You look in disbelief at Shilo’s faint smile as the incredible glow she exudes fades to nothing. Your heart sinks as you watch her body fall to the ground with a dead weight that you’ve seen entirely too often in the past few days. Your mind rings with the years of information that have just made their way into a mind far younger than the information itself just as you realize that this was your sister. Instantly, you continue your run to her side, your eyes filling with tears, even as you come into concurrence with reality that Shilo is, in fact, dead. The glow in her eyes is gone as you drop to her side and lift her head, that smile still present on the face which has been emptied of life.
Words fail to reach your lips. You aren’t sure how long it is that you sit there, the smell of blood filling the lobby as the chill sets in. The room had been warmed by the battle, but now, its stagnance returns the former temperature to place as your eyes drain all tears from you. Your breathing becomes erratic as your nose runs with grief. Finally, a flimsy wail begins to make its way out of your throat. Any need for pomp and circumstance has just vanished from your world, which has grown geometrically in the past few days. Tears, snot, and noise emanate from you without apology as your grief and anger at the world are released, your own glow burning brightly. As you approach a brighter glow than you’ve ever released, however, a voice in your mind whispers softly, ‘Stop.’
Your glow fades to its normal level instantly, and you sniffle as you recognize the voice: Shilo. You look down at her body, sniffling again, your eyes searching her own for some sign of life. There is none. Death is your only greeter on the other side of those doors. Nevertheless, you reach out in all directions with your own mind, screaming soundlessly into the void, ‘Shilo?! Are you there?’
For a few moments, you look about yourself, holding Shilo’s empty frame with shielding arms. But then, ‘Of course I’m not here, you silly girl, but did you think I’d leave you all by yourself?’ You can’t make sense of it, but surely there’s some explanation. Shilo is dead, but that voice is Shilo’s, too. How can that be? Then, the voice speaks again from inside your own mind, ‘Look, I know this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but with the amount of my mind I gave you, there’s bound to be a certain residual amount of me left over in it. Now get up. We have to get you off this planet.’
You stand, setting Shilo’s head on the marble floor. She’s right, or you are. You suppose they’re really your own thoughts based on Shilo’s residual personality ingrained into the associated information. Nevertheless, it’s good to hear her voice, at least, and you take the time you need to reach the entrance to your home to sort through some of that information. You realize it’s mostly memories, but some of it is schematics, training, and technical information that would have taken years to learn. There are techniques for breathing, and you think you can catch a passing glimpse at a special type of sleep, but then you reach the room with all the gadgets and gizmos Daddy had left behind.
Looking at the room with new eyes, you see weapons and armors you never would have recognized before. Farther along, toward the back of the room in a more dimly lit section, you see a glint of metal. Moving your way toward the glint, you stop here and there to grab new weapons and refasten better armor. Your healing has almost finished when you reach the back wall. The glint is behind it. How did it–?
‘Bioswitch,’ Shilo’s voice says. At that moment, you notice a small, dusted-over switch in the darkest corner of the room. You brush off the panel, lick your thumb deftly, and press it against the switch until you hear a light beep. A panel lifts slowly, a motor whining weakly as you begin to see a small hole behind the panel. There is no lever to indicate a larger door, but the hole seems small enough that you could squeeze through it. You bring yourself down to all fours and scoot your way through the hole.
Once through, you look up and see an old dipulse: an early form of pulsecar that was designed with two primary pulse engines that rotated freely as opposed to the now-standard eight with up to twenty stabilizers. The skill required to pilot a dipulse was compared with that required to pilot a fighter ship. Well, that’s odd. You didn’t know that at all before. The wonderment at the novelty of such knowledge is soon drowned by a renewed grief over Shilo’s departure, which is followed by Daddy’s, and that by Mommy’s. You’re very nearly overwhelmed by the emotions when you hear Shilo’s voice call out, ‘Not yet, Keri. You can grieve later. You need to get off the planet now.’
She’s right. Or, rather, you are. You decide it’s best just to think of it as Shilo and not yourself for now. It might comfort you enough to make it off this world which has so long been your home. Casting that thought aside, you start looking for a way to exit the room with the dipulse. As you do so, you realize that you do not expect any difficulty piloting the vehicle and that you are quite aware of how to reach the docks from here. Thanking Shilo just as her voice points out a mechanical lever on the opposite end of the room from where you were even looking, you turn about and remind yourself to be more aware of the wider view allotted to you by these helmets.
