None of the four men had the same burnt mask that had made the flames across the water, and Perry was grateful for that, because his main priority was making sure that the rest of the crew stayed alive. Four against one was terrible odds for Perry, but the masks worked by perception, with only a rare few allowing true control, and then always with something that could be perceived rather than through thoughts or commands. The men were mostly alike in their general demeanors, all with the tightness of soldiers, but different in stature and in which masks they wore.
Two had the same sort of bug-eyed mask that Perry had seen before, the kind that was meant to take in as much of the surroundings as possible to protect both the wearer and whoever was in their field of vision. It worked on clothes too, and all the men were wearing heavy clothes that became armor when one of those masks was pointed their way.
The other two wore different masks though. The global traditions of mask-making were different and much of the aesthetics of the masks were about personal connections and cultural conditions rather than raw utility — perception colored function, which meant that function followed form.
One was a half-mask that covered only the left side of the face, and where the eye would have been, there was a bit that poked out, a lens focusing the perception like a pinprick. It was a technique that was sometimes used so that the person wearing it could see what they were doing with their uncovered eye. From what Perry knew, it was a lot of work for something that was about as effective as a gun and far more situational, but he was keeping an eye out, because he was definitely not impervious to guns. In this world, the expression ‘staring a hole into someone’ was literal. Unlike a bullet, it would be nearly impossible to parry.
The last of them was the one that Perry was most worried about, and when he looked closer, he realized that it was actually a woman, her face obscured by the mask, her stature a bit shorter, but still with broad muscles. The mask was another bird’s mask, traditionally associated with precognition or something like it, not actually time travel, but a feeling that everything that had been seen had been seen before and was foretold. On its own, it didn’t make a person any stronger or do anything to stop an assailant, but it made for strong fighters who could sense what their opponent was doing before they actually did it, at least in the very near term. Back on Earth, they probably would have made a killing doing high-frequency trading. She would be the one calling the shots, at least in combat.
She hadn’t told the others to stand down, which was a little bit worrying. If she could see that Perry was about to tear through them like low-ply tissue, throwing down their knives seemed like the thing to do.
“Last chance,” said Perry.
“Who are you?” asked the woman in the bird’s mask.
“Just a concerned citizen,” said Perry.
She narrowed her eyes, which were the only part of her face visible beneath the mask aside from the bottom of her jaw and her lower lip. “What is your stake in this?” asked the woman.
He had shoved their leader out the open door and then flown back in minutes later, soaking wet. He’d really hoped that he would have made more of an impression, especially shirtless, but she wasn’t backing down, and they were all in a position to fight him.
“Set your knives and masks down, and maybe you’ll find out,” said Perry. He’d turned himself to face the man with the one-eyed mask who was going to try to bore a hole through him. With two of the reinforcing masks, it was going to be difficult to make the killing blow, but Perry had plans for that.
He was very aware that all this was happening in front of hostages, and that those hostages were crew members who had absolutely no reason not to tell the world about what they had seen. This was, in part, his debut to the security services of the world, and perhaps to the general public, though he was hoping to convince whoever was in charge that this was one of those secrets that was best kept secret.
“He killed Michel,” said the woman. That seemed to be all the argument that was needed.
Perry didn’t want to strike first, mostly because he was being watched by the hostages. It was one thing to threaten someone’s life if they didn’t drop their weapon, and another thing entirely to start the fight before giving them a proper chance to surrender. This wasn’t how Perry would normally operate, but he was pretty sure that within the bounds of the culture — to say nothing of the law — you couldn’t charge in and attack people without a good faith effort to defuse this situation.
Of course, he’d cut his way through more than a dozen people on his way to this room, and he’d only left one survivor.
The masked woman called out a command, a thick and harsh word that Perry was mildly surprised to understand the meaning of. It wasn’t another language, just a code word, but it had such sharp edges of intent that he could feel it in the air. She was saying ‘fire’.
