THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 26: Search Out
“Wisdom doesn’t come from what happens to us, but what we do about it.”
– Duaal Sinnay (234 PA)
“Can you believe it?” Jaissa asked.
Gavriel looked over the top of a datadex and hoped that his wife could see the stern frown lines across his forehead. Yellow sunlight streamed in through the open curtains above the sink. Even after thirty-two years on Tynerion, Gavriel could never get used to the brilliant sun of his new homeworld.
“I believe,” he said, “that this wedding is going to cost us five years of my salary.”
Jaissa scoffed. “Of your old Zeon salary, maybe. But Poes Nor University pays you ten times as much. Besides, we’re not skimping on our only daughter’s wedding.”
“She may be our only daughter,” Gavriel pointed out, “but this is her second wedding.”
“The first one was just practice,” Sarru said.
She came into the kitchen, high heels clicking on the tiled floor. She bent and kissed her father’s thinning hair.
“Besides, that one didn’t cost you a thing,” Sarru said.
“Xiv took you for everything you had. That’s why we’re paying for this wedding.”
Sarru made a face and turned to her mother. “Dad’s getting grumpy in his old age, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” Jaissa agreed. “But he’s allowed to. We’re very exasperating people, after all.”
Gavriel relented and smiled at his wife and daughter. “Fine. Get going before I change my mind and refuse to let either of you out of my sight. I don’t care if you spend every cenmark I’ve ever made, as long as you’re both happy.”
“We are, love,” Jaissa said.
She kissed Gavriel and grabbed her purse from the counter. Jaissa and Sarru waved and then went out the side door, the one that led to the little cobbled walkway and the road. Jaissa’s car was in the garage, but Sarru preferred to drive. Her tiny sports flier was hardly a family car, Gavriel reflected, and if this marriage worked out, Sarru would need something a little bigger. Maybe as a wedding gift…
Gavriel thumbed his datadex over to mainstream access. Looking at a few options couldn’t hurt. He was still pulling up the dealership’s node when he heard the deafening squeal of tearing metal, the sharp shattering of glass and then the screams outside. Gavriel jumped to his feet and ran for the door. But by the time he reached the blood-spattered curb and shoved past his neighbors, it was far too late.
Writing speeches and giving them were entirely different things, Panna discovered. Her already towering respect for Maeve went up a few more notches as she washed her sweaty hands for the fifth time. She turned off the faucet and watched the last drops of water fall in a swift, fine spray under the influence of Hadra’s high gravity. Panna reached out, but the towel was gone. She had already thrown it down the laundry chute two hand-washings ago. She sighed and wiped her dripping fingers on her shirt.
It was Sir Ballad’s job to help Panna find their fellow Arcadians and bring them together, but she was the one who had to speak to them. Panna had tried a couple times to persuade Ballad to help out with the speeches. The young knight had been hand-picked by Maeve as Anthem’s first squire, after all. But Panna knew the queen and the new kingdom better, Ballad argued. She never agreed, but the Prian fairy had been stubborn and refused to give ground.
The bathroom door — which had been stripped and repainted so many times that it looked as though it had some sort of disease — swung suddenly open and Ballad appeared in the mirror. Panna jumped, swearing.
“Get out of here!” she shouted.
But Ballad didn’t move. “You’re not doing anything. We need to talk.”
“I could have been in the shower!”
“You weren’t, though,” Ballad said with that annoying and unarguable Prian pragmatism. “What were you doing?”
Panna mumbled a noncommittal answer, but followed Ballad back into the cheap motel room. She sat on the edge of one bed.
“How did it go down in Dark End?” Panna asked. That wasn’t the district’s real name, but that was more or less what the Hadrian Arcadians called it.
“Darkened?” Ballad asked, raising one wheat-colored eyebrow in obvious confusion.
“Dark End,” Panna repeated, enunciating each word carefully. “Dark… End.”
Ballad snorted. “That’s not what it sounded like.”
“What?” Panna crossed her arms. “As though you can speak. I can barely understand you through that stupid accent!”
“My accent?” Ballad asked, scowling. “You talk like you went to school on Tynerion!”
“I did!”
“That explains why your Arcadian is so bad. It’s even worse than your Aver.”
“What? No, it’s not!” Panna said. She jumped up to her feet and felt heat in her cheeks. “I speak perfect Arcadian! It’s not my fault you come from the back end of the galaxy.”
