm showed no real change. I must have been lucky enough not to land on it. As I fully rose there was a surge of pain in my calf and my right leg threatened to give out. I half-fell against an iron support pillar and checked myself over. No big bleeds, though there were plenty of little scratches and a metallic taste in my mouth indicated I’d likely bitten my tongue. I pulled up the leg of my coverall to find a monster bruise already purpling on the side of my calf. It was bad enough that if I’d had regular bones in there they’d probably be broken, but now that I was ready for it I was able to carefully move.
I crouched down beside Arc with a groan. She seemed a little out of it, plucking at her suit jacket- which was wet with water from the ceiling and even more shredded than when I’d shot it up at our last meeting. Maybe her translation, however it worked, got spotty when it came to her clothes. Miraculously, her dark messy hair was still caught up in its bun by her hairpins. Finally she quit messing with the coat and flopped back in disgust.
“Am I going to go through a suit every time we meet, Sharkie? It’s inconvenient.”
“Maybe third time’ll be the charm. I don’t know what I can do for the concussion, but did you get hurt anywhere else?”
Her inky eyes met mine. “Besides everywhere?” I was about to get annoyed, but then that crooked smile showed up for a moment, fleeting as usual.
I snorted. “Okay, I guess you’re fine.”
“And what about you- Sharkie!” She pointed at my forehead all of a sudden, a shocked look on her face.
“What? What it is it?”
She winced. “You’ve got metal in your head! Right here, above your eye…”
“Oh.” I reached up, found it, and pulled it out. Eyes wide, Arc tried to stagger back against the scrap heap and failed, the sight somewhat ludicrous from someone of her stature.
It came free without much pain and I checked it out. Just a little triangular piece of fragmentation casing. My skull and Arc’s translation had stopped it. That made me wonder what would happen if she turned it off while passing through something.
“Just a little shrapnel,” I reassured her. “Don’t pop a disc over it.”
She shook her head and immediately winced. “Just a little- oh, whatever. I was worried you were going to pull on it, and it would just keep coming and coming out…” Now I shivered a little. That was a gruesome image no matter how unlikely. “And what do you mean, ‘pop a disc?’”
Right. She’s not from here. “It’s like, ‘don’t freak out,’ or ‘don’t overreact,’ or something like that. I think it comes from vat workers. The processors, I guess they all have burst discs in ‘em in case of overpressure, so they’re saying ‘don’t cause an emergency when there isn’t one-‘“
In a series of slow, careful movements she inched herself up with her elbows, eventually reaching a sitting postion.“Which vats do you mean?
Right. She’s really not from here. “They make arpaste. Which is…kind of our staple food, for some definition of food-“ From the hole in the wall behind her came the roar of flyer engines. Not right on top of us, but close. Arc heard it too and it seemed to shock her the rest of the way awake. She turned over and crawled to the top of her heap and I flopped down beside her. At first all I could see outside was dark, dark, dark. Nothing to tell us where we were. But then a VTOL streaked across our view, its screaming engines trailing purple-orange flame. In their light I just barely made out a wall of rock behind it- but no ground at all. Missiles tore from its racks, fired at some point nearer to us. My SKH eye did its best to trace their trajectories and they weren’t coming directly our way.
“Motherfuck,” I whispered. Whatever this place we’d fallen into was, it had to be situated partway down the Chasm’s wall. We were, to put it eloquently, utterly boned. A shiver ran through whatever building or structure we were in, sending rust flaking from the walls and ceiling. A moment later we heard the explosions.
“Look!” came Arc’s harsh whisper. I squinted and made out faint bluish laser beams originating somewhere to our left, only visible where they pierced scraps of the humid fog. They converged on the screeching VTOL, which unleashed a fusillade of chaff and smoking magnesium-bright flares- but then the air was torn by a deep ripping noise, like someone tearing a heavy bolt of cloth. A torrent of lights shot towards the VTOL from somewhere on our wall.
“Tracers…holy shit,” I murmured. There were enough of them to make almost a continuous line from the flyer back to our wall, and they were big. The chaff played hell with my eye’s tracking attempts, false threat-markers flickering all over, but whatever was shooting didn’t have the same problem. Active protection guns sputtered to life on the VTOL’s flanks but it was no use. Airbursting shells crackled into deadly life around it, flensing it with shrapnel. One of its engines coughed greasy flame and the other cut out entirely. Arc and I watched, transfixed, as the aircraft went into a descending spin before slamming into the Chasm’s far wall in a burst of purplish transuranic flame. The guns on our side chewed up the impact site, the tracers taking seconds to reach their point of impact. A belated shockwave washed over us, catching at my hair. Finally the guns cut off, the ripping sound of their super-high fire rate ceasing. Scraps of burning wreckage tumbled into the blackness. As far as I could see, they went out before hitting bottom.