The cyclops could attack as fast as blinking, closing his right eye and opening his left. Perry was on the move as soon as the command was given, which saved him from having a hole in his heart. Instead, the hyper-focused perception swept across his chest, gouging a half-inch deep line across his rib cage. It stung worse than the slash of the sword, and the most surprising thing was just how effective it had been, easily enough to kill him if it had gone straight through. But Perry was fast, and had his target, so by the time the blood was starting to run freely from the wound, he had already grabbed the wrist of the cyclops.
Perry threw his sword at one of the other men, mostly as a distraction, then spun with the ball of his foot on the floor, using all his weight to lift the masked attacker up off the ground. It was easy to lift someone up, but difficult to maneuver them, and Perry slipped, landing with his knee straight into the ground, dumping the guy he’d gone after just shy of the open door. Perry launched himself forward as the men with knives came to him, and Perry was faster than them. He punted the cyclops like a football with a kick square to the stomach, sending him tumbling over the edge.
They were all going out the open door, he decided, it was just a matter of time.
Perry turned to the other three and summoned his sword back to his hand, where it settled just in time to be brought up for a parry. Perry used his raw strength to knock the knife to one side, giving him an opening, and stabbed forward with his sword, straight into the man’s belly. The sword bounced off the thick fabric like it had hit steel, leaving barely a nick to show for it. With two masks reinforcing everything, cutting anyone was going to be nearly impossible.
The woman with the mask gave them another command, and Perry had to strain translation to understand that she wanted them to attack in tandem. She was going to have to coordinate them so that they could close their eyes together and their knives could penetrate him, and he was ready for it. Perry backed up slightly in anticipation, then used his sword to block one of the strikes, and let the other one in. As he’d hoped, the command was called out, which meant that Perry had his opening. He kicked out and caught one of the masked men in the kneecap, bending his leg backward while the other man’s knife caught Perry in the side. It was a trade he’d been more than willing to make, since it meant that he was down to only two attackers.
The woman with the mask could only see a second or two in the future, and she must have thought it was a good trade too, otherwise she wouldn’t have called it out. Perry was resilient to injury, so long as he wasn’t shot in the head or stabbed in the heart, but she couldn’t have known that. She had probably thought that getting stabbed would be fatal to him.
He felt a jarring pain in his lower back and dodged to the side on instinct. He turned toward the open doorway and saw that the cyclops he’d kicked off was still hanging there by a railing on the side of the door, one arm propped up on the floor, dangling. Perry threw his sword again, catching the man right in the mask, and while the other masks provided enough protection that the sword didn’t cleave straight through the man’s head, the sheer force of it made him lose his grip and fall, this time hopefully for good.
Perry turned back toward the other men as his sword returned to his hand again. They didn’t know how to deal with him, that much was clear. There were only two of them left, along with the man on the ground whose leg was bent back the wrong way. He was gasping and screaming, and Perry would have just left him there if not for the fact that he still had the mask on. Perry stepped forward with his sword in front of him to guard against an attack, then grabbed the injured man by his shirt and threw him out the open door.
Perry gave them the courtesy of five seconds to soak that in and maybe surrender if they wanted to, then went for the last man in the reinforcing mask. Panic had clearly set in, and Perry almost felt bad about it, but they had been threatening hostages, and attacked first, and gave Perry three wounds.
Perry went at the last of the soldiers with as much speed and rage as he could bring to bear. The mask made it like hitting against metal, but his sword could gouge metal, and Perry was keeping up as much pressure as he was capable of. After the first two strikes, there was no defense against it, and Perry was just stabbing the man in his chest with the rapid motions of a prison yard shanking. The clothes were quickly shredded, and the sword began doing some real damage, a half-inch at a time. Soon the sword was in the man’s guts, and Perry kept going until the sword was soaked with blood and the effect of the mask began to fade.
Perry withdrew his sword, grabbed the man by his arm, and threw him out the open door. The airship had been drifting downward with the engines off, and the splash was audible from inside the room.