“Back end of the galaxy…?” Ballad asked. His face was turning quite red, too. “Prianus is… alright, fine! Maybe it is a bit out of the way, but…”
He trailed off and then turned his back on Panna, glaring out the windows. She didn’t sit down. Ballad might have given up, but Panna was still angry.
“I guess neither of us really sound like the old fairies, do we?” he said, not looking at Panna.
“No,” she agreed reluctantly. “I guess not.”
Panna’s anger suddenly collapsed, giving way to a sharp-edged depression. She flopped back onto the bed. Hadra’s gravity made it a harder flop than Panna intended and Ballad looked back at the thump. He sat on the other bed, angling himself so that his wings remained free. Flaunting them, she could not help thinking.
Arcadians — or aerads, as they had once been called — were children of the air. There had been four races of fairies in the White Kingdom, roughly corresponding to what the old civilizations of both rim and core considered to be the four elements: the dead but fiery pyrads, the amphibious nyads, the forest-dwelling dryads, and the white-winged aerads.
Not long into Panna’s studies with Professor Xen — the memory of her teacher still made Panna’s eyes sting — she was certain that this poetic delineation of the fairy species couldn’t be the work of natural evolution. Someone must have designed the four fairy races. Panna considered the gods of her parents and even the coreworlder Union of Light creator, but after many talks with Xen in the Poes Nor University cafeteria, that seemed unlikely.
If a god or gods had created all life, that would certainly explain the similarities Professor Xen had studied, like the common genes between the Lyrans and wolves found on many planets, as well as the presence of humans throughout the galaxy. A single creator or committee of them might have such a common and unified vision of life.
But what about the imperfections? The Mirran tendency toward high blood pressure and heart failure? The relatively weak Hadrian immune system? These were obvious results of adaptation to their planets, but poor ones that must have evolved side by side with the more useful traits.
Mirrans were fast and held most athletic records in the galaxy — with the notable exception of water sports, over which the Hyzaari appropriately claimed mastery — and their stripes had concealed them for generations from Mir’s many predators. But evolving as prey animals had made them high-strung, nervous and edgy. Over seventy percent of humans with at least one Mirran grandparent suffered some sort of hypertensive condition. If a god had created the Mirrans, surely they would not have included such frailties. No, it was clearly the result of natural pressures. There was some sort of strange mix of intelligent design and natural evolution taking place in the galaxy.
Panna had to admit that Xen’s opinions might have shaped her own. As a species, the Ixthians weren’t generally great followers of the Union of Light. For the most part, it had been the human races who founded the religion.
Lyceum representatives from Ixth had approved the creation of a unified faith in those early days of the Central World Alliance, but more to put an end to the humans’ incessant religious wars than any desire to adopt a god of their own. The Ixthians were gods unto themselves, Professor Xen was fond of saying. Their creations had no heart problems. Not, at least, that they couldn’t fix in the next version.
So Xen ruled out a god creator. The professor had theorized a common ancestor for most life in the galaxy. Or at least a common planet of origin, a world on which the dominant life-form was bipedal, with a single head, two arms and two legs and an omnivorous diet. That planet had obviously had the insects and wolves from which Ixthians and Lyrans descended. Probably some sort of large primates, too, that eventually became the powerful Dailons. Xen had not been popular around campus with the other Ixthians for suggesting that their own species might not have been the dominant one on some ancient shared homeworld. Xen had been very brave, Panna always thought.
But Panna’s own people, the Arcadians, did not seem to entirely conform to the rules of Professor Xen’s theory. They were close to human in appearance and had a great many genes in common, but also shared partial redprints with several bird species. Panna had no access to dryad or nyad cells, but suspected they were equally specialized hybrids. Without a natural evolutionary divergence like that of the human species, the fairies likely couldn’t have interbred.
Someone had probably designed the fairies not to breed, which would also have explained the incredibly low Arcadian birthrate and high cultural esteem placed on siblings. And it meant that the rumors that Cavain’s black hair came from pyrad blood were highly suspect. Maeve might be disappointed, but Panna like to hope that when Cavain wiped out the pyrads ten thousand years ago, he at least wasn’t killing his own people.
There was the Arcadian stellar system itself to consider, too. All five planets circled their sun, Aes, on a single perfect orbit. Each tilted at an exact seven-degree angle. Panna had run simulations in the Poes Nor lab over three hundred times. The chances of such a system occurring naturally were in excess of one in eight hundred trillion.
It wasn’t impossible, but extremely unlikely — unless someone created it that way, created the Arcadian worlds and inhabitants like the Ixthians created new organs in their sealed ceramic vats.