“…that was rather final, wasn’t it?” Arc muttered, sounding a bit shellshocked.
I wasn’t far behind. “Somebody’s down here with us, and they aren’t fucking around. Has to be Admin.”
“That’s who supposedly runs this circus you call a city, isn’t it?”
“Right. And I bet the same ones who set up those guns are making that signal.”
“Ha.” She turned over and skidded back down onto the near face of the scrap heap. “I’d nearly forgotten that’s why we’re here.”
I stuck my head out as far as I could, even daring to poke it outside the window, but I couldn’t actually see anything to our left but the vague outline of some structure clinging to the wall of the chasm. A few lights and fires sparkled here and there, but not enough to actually tell what we were dealing with. I gave up and slid down to join Arc, gasping in pain when I bumped my calf on an upthrust piece of metal.
Arc reached into her jacket, retrieving a gold-plated lighter and a thin metal case of the same. She looked at the crumpled dent in the case and scowled before prying it open. I watched her toss several snapped-in-half cigarillos away before finally removing one that, though in one piece, had more dents and kinks in it than one of Walker’s cars. After a struggle she puffed the wiggly burner alight.
“What’s the plan?” she asked, blowing out a cloud of cherry-tinged smoke.
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I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “You look fucking ridiculous smoking that thing.”
Again the eyebrow shot up. “Well, at least I’ve got one.”
“I don’t even smoke!”
“Your loss,” she shrugged, entirely unfazed.
I dragged fingers through my hair and leaned forward, squatting on my heels. “Whatever. Anyway. I think our first priority is getting out of here, wherever here is.”
“I agree, but what about the signal?”
“Well, that’s the thing: we can look around here for a way up,” I waved vaguely around the room, “but I bet we’re just gonna find a cliff. Are you much of a climber?”
“No.”
“Me neither. So my guess is if we want to get back up, we’re gonna have to use whatever the hell whoever the hell’s over there has.”
Arc nodded, taking another drag. At least it smelled better than the rotten weed cuttings Walker smoked. “And they’re almost certainly producing the signal. Wait, of course!” She fumbled around in her jacket, sticking a hand in one of the inside pockets- only for her fingers to poke through a hole and outside. “Oh, don’t you fucking tell me…”
She felt around in all her pockets with no luck, then just barely stopped herself from throwing her burner with a frustrated noise. “The void-damned detector must have fallen out. Perhaps if Sharkie, Destroyer of Suits wasn’t around-“
“Aw, shut it. This time was your fault.” I grinned all the same. Arc seemed to be taking all this quite calmly, and it didn’t seem like shock. I was too, I realized. This was objectively a fucking terrible situation, but I was so used to jobs going wrong that at this point it hardly registered. Freaking out wouldn’t improve things any. The more I thought about it the worse, I decided.
“I would have translated myself better if I didn’t have to protect your oversized corpus as well.” She jabbed at me with the cigarillo, though considering its crookedness she was pointing more at the ceiling. “Entirely your fault.”
“Who the hell are you calling oversized, jo-san? You don’t look like you wear a size small of anything,” I laughed.
“Am I really that large?” She glanced down at herself, seeming unsure. “I know I’m a bit taller than usual, but…”
I recalled she hadn’t had an entire city to compare to growing up- all her standards would probably have come secondhand, from books or holos or whatever. “I’d say ‘tall,’ more specifically, but we’re both pretty far from normal.”
“Ah. Good.” She leaned back, a satisfied look in her heavy-lidded eyes.
Now it was my turn to look nonplussed a moment before shaking it off. “This all reminds me. It’s not going to be easy to get to our way out, I’ll bet. We ought to see what we’re working with.”
“That does make it easier to plan. Alright.” Arc shifted herself into a crouch to match mine, then pulled off her jacket. The sleeves of her dark shirt were already rolled up in the humidity, revealing tough and sinewy arms. She wasn’t as bulky as me, but she looked plenty strong.