Perry turned to the woman, who had her knife held in front of her. She was trembling, and Perry hoped that she could see that there was no possible way out for her. He batted her knife to the side with his sword, sending it sideways to embed in the wall. It would have been easy to remove her head with a single swipe of his sword, given that her mask was doing nothing for her. Injured though he was, Perry couldn’t imagine a world in which she could possibly defeat him, no way that her mask would make up for her inferior strength and speed.
He darted forward, using all his speed, gripped her by the throat, and lifted her up off her feet. She grabbed his wrists, twisted and turned, and let out two strangled words: “I yield.”
It would have been easy to kill her. His thumb was on her neck, and his nail was long and sharp. He could press it into the place where he could feel her pulse, cut through the delicate skin and let her blood flow freely. Or he could just throw her out of the airship and be done with her. He could smell the sweat, blood, and fear in the air, and he resented that she had waited so long to give up. He’d given the option for them to lay down their weapons and surrender, and now she was asking for a stay of execution. He didn’t think that she deserved it.
Perry came to his senses before very much time had elapsed. It wasn’t about this woman and whether she deserved death, it was about the hostages who were watching and what they would think of him.
He set her back down on the ground and released her.
“Remove the mask,” he said.
She took it off with trembling fingers, and when it was unstrapped, she threw it to the ground without needing to be told to. Perry recognized her from one of the mealtimes, though he hadn’t actually met her. She was with the other people staying down in the hold, a homely woman with a weak chin and beady eyes that the mask had been hiding. She was younger than Perry had thought she would be, and up close, he didn’t think that she was too far out of her teens. She looked at Perry like she expected him to slap her across the face, though the moment had passed and she was safe for the time being.
Perry looked over at the hostages, who were still huddled off to one side of the room. They had seen everything. Perry took a breath, trying to think of what to say, then went to the open door and looked down at the water.
“Someone is going to need to get the engines running again,” said Perry. “We’re losing altitude, and there are monsters down there, drawn by the blood.”
“Who are you?” asked one of the crewmen.
“No one of any importance,” said Perry. “I’m serious about getting the engines going, I would assume a water landing isn’t something that would be great for this ship even if there weren’t dangerous things swimming down there.”
“Is it safe?” the crewman asked. “Are they all … dealt with?”
“Not all of them, no,” said Perry. He turned to the unmasked woman. His sword was still in his hand, and he pointed it at her. “Was that everyone in this section of the ship?”
She sucked in a breath as the point of the sword came her way. “Yes,” she said.
Perry gritted his teeth. He had no idea whether she was telling the truth, and it was clear he was going to have to make a sweep of the whole ship just to make sure there wasn’t someone waiting in a dark room somewhere. Most of the crewmen were in their nightwear, since the hijacking had taken place when they were asleep.
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“How many did you count?” he asked the crewmen.
“There was one more,” one of them said. “And others blocking the walkway to the passenger gondola.”
“They’re dealt with,” said Perry.
One of the crewmen had ventured over to the open doorway, though he was giving it a wide berth lest he fall overboard. Perry had the impression that the door was used for loading and unloading things when the airship had landed, and wasn’t really meant to be a high altitude exit. This seemed to be a storage area, except that it was mostly empty.
“We sabotaged the engines when it was clear there was a hijacking,” he said. “We shouldn’t be losing altitude though.” That started a conversation among the crewmen, one that Perry wasn’t remotely equipped for.
“I’m going to go deal with the others,” said Perry. He looked at the woman. “You’re going to come with me, at swordpoint, and tell them to lay down their weapons so I don’t have to kill them.”
“And if I don’t?” she asked.
“Then I kill them, and you,” said Perry.
“That’s not the culture,” she said. Maybe if she hadn’t been scared out of her mind that would have been said with a sneer, but instead it came out more as a question.
Perry shrugged as though he didn’t care about that, though it was basically the only thing he cared about at the moment. So far as he knew, people had a right to defend themselves, and they really had a right to defend themselves against foreign nationals who were working against the very fabric of their society. But killing a prisoner for not cooperating was one way to phrase what Perry had proposed, and that wouldn’t have been allowed on Earth either.