What about the Waygates, ancient even beyond Arcadian reckoning? Gripper said the language one of them boomed across Pylos was similar to his own, that it was summoning its technicians. Its creators, the Devourers. What if the Devourers were that common ancestor to the coreworld races and creator of the Arcadians? Their observable biology certainly fit the profile Xen had laid out…
Panna realized Ballad was talking and probably had been for some time. His wings were alternately flexing, one after the other in agitation. Panna waved him off.
“Hold on, I need to write something down,” she told Ballad.
The leather-clad young knight stopped speaking and cocked his head to one side, frowning.
“What?” he asked. “You weren’t listening to a word I said!”
“No,” Panna agreed as she reached over the edge of the bed. She found a datadex and rummaged through her backpack for a stylus. “Sorry.”
Ballad slapped his hand down on the screen. “Panna, stop! Will you just listen to me for half a minute?”
“This is important!” Panna said, yanking the datadex out from under Ballad’s fingers.
“So is what I’m trying to tell you! There’s someone else–”
“It can wait!”
Ballad stood, throwing his hands into the air and stormed from the motel room.
Sweat dripped down into Logan’s eyes. He ignored the salty sting and carefully slid the thin tweezers beneath the coils of green and black wires.
“Can you even see what you’re doing, Hunter?” Gripper asked.
“No,” Logan said. “You’re not supposed to be here. Get back with the knights.”
“You might need the extra hands. I’m not leaving.”
Logan didn’t spend energy on an answer. He held his breath and slid the tweezers delicately along the bottom of the timer casing, beneath the snaking twist of tangled wiring, until he felt the point impact something. There. More sweat rolled down the back of his neck, soaking his hair. The dim, hot red sun burned down on the damp skin, reflected and refracted by Kaellisem’s glass towers.
Slowly, Logan worked the tweezers’ prongs under the obstacle. The little tool slid in his grip and nearly fell into the opened bomb, right into the lumpy yellow-white bars of hand-packed nitrocycline. Logan squeezed and pried up the tiny piece of metal, tugging it gently free from the casing. The half-circle of copper was welded clumsily to a length of the green wire and Logan swiftly pressed the contact down onto the small battery gripped tightly in his illonium left hand.
“What did you do?” Gripper asked.
“Put the timer on its own circuit. We have about thirty seconds before the system shorts on the uncalibrated voltage.”
“So we just need to get the nitrocycline out, right? That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It’s corrosive,” Logan said. “Did you find the amylide?”
“No,” Gripper told him. “I’m sorry. I never need it on the Blue Phoenix.”
Logan nodded. “Fine.”
He carefully passed the battery to Gripper and flexed his illonium hand three times. The joints didn’t like the dry dust of Stray and the metal ground with grit. Well, it would have to be good enough. Logan held the cylindrical bomb steady in his right hand and reached inside with his left. There was a hiss and a pale, toxic-smelling thread of smoke rose as the nitrocycline seared the metal. Carefully, Logan lifted one block of explosive free. The illonium covering his cybernetics was blackened and corroding.
Logan tasted blood. He was biting his tongue. Twenty percent of his melting hand was still agony. The nitrocycline seared his fingers like sticking his hand into molten steel. But the metal didn’t sweat. It didn’t bleed.
“Give me the bleach,” Logan said.
Gripper nodded and held out a large ceramic mixing bowl and Logan quickly dropped the nitrocycline bar into the slippery, oily-looking liquid inside. The white explosive began to froth and then dissolve into the bleach.
Logan repeated the process for the rest of the nitrocycline, dropping the last block into the now muddy brown bleach just as the timer wire sparked. The detonator — a small ignition coil taken from a vehicle engine — popped and glowed orange for a moment, then went dark.
Gripper jumped to his feet and punched the air with one huge brown fist. “You did it, Hunter!”
Logan sat back on the sandy ground, sweat pouring down his back and blood filling his mouth.
“Give me the rest of the bleach,” he said in a rough voice.
“Oh, shoot.” Gripper stopped his victorious canter and grabbed the bleach bottle from next to his toolbox. “Yeah. Hold out that hand, Hunter.”
Logan gratefully let Gripper douse his burning metal fingers. The bleach that ran over his corroded illonium hand dripped dark gray onto the sandy ground. When Gripper was sure that all of the corrosive nitrocycline had been neutralized, Logan pulled back and forced his right hand to unclench. The skin was slicked with sweat and his fingernails had carved red crescents into his palms. Logan inspected the damage to his other hand. The gray illonium was streaked in foul-smelling black burns