Jumping up a couple of times, you finally manage to reach the lever with a bit of glow, and your weight pulls it down with a loud clacking sound. A chaotic grind can be heard from inside the wall as, to your surprise, it lowers instead of rising. You blink once or twice before making your way back to the dipulse, noticing that with the lowering outside wall, the wall to the rest of the armory rises, and the wall into the apartment slides back. WIth a sudden realization, you realize that the pictur
es are still inside, and you use a bit of glow to ensure you beat the slow-moving walls in and back out of the apartment, the boxes which have become entirely priceless to you held firmly in your grasp.
You make your way back to the outer room and begin to load up for your trip. The first things you load into the dipulse are the boxes of pictures, followed by the choice weapons and tools Shilo had noticed on her first pass through the armory. You even mount a few specialized weapons onto the dipulse before firing its engines, their familiar, low pulse providing a small comfort as you prepare to make your way to the docks, where Valkyr 2 is awaiting small repairs whose associated damages had resulted in its pilots’ deaths. ‘Let’s go,’ Shilo’s voice echoes into your mind. ‘You’re going to have to drive, though.’ You suppress an urge to roll your eyes and grin. Maybe Shilo isn’t as gone as you thought.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
The Beat
Battle
Lessons Learned
huntress inside you comes to the forefront. A gentle memory of a dead voice you haven’t heard in over twenty cycles reaches into your mind, sending your thoughts to a long-past, failed hunt as a child; but this time, you don’t hesitate to follow your mother’s command as the memory whispers the echoed word, ‘Now!’ Your feet break contact with the ground as a burst of energy compresses behind you, propelling you into the fresh heat of a battle which you can finally fight for all the right reasons.
Discovery
You open your eyes to a heavy darkness. Your breather just finished up its last viable recirc before waking you. That means you’ve got more than just dark on top of you. You try moving and find it less difficult than you might have expected given the circumstances but substantially more so than it really should have been. Remembering the events of the night previous (or had it been day?), you start swimming your arms cautiously about, bringing yourself slowly to a seated position as an arm’s length of ash moved its way off of your chest. After a milliday or so, your breather puffs out a tiny cloud of ash as it releases its now oxygen-depleted air reserves, allowing new air into your lungs for the first time in several centidays. You smile softly and gulp down the air as if it had been years since you last breathed of your own accord.
Grateful for the unique properties of your plasma-shielded goggles, you look about without having to rub any ash clear of your view, and you see that you were right to insist that Keri actually sleep inside the room whose door you had slept before. Even standing perfectly straight in the ashbed that was like so much filthy snow, she likely would have been enveloped before waking and suffocated without realizing it before it was too late. Looking to the small display on the underside of your left gauntlet, you realize that it’s been at least twenty-five centidays since you went to sleep. Deciding that that was enough time, given the circumstances, you gently push open the door, watching some of the ash pour in and onto the marble floor you had so meticulously cleaned only thirty centidays before.
Before the door is even entirely ajar, the young Keri is at the doorway, looking expectantly to you as she awaits instruction for this new day, her smile slightly wider than her tired eyes. “Is it time to go now?” She asks the question in a way that conveys an understanding that there can be only one answer, but you nod anyway, your lightly armored hand resting on the linen of her nightgown. Her hair is cleaner now than when you met only two days before, and its almost entirely aqua locks fall more neatly about her small face. There are the beginnings of curls, or perhaps they’re the ends of them, but they’re scarce as her hair falls almost perfectly straight in all but her bangs, which seem to have a life of their own.
You had never really thought much about your own hair, but seeing hers falling to such lengths as it did made you a bit sad that a Valkyrie pilot had to keep her hair short to distinguish her from the other sisters. It had been only a few years since that hair had fallen from its long-held position at the terminating points of your head, but you had always been satisfied with the collar-length hair you were permitted until now. Seeing how much this young child had, though…
“Are you ready to go?” The words make it out of your mouth before they register with your own brain. Nevertheless, they are the appropriate words, and Keri nods, her smile fading into a weary grin. You can hardly blame her. It must have been hard enough getting all the way out to the edges of the city by herself, even if she was a Valkyrie, but going back through it all, well… It makes you grateful for her sake that there was so much ash spread around to cover the bodies that still riddled the streets, hands holding one another, arms wrapped around wives and children. In all the marvelous efficiency of the Valkyries, only one person in millions had been spared, despite there being only two attackers and three days for execution, and you still suspect that that fact may have been inadvertent rather than intentional.