“I’ve got, let’s see…” She removed a pair of big, hammer-fired pistols from holsters under her arms, their polished steel slides covered in intricate scrollwork. I’d cut one in half at our last meeting but she must have found another. “First of all, these and a few spare magazines for each.”
“What the hell are they?” I asked. For all that they were in good shape they looked very old.
“Colt Automatics, Caliber .45,” she said, tapping the slide with a fingernail. I zoomed in to read the roll-stamped markings with my bionic eye. “The Sculptor had them lying around- several of them, thank you very much- and I like how they look,” she shrugged.
They looked to shoot a pretty big bullet at least, though who knew how’d they’d do against armor. “They work alright?”
“I’ve practiced plenty, and they’ve never jammed. What else…” An astonishing number of knives began to appear from all over her person: small throwing blades from her belt and within the sleeves of her jacket, a pair of short single-edged blades from her pockets that looked a lot like my own knife, one of those funny claw-looking knives with a ring through the handle- people called them a ‘cramp-it’ , maybe because they looked so uncomfortable to hold- and finally a full quartet of the long fighting daggers she’d come against me with before, two from her pistol harness and the others from her belt. It had to be ten pounds of edged metal on the low end.
“You, uh, you think you brought enough knives?” I asked with a wary smile.
She just looked at me, almost seeming offended. “Obviously not. We’re still stuck down here, aren’t we?”
I decided she was making a joke. “That’s all, then?”
“Mmm…I’ve got a lighter, a couple of flashlights, what used to be a cigar case, this communicator,” she put down a small black rectangle like a piece of obsidian, “which will be useless because the Sculptor won’t answer it and wouldn’t help us if she did-“
“Wait, really?”
She rolled her eyes, the picture of scorn- though I didn’t think it was for me. “Here, I’ll show you.” She picked the little thing up and twisted its top section around. It rejoined the rest seamlessly when she let go and put it down, and then the whole thing gradually changed color from pure black to a cool crystalline jade. It was like nothing I’d ever seen- this was spacetech, or something close to it. It pulsed light a few times, then abruptly went black again. Even not having seen the communicator before, the meaning seemed clear: the Sculptor had canceled the call like a dealer owed too much money.
“So that’s fucking out, okay,” I muttered. “Why carry it if she won’t pick up?”
Arc gave a diffident shrug, eyes still on the communicator. “I don’t know. Sometimes she does. Perhaps I’m just hoping to annoy her.” She must have notcied me looking at her, for she raised her head and watched me levelly. “She’s not exactly a parental figure, if that’s what you’re wondering. I know most people have parents. Do you? I- I don’t mean literally, of course-“
“Yeah, I have a dad. He found me when I showed up here. However that happened. I’m guessing you don’t know how that happened…?“
“No.” She shook her head. “I have no idea why you ended up in this city or how. The Sculptor told me it wasn’t exactly what she’d intended, but it worked out well enough. Her words.” That sneer again. I was beginning to understand why she didn’t like the Sculptor much.
“That sounds…nice, I suppose,” Arc continued. “Having a father. Is it?” The question was asked in that same matter-of-fact tone she had about everything.
“In my case, yeah.” I felt awkward, like I was flaunting something she couldn’t have.
But she only nodded crisply. “Good. And that’s everything I’ve got. Oh, and I think we could both use some of this.” She dug a flask out of her piled-up jacket, which was maybe the first good thing I’d seen since waking up. She sloshed it back and forth. “It’s skotch.”
I had no idea what that was. Sounded Sovish. “Booze, right? Mind if I try?”
“Only after I go.” Arc took a big swig and passed it off.
I drank and almost started coughing the taste was so unexpected. “Pf-What the-oh, man. Shit tastes like a house fire! Strong, though- what’s it made of?”
Arc laughed at my reaction, a quiet and almost wheezy sound. “No idea. The Sculptor’s got a bunch of that lying around too. She says they aren’t making any more, though. Whoever they are.”
I coughed some more. “Think I can live with that. Thanks, though.” I handed back her flask and she put it away. “Now, as for me-“ I spread out my kit next to hers. Two comslabs that miraculously hadn’t shattered in the fall, the Slukh and a couple reloads, the coilgun and a couple more, my fixed-blade, and of course my new Wiken glittersaw. “That’s silent, that’s loud but pretty powerful, that’s just a knife, and that’ll cut through almost anything. All I’ve got. I wasn’t planning on fighting at all, but I guess that was a stupid fucking plan.”
