Michael switched off the HUD with a cerebral jerk and watched the flood of probability vectors and pathing shadows slowly dissolve. He sighed in relief. Information processing was at the heart of his Mantle, but processing complex engagements for three hours straight still left him feeling exhausted, mentally if not physically. He let his Mantle, which was invisible to most people, phase back out of Creation, looking around him with normal eyes for the first time since arriving in Szuisk Ward.
The T-type was melting. He’d let the subordinates collect its song. It would go a lot further with capeless than with him. With another cerebral jerk, the qubits in his helmets started the probability cascade to search for long distance objects vulnerable to an entanglement expression in the area he wanted to go to. Even for him, this would take a minute.
He performed a short distance entanglement and teleported to the top of the apartment building they had been protecting, swapping with a pigeon. He didn’t want the young capeless to pester him. They had to learn how to close down an event on their own. People thought that First Response were concerned exclusively with fighting Lumin, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. They had to liase with the police, during and after an event, make sure civilians didn’t wander into areas of structural weakness or Lumin contamination, and they had to organise the vast system of call and response such that no Lumin incursion went unnoticed. Uncontested, Lumin would tear through a zone in days.
It was only a medium sized event but they’d still have to quarantine the area for at least two days until the rhata teams had incinerated all the lingering gel. Until then, the O-waves sent over by the olmets wouldn’t be able to reshape the earth—smoothing over fault lines, securing the foundations of the building, closing up rents in the ground—and everything would sink slightly into the sandfall. Sometimes, even small sinks at a large scale were enough to topple buildings. And the gel itself was extremely toxic to non-Mantled. If they stepped in even a small patch off the stuff and it burnt through a shoe, it would kill them.
He watched the capeless from up high. They were doing a pretty good job, exuding the aura of confidence and strength which FR tried to ingrain in all its members. This strength was the backbone of the city: assuring the police and the civilians that everything was under control, that the Lumin were no match for FR.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
He shook his head. There was no use rehashing old thoughts. Things had gone well the past year or two, which only made him more nervous, but they’d just have to do their best. It was all they could do. Down bellow, Snapse was chatting with the ranking police officers, giving out instructions, while Gollum was going around testing the debris of the fallen bridge and the twin apartment buildings, and making small controlled demolitions with his power whenever he deemed it structurally insecure. Mantled olmet were extremely valuable to FR for this reason, especially ones with a power that let them level stone, and Michael was grateful to have the new kid on his team. Invisible to everyone else, a steady stream of Lumin song flowed into Snapse and Gollum, and into Quila where she sat nursing her injuries, brooding. She’d be fine, but she needed a doctor. One of the B-types (which most FR affectionally referred to as ‘slug-mummies’) had got a needle in her and flooded her stomach with gel. Sighu had already left. He had no interest in T-type song.
Michael sighed. It was the early hours of the morning and the world was still sunless. The stars glimmered up above. The wind was hot and stifling. He wanted to leave. There was a beep from his helmet as it found a target for his long distance swap and he sighed in relief, then chuckled when he saw the coordinates and the image of a can of Falax flashed up on his HUD, rotating slowly. He initiated the swap with a measured squeeze of power from his Mantle, and in less than a moment he stood at the top of the Wall. The woman besides him jumped, spinning and crackling with raw power. Then she saw who it was and relaxed.
“You shouldn’t drink that stuff, Gatekeeper. It’ll kill you.”
The shaven-headed woman chuckled.
“I know, I know, it’s terrible.” She paused. “Did you do that on purpose? I’m a lost cause, you know.”
Michael displayed a grin on his helmet.
“I wish I could say yes, but no. Needed a swap on the top of the Wall.”
Gatekeeper nodded, returning his smile and running a hand over her head, which moulded sightly where she massaged it, like it was made out of rubber. She wore robes of flowing white and a single golden ring on each of her middle fingers, with no sign of rank. Gatekeeper was one of the ‘shadow’ bannermen—she wasn’t officially listed like many of the others, and few knew she even existed. She valued this very much. Michael suspected she had grown up in the Park. The first time he had swapped up to the Wall, more than 60 years ago, she had very nearly killed him. Now they were good friends.
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“It’s good to see you Quase. I was watching your incursion at first, but I had to step away. How did it go?”
“Fine,” he sighed. “Minimum casualties. The spill over at Five was a lot worse.”
She glanced at him.
“Why so dour?”
“Well, minimum casualties tonight but it was a close thing. We’re losing the arms race.”
“It will level out,” reassured Gatekeeper. She sound confident, but then she always did.
“Will it? I don’t understand this belief you Es have.”
“It’s called faith.”
“In my lifetime, starfall has reduced by 10%. If the stars dry up, we won’t survive.”