After about a centiday, you head out and onto the road, moving once again toward your goal, the large building that now looms close enough that the buildings around you seem to be dwarfed in comparison, their ten- and fifteen-story structures like sandcastles before the massive, 240-floor residential complex in which Keri claims to have lived with her father for the past three years, which happens to be about as far back as she can remember at her age. You wonder, looking at the largely blasted apart structure, if her home is even intact and, assuming it is, if you’ll be able to get to it safely. You may be able to survive a 200-story fall in your armor, but not even a Valkyrie could stick that landing without breaking several bones, and Keri doesn’t have armor designed to assist one in falling-type circumstances.
Keri, however, seems to barely notice the wanton destruction so expertly crafted around her as she counts quietly. It’s a common enough affliction among Valkyries, really. So many of the finest minds and bodies of the Valkyries went nearly to waste due to encroaching madness. You hope that this, instead, is merely a coping mechanism for the vision of death itself laid out so perfectly in front of you. You’ve grown entirely too fond of this child to see her go the route of madness that consumed so many, usually at a much later age, at such an early point in her development. You write a mental note out to yourself and set it among all its brethren, reminding you to get her to a Valkyrie Trauma Counselor as soon as you make it back to Thor. Your face tightens as the girl loses count, stamping her feet in frustration as she begins again, tracing back her steps to the last intersection first.
Eventually, you reach Keri’s complex, and you approach the entrance with some anticipation. She should remember the location well enough, but what if it isn’t there anymore? “What floor did you live on, Keri?” The question makes it out of your throat, but only just. You hope she didn’t notice that you had used the past tense, counting on her age to restrict her knowledge on such matters. The flicker of narrowed eyes that darts toward you for no more than a milliday’s fragment, however, tells you all you need to know.
Keri takes a deep breath before saying, “Keri lives,” Her eyes catch yours, even through the mirrored pseudo-surface of your goggles, as she pushes the word, “on this floor.” She points to a door only just inside the entrance, and your eyes widen as you realize the implications of a ground-floor home in a complex like this. You head into the building and head straight for t
he door, which is reached within a milliday of meandering about distractedly as you look at the wreckage of what had once been a monstrously impressive lobby. The ceiling towers above you at nearly fifty floors, and the ten-story-tall light assembly that is now sprawled on the floor and rests partially in the ornate fountain in broken shambles once clearly levitated at a much higher perch.
After a short trot and look-about, however, Keri makes her way to the door and licks a finger before placing it on the bioswitch that activates the door. Your eyebrow raises at the notion. Bioswitches are fairly commonplace on military ships and facilities, but the technology was expensive enough that very few actually use them in the civilian sector.
The door slides open, revealing a residence that stands in firm contrast to the ornately decorated, stone and glass lobby. The entrance hall, just long enough to keep people outside the door from gazing nonchalantly into the main room, has two pairs of shoes sitting neatly beside each other, one several times larger and less girly than the other. Looking to the walls, you see a few pictures of a mustachioed man with shoulder-length, glossy gray hair and Keri. You conclude reasonably that this must be her father. You also notice that there are no pictures of anyone else even as you make your way into the main room, which holds a wireless and an istringr interface, fairly common for a family room. You work your way quickly to the kitchen, which is gratefully just as clean as the rest of the apartment, which seems to have been magnetically suspended to protect it from seismic disturbances and hermetically sealed to shield it from biological contaminants. Whoever designed this place had either a very paranoid or very wise eye, given the current state of the world you’re on.
Keri sits on the small seat beside the table politely as she waits for you to prepare the food. You notice that she has followed the proper etiquette to a tee, which is remarkable for someone raised on one of the outer worlds. “Do you want Skell eggs, Keri?” You ask tentatively. You would love some Skell eggs right now, and you’re incredibly hungry. Keri nods enthusiastically, and you start cooking, pouring each of you a crystal cup of water from a jar in the chiller while you wait for your pan to warm up. Keri gulps the water down as gratefully as you do, pausing only to thank you for the cup.
After you’ve finished prepping the eggs and a few greens for lunch, you set them out on plates and bring them to the table, turning off the stove and washing the pan before you do. Before eating, you each sign the Sword of Drigan’di and say a quiet prayer to the Great One. After you finish eating, you look beside you at the young lady carefully masticating each tender piece of egg before swallowing gently in a manner almost disturbingly proper. Someone went to great lengths to train this girl to act in a manner that anyone else could deem acceptable, and that’s a dangerous skill at her age.
“Keri,” you begin. Keri’s eyes train steadily on yours as you continue, “You mentioned that your daddy had pictures of a woman, didn’t you?” She nods carefully, choosing not to speak with a filled mouth. “Where are they?”