“Go,” said Perry. “We’ll get out of their hair.”
She took a hesitant step, and Perry followed behind her. The captain was still in the shelf space, and Perry would need to pull the man out soon, but he really didn’t want to reveal the existence of the shelf to everyone, not when it was his most valuable asset and the thing that was most likely to get him out of a jam. He would need to check on the captain, and the only reason he hadn’t already done it was because he didn’t want to give too much away. Unfortunately, if the captain had regained consciousness, he would be seeing the interior of the flooded shelf space, and that certainly wouldn’t be good.
They went up and out of the crew area, to the door that led to the walkway. The body of the man Perry had killed was still there, much more pallid than it had been when Perry had left. The woman froze at the sight, and Perry almost prodded her with his sword to keep her moving, though it thankfully didn’t require much more than him brandishing the sword.
There were also bodies on the walkway, and a foot that Perry had sliced off. Those she stopped longer for, staring.
“The plan was to fly to Thirlwell?” Perry asked her.
“Yes,” she said softly. “We were going to hand it over to the king. An airship of this size has a lot of value, especially if it’s transporting something that it shouldn’t.”
“But you’ve got no idea what that was,” said Perry. “I heard that much.”
“They shed too much weight for this trip,” she said.
“Maybe,” said Perry. “Keeping something like that silent wouldn’t be the culture though.”
“The culture is a thing of contradictions,” she replied. She turned away from the carnage on the walkway and looked at him. “Do you believe in it?”
“No,” said Perry. Not yet, anyway. “But I believe in it more than I believe in executing people for perceived nationalist grievances.”
“They said you were from Berus,” said the woman. “We were going to approach you.”
“I could have saved everyone a lot of trouble by explaining how it would go ahead of time,” said Perry. “Though I guess that’s your schtick.”
“The shot to the back, that should have killed you,” she said. “You’re bleeding from three wounds that all should have killed you. You don’t even wear a mask.” She wanted answers, which was laughable given how little incentive he had to tell her.
“This isn’t storytime,” said Perry. “I swear to you that I don’t have any compunctions about killing you, not when you tried to kill me, not when you’re a fanatic.”
“I’m not,” she said. She placed a hand to her chest. “I’m a patriot. That’s all.”
Perry pointed the sword at her. “Are you stalling?”
“I want to know what’s in your heart,” she said, having found some reserve of courage. “I want to know what drew you to them. Was it the elf women? The promise of a life lived without effort?”
“It’s not really any of your business,” said Perry. “But I think my position on things would start with the bombs dropped on the city I was staying in, and ends with a bunch of people hijacking the airship I was using and throwing the captain overboard, which was actually quite rude.”
“Is this a joke to you?” she asked.
“The idea that you think you’re owed some kind of answer is the joke,” said Perry. “What are you thinking, that you’ll convert me to your side after I’ve killed a dozen men?”
She turned back to look at the walkway. Thankfully it hadn’t been too badly damaged in the fight, though Perry could see that there were a few places where his sword had gouged the slats. “This was all you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said Perry.
“Such power,” she said, almost in a whisper. He could still smell the fear on her, but there was something else undercutting it now. She was insane if she thought that she could turn this situation to her own benefit, but that seemed to be what she was thinking. “Why would someone with that power work for them? With them?”
“No time for philosophy right now,” said Perry. “There are another dozen men who don’t know that they’ve lost yet.”
She seemed like she wanted to argue, but she walked down the walkway anyway, hands on the railing as she stepped across the slats, which were sticky with blood. They moved over bodies, and when Perry went by them, he unceremoniously kicked them over the side. He was hoping that the monsters in the ocean below them would get their fill, or maybe that enough of them would be attracted that they would start fighting each other for food. The engines still hadn’t been started back up, and the Caster was now only fifty feet from the water.