Gatekeeper scoffed.
“As if the stars could ever dry up. And ten percent is hardly dry.”
“Lumin, measured by total gel volume, have increase by 4% in that time,” he said. “You haven’t run the numbers. Projected, that’s city death in twenty years. It can’t last. They are winning.”
Gatekeeper shook her head, smiling faintly.
“We haven’t run the numbers? We have run the numbers, Quase, long ago when the sand first formed and yesterday and all the days between. The King assures me resources are being allocated where it is most prudent. I am confident.”
Micheal scoffed, but the sound didn’t exit his helmet. The bannermen always said things like that. Not even higher ranking FR than himself new the truth depths of their information or starpower. It was a difficult thing to place ones faith in. He sighed, glancing over his shoulder.
Before him lay Tinjouki, stretching to the horizon in an impossible tangle of concrete and electric lighting, illusory under the cover of night. Behind him stretched the National Park: a plush world of impossible plenty and surreal, fantastic flora. A fever dream that the humans in the city below would never even dream of, never mind see. Here was another mystery. The Es protected the Park vehemently from all attempts FR made at understanding it. They said that FR was infiltrated by Cretes and by the Fish. They said the Park was too precious to take even the smallest of risks.
It had never sat well with him. He’d resisted moving to the Park for a long time, preferring to live in his battered old condo in Zone Twelve. It didn’t seem fair: that hundreds of millions had to live in squalor in the oppressive heat, pollution and monotonous architecture of Tinjouki, while he got to live in paradise. But he was getting old, mentally if not physically, and values tend to atrophy as men age. Eventually, after almost dying at a particularly nightmarish Muster, he’d relented and moved to a small village on the outskirts, near the other side of the Wall. He wasn’t allowed any deeper.
He sighed again. There was no use arguing with Gatekeeper on this issue. FR and the Executives were allies: one concerned with the evil of the Lumin, the other with the far more complex evil of the Concrete Kid and his army of criminal Mantled. You might think that monsters from another world were the biggest danger. You would be wrong. Mantles could do almost anything. The bannermen had been locked in a vast game of chess for however many hundreds of years, and Michael didn’t envy them. The Kid didn’t just want to understand the National Park. He wanted to possess it.
“Any action on the Wall tonight?”
“None. It’s a good thing, I suppose, but very boring. I miss that kid—the one that used to try and ride up it on his F-bike. A ridiculous strategy, but extremely entertaining. And I have to say, he was an impressive pilot. A week or two ago I watched him outrun a zus.”
“I saw him tonight.”
“What?!”
“At the incursion. The Heavens have blessed him, it seems. He’s in the middle of his first integration.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. Some kind of marksman power. He can shoot ballistics from his finger or his arm, I’m not quite sure. From the way he was moving, he’s still a very low card. But there was talent there, certainly. Who knows what he’ll be able to do as his Mantle diversifies?”
“You’re kidding me. I can’t believe it. He must have received the star that fell near the Wall last week.”
“Three stars fell last week, no?”
“Only one in Six. I looked him up when he was first started trying to get up the world. He doesn’t have a visa for anywhere else.”
“Ah. What was the grace on that one?”
Gateway shook her head, smiling faintly
“Nearly an hour, not sure. We figured the Kid must have got to it.”
“Maybe he did.”
Gatekeeper nodded.
“True. We better keep an eye on him. It’s a strong Mantle. ”
“How can you tell?”
“A grace period that long, they’re always strong. Warping the awareness of all of Creation is no small feat, even to the power that sends the stars. Marksman, you say? Perhaps the boy has received the Mantle of the Lone Ranger. Or the Mantle of the Sharp Dog, or of the fickle bond. I believe both have been known to manifest in a marksman, and they’ve been out of circulation long enough. We will watch him.”
Michael shook his head. When a star fell, only one person noticed it for a set period of time. He didn’t understand why this happened, and he was fairly confident the Es didn’t either; but it meant that neither the Kid, who ruled over all of Tinjouki, nor the Es, who had the unknowably huge landmass of the National Park, could elect who received a star in their territory. Most of the time, someone got there first. It was generally understood that this was no accident.
“Did you offer him the old calling card?” Gatekeeper asked.
“Of course. He won’t accept it though. He needs time to adjust to the new world. I gave him a can of growth paste. Kid had his arm half eaten by a slug-mother.”
“Well done. Can’t go wasting talent. What about the Cretes. Will he go with them?”
“I know nothing of him, Gatekeeper.”
Gatekeeper nodded again, surveying the city with gleaming silver eyes, which had no iris.
“All will develop as all is intended,” she said piously.
Michael didn’t respond. He sat down at the edge of the wall and watched the sunrise.