Keri holds up a tiny hand to tell you to wait a moment while she uses the other to dab her lips clean of any oils from the eggs. Once she’s finished, however, she says simply, “I’ll go get them,” and scampers off into one of the side rooms.
A few millidays later, she returns with a small box and sets it on the table before you before scurrying up onto her chair once more and reaching across to open the box. “Daddy said Keri shouldn’t look in this box, but Keri knows it’s ok, anyway.” For such a well-behaved young girl, Keri’s tone in disregarding such a rule is positively flippant. You blink incredulously once or twice before returning your attention to the inside of the box to see something you never would have expected.
In the box are hundreds of pictures of that same man and a somewhat older Valkyrie woman you seem to recognize faintly. You can’t quite place that face, but you set it aside as you make your way through to the older pictures, the man’s face losing more and more mustache and hair. They all seem to have been taken on Thor. You recognize the city of Qzcivden in the background of a picnic picture, and finally, you see a picture of the woman pregnant with Keri sitting next to what is apparently that same man with no mustache and the clean-cut look of an Armadian in uniform. The man looks familiar now, too, with only streaks of gray in his more softly wrinkled face. This gives you pause. You feel like you’ve seen this man and the woman before, but you aren’t sure where or when.
You work your way through more pictures, hardly noticing the clack of metal on ceramic as Keri eats her eggs. The man and woman get progressively younger and, with it, more familiar. The pictures now have to be almost twenty cycles old. You’re almost certain you’re right about the suspicions sneaking up on you now, your eyes making their way through the next picture set. In these, the couple are in a hospital, holding hands and eating together, their smiles as wide as children’s. Finally, you reach the bottom of the box and see a picture of the two of them in hospital beds beside one another, their heads thoroughly wrapped and their bodies mangled wrecks. Still, you haven’t seen the other woman.
“Keri,” you started, again. “Where are the pictures of the other woman? The one you said wasn’t your mommy…” Keri’s eyes grow wide as she realizes she brought you the wrong box of pictures and scampers off back to the other room. There’s an audible thud as she drops something, but there’s a quick dismissal of the urgency that makes it to you even before you finish standing. Moments later, Keri comes rushing back in and sets a box in front of you with a broken lock on it. It has one word written on it: Goddmunr. Good mind. It’s written in childish block letters, and yet you suspect it wasn’t written by a child. Cautiously, you open the box and pick up the first picture.
The first picture is a wedding picture of the man and woman at a much younger age. His uniform is much less decorated, and her hair is a more vibrant blue tied up in Maerskor. There’s a light in both their eyes that you hadn’t noticed in the other pictures, and you’re fairly certain it’s nothing to do with age. As you pick up the next picture, tears begin welling up in your eyes before you even turn it over. You know who these people are now. When you flip the picture over, the tears make their way down your face. You wish for a moment that you hadn’t taken off your goggles to cook and eat. Then, Keri wouldn’t have seen you cry.
As you pick up the next picture, however, you no longer care. You stifle a heart-wrenching sob as you look at a picture you have used as a bookmark for the past twenty cycles of your life. That same young Valkyrie woman is holding a young baby with glowing green eyes of her own against her hip, smiling joyfully at the man behind the camera. On the bottom of this picture is written, in much neater handwriting than the word on the box but likely by the same hand, “Zhilo’di, half a cycle, Qzcivden Gardens.”
You had been picked up for the Young Girls’ Academy for the Blue at a very early age, shortly after your parents had gotten into a shuttle crash. You had never questioned whether or not they were alive. You had always just known they were dead. Now, though…
A small hand makes its way into the crook of your arm. “Shilo,” the now somehow much more dear voice of your sister says. “What’s wrong? You’re crying.”
Blinking a few times before looking back to her, you wipe your eyes and say truthfully, “Nothing’s wrong, Keri. Nothing’s wrong at all.” The worry written on Keri’s face melts a bit, and she smiles hesitantly. “Now,” you say, your arm opening up so she can climb up. “Would you like to look through these pictures with me?” Her smile grows stronger, and she quickly climbs into your lap, pulling a few pictures out of the box, herself. She starts indicating her favorites, and for a few moments, you both let yourselves forget the fact of the destroyed city all around you on this decimated planet, both exhausted and both very happy to cling to something wonderful for a short while.
A few centidays later, however, that time comes to a close as you hear the cry of a vengeful pack of ice wyrms let out a rallying cry from inside the building’s lobby.
Shilo
cousins must have been unable to kill one of your own, which made you wonder, “Where’s your mother, little girl?”