Rounding up the hijackers took some time, and to Perry’s relief, he didn’t need to kill any more of them. He was covered in blood from his wounds, but the bleeding had mostly stopped, and the blood was vanishing from the power coursing through his body, cleaning him as they went from place to place. Doing this as a single person was maybe ill-advised, but after the first of the corridors was liberated, he was able to recruit some people to help with keeping them under guard.
Moss Grumhill, the dwarf that Perry had met on the observation deck, was the first person Perry met who actually seemed to want to take control.
“You fought,” he said, looking at Perry’s wounds and the sword by his side. “You brought a sword.” He had probably noticed the sword’s glow.
“I’d be happy if you or your wife would take over now,” said Perry. “The engineers are working on getting the engines working again, and if they don’t, we’re going to hit the water and get eaten by monsters or sink. I think when they realized that they were being hijacked, they sabotaged what they could so that they’d be stuck in the air and maybe have more time for someone to notice that something had gone wrong … but they might need someone with your skills.”
“That’s not my specialty,” he said, frowning a bit. “I’ll do what I can. If they try something, you’ll be here?”
“I will,” nodded Perry.
“We knew there would be dissidents and sympathizers on the flight,” said Moss. “It was uncontrolled, there was no vetting. We just didn’t think that it would be … this. We didn’t know they had so many people in Kerry Coast, nor that they were so well-organized.” He looked Perry up and down. “We thought that you might have been one of them.”
“Nope,” said Perry. “They thought there was something on the ship. Some kind of … I don’t know. A weapon, something like that, something that you were bringing into Berus and keeping secret. I wouldn’t credit it, but what they said about the weight restrictions seemed to make sense to me. The hold got cleared out so there could be more people, but extra hammocks for extra people weigh a lot less than the potential cargo they were displacing.”
“This isn’t a conversation for right now,” said Moss. He frowned. “You’ve proven yourself beyond a shadow of a doubt today, not just with your potential as my guard, but in your commitment to the culture we’re trying to instill. I’ll tell you later, once we’re more secure and away from prying eyes.”
Perry nodded. It was clear he was going to have to seed the entire ship with nanites. March should have seen the hijacking coming, and if there was something hidden on the ship, Perry should have known about it, either from nanite spiders crawling through the place or from overheard conversations. Moss knew something, and Perry would have been very surprised if he was the only one who did. They didn’t have a proper symboulion on the ship, not unless he counted the weird sort of worker’s collective that was made up by the crew, but they did have people who were talking to each other and who ultimately formed a sort of power structure.
Perry found a quiet place to check on the captain, who was still lying in the bed Perry had provided. The captain was fast asleep, and the shelf space had been trashed by seawater. Perry was pretty worried about mold, since he didn’t know how to deal with that, and didn’t even really know what fundamental truths underpinned the extradimensional storage area. Perry shook the captain’s shoulder, and the man roused only for a moment before fainting again. There were certainly internal injuries, and no magical healing to save him if he was going to bleed out, so Perry lifted him up and took him out, moving him to where the people were congregated. Moss raised an eyebrow, but the whole subject was going to wait until later.
It was another hour before the engines started up again, and by that time, the airship was perilously close to the water, buoyed only by cutting loose some ballast. They were actually close enough that monsters had started breaching the water’s surface, pushing themselves up to try to take a bite, but thankfully their size meant that most of them couldn’t go all that high out of the water.
It was dawn before Perry thought it was safe to go back to his cabin and get some rest, but just as he was leaving, he spotted a familiar face: it was Dirk Gibbons, from the Inter-Cooperative Global Command Authority. Perry had met him at a play in Kerry Coast City during intermission, and took the man to be a spymaster of sorts, or at least a secret agent, but what was very clear to Perry was that Dirk Gibbons had in no way been on the airship’s passenger manifest, nor had he been mingling with the passengers. Perry would have seen him.
“Dirk,” said Perry. “We meet again.”
“Not the circumstances either of us expected, I know,” Dirk said with a smile. “Or I guess for all I know, this is exactly how you drew it up. I heard about that ‘concerned citizen’ line. It was a good one.”