“This is the same kind of power tool you tried on me before, isn’t it?” Arc ashed her cigar and reached for the saw with a questioning look. I nodded that she could look at it. If she was going to kill me she’d have done it by now. Probably.
“Yup. Careful though, even turned off the blade’ll rip you up.”
She slowly unsheathed it, watching the diamond-toothed blade sparkle even in the dull, flickering light of the mercury lamps. When she bumped the trigger the teeth blurred into almost silent motion, only torn air betraying the fact that they moved at all. “And you really use this to fight…” Arc murmured, almost to herself.
“It works pretty good if you’re stupid enough to fight that close. Which, uh, yeah.” I waved a hand at myself.
Arc smirked. “Pretty good, so long as nobody cuts the blade off.”
“Not fair. You’re a special case. In fact, how did you even do that?” I had I couple guesses but I wanted to be sure.
She carefully sheathed the saw before answering. “When I translate, it’s like…it’s hard to explain.” Her eyes narrowed even further in frustration. “I’m there, and I’m not there, so I can go through things. But when I stop, there’s obviously going to be something there in the spot where I do, even if it’s just air. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I sort of…I suppose ‘overwrite’ is a good word. I overwrite whatever’s there if I can. Air is easy, but something solid- well, I couldn’t just put myself into the middle of a brick wall. Not with out a good chunk of my mass turning into brick- randomly distributed, of course.” I shuddered at the unpleasant image, retroactively scared of what could have happened when she’s translated me before. “But small things- say, something the thickness of a knife blade and the width of your saw,” she grinned, “those I can overwrite, with effort.”
“Ahhh…I was thinking it was something like that. But where does it go, the stuff you overwrite?”
“What do you mean?”
“It has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?” I wracked my brain for scraps of educational holos Sawada’d parked me in front of when I was younger. “There’s some rule that says you can’t just make matter disappear, right? Or something like that?”
“Conservation of mass?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Arc frowned. “I’m not sure. It’s nothing I experience on so granular a level. More like moving a muscle, just one that’s…not. Awful explanation, but-“
“No, no, I get it.” Consciously pulling up my chill had felt kind of like what she described. I couldn’t help but be a little envious- my ability or power whatever was only useful when someone else was around for it to disable. Oh, fuck it. You’ve done alright so far. For some reeaaallly broad definition of alright. “So. The plan. I say we walk towards the gunfire, kill anyone in the way, and get out of here. Oh, and if we spot something that looks like it could make an ‘unusual signal,’” I applied some very heavy sarcasm, “we make a note.”
Arc blinked, then began retrieving all her her knives. “I would say those are some very broad strokes, but we don’t exactly have much to narrow it down, do we?”
I did the same and stood. “Oh! You know, just in case, let me make sure there’s not a stairway leading all the way out just above here or something.” I went to one corner of the room and managed to climb up on some blocky derelict machinery. It was high enough I could get to the ceiling with the saw. I slashed a rough triangle in the thin metal up above.
“Hot damn.” This Wiken saw was something. It cut even better than the old one and with less noise and effort. I peeled the impromptu trapdoor away and handed it to a helpfully ready Arcadia, then levered myself through. Luckily we were on the top floor of whatever this place was already. I ended up kneeling on a corrugated sheet-metal roof, slightly sloped. Warm, sticky wind caressed my face- the chasm was so wide it actually had a bit of weather even this far down. Speaking of, I looked up and saw nothing. No lights, no stairs, no anything but sheer, dimly visible rock. Off to my right were a few more roofs, even more decrepit than ours. The row ended abruptly at a sheer drop. Left, though, was much more fruitful.
More blocky metal structures like our room crowded together in a line, seeming to be perched on a ledge protruding from the Chasm’s wall. There was a long gap at the end of the line, but across from it was an even larger structure like some kind of derelict warehouse or factory. The Chasmward side was a rough mess of twisted beams where much of the building had pulled away and fallen to the bottom, but the rest was relatively well preserved- that, and burning. Fires that had to be from the missile strikes burned on the roofs and in some of the windows. I thought I saw dim humanoid figures moving around them, beginning to put them out. More of those targeting lasers swept across the abyss and I decided to get down before some Admin bastard with a thermal scope spotted me and put an anti-materiel slug through my eye.
My boots hit the floor with a dull clang. “Looks like left is all we-“ I stopped as Arc held up a hand. The other was already filled with knife.
“Someone’s coming,” she murmured.