“Thanks,” said Perry.
“You’re pretty nonchalant about having killed so many people,” said Dirk. They were away from the other people who’d gathered to discuss matters of armed guards and prisoners, but Perry would still have appreciated it if Dirk would have kept his voice a little lower, especially if he was tossing out accusations. “You’re also pretty nonchalant about your wounds.”
“It’s not my first rodeo,” said Perry. The word translated to something else, as their version of English didn’t have the word ‘rodeo’, or possibly even the concept.
“You’re not surprised to see me either,” said Dirk. “Or you’ve got one hell of a poker face.” They did, apparently, have poker faces, because the words came through unmangled.
“We have some things to talk about,” said Perry. “You want answers.”
“I wanted to thank you, first and foremost,” said Dirk. “This airship is more important than you know. They knew, even if it was only enough to see the edges.”
“Tell me if you want to,” said Perry. He didn’t particularly want an exchange of secrets, which he felt might be on offer. “I’d be interested in hearing how you got here, and it would be great to know what it was that I just protected for you. I need to go check on my wife.” Perry paused for a moment, wrinkled his nose, then sneezed. “Excuse me.”
Of course, Perry didn’t actually need to sneeze. He hadn’t sneezed since becoming second sphere, and was pretty sure that he would never sneeze again. What he had instead done was to palm a small bit of nanites, then use the sneeze to distribute them like dust into the air. Many of the clusters would land on Dirk, and at March’s remote command, move into the folds of his clothes or attach to his hair and skin. It was a pre-arranged strategy that Perry was happy to have a chance to use.
Perry stashed his sword in the shelf space once he was out of view of anyone, and returned to his cabin, where Mette had gone back to sleep. She woke up to the sound of the door though, and blinked a few times as she looked at Perry.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“Not really,” said Perry. He touched the gouge along his chest, which was red and tender but already completely scabbed over. He wondered whether it would scar, but from what he’d seen of the second sphere on the Great Arc, they only got scars when they looked cool or were spiritually significant. The knife wound on his side was similarly a painful bother, but it was at least closed. The one on the back was the worst, and Perry didn’t want to lay down on it, but that meant that he was going to have to hold off on sleep for at least a little bit. He was trying to use his internal reserves of energy to heal himself, directing the flows from his meridians to the places he’d been hit, but it was a slow process done by a novice.
“March said you dealt with the problem,” said Mette. “He said you killed a number of people.”
“Yeah,” said Perry. He was mildly surprised that Marchand hadn’t given her the play-by-play, or that she hadn’t asked for it. “You were fine?”
“I was worried,” she said. She was sleeping without clothes on, and pulled the blanket up to cover herself a bit more. “I kept thinking that I was going to hear something, the sound of gunfire, cannons like that. Like on the Natrix, the sounds of bugs being shot down.”
“It was swords and knives,” said Perry. “I don’t think the masks or lanterns ever make all that much noise.”
“And … how do you feel?” she asked. She was looking into his eyes.
“Fine,” Perry shrugged. “It might have been better not to reveal as much as I did. They know about the sword, and depending on what the captain remembers, they might know about the shelf space, which is, incidentally, trashed. It’s going to take a day or so to clean it out, and that’s probably better done sooner than later.”
“I thought about coming to you,” said Mette. She gestured to where the pieces of March were lying, covered by a blanket. “I was going to put on the suit.”
“It doesn’t fit you,” said Perry.
“It’s not such a bad fit that I couldn’t move around,” said Mette. “And with it on, I would be armored, so not being able to move wouldn’t be that bad. Plus there’s a gun in the shoulder.”
“I’m glad you didn’t come,” said Perry. “I’m glad Nima didn’t come either. She kept to her room?”
“Yes sir,” said Marchand.
“That gives her a better cover than I have now. I don’t know what they think I am, but I’m hoping that within the next few hours, I find out. March, I want you in full read mode. Tell me what the hell they’re hiding on this ship, and how Dirk got here across hundreds of miles of open water in the middle of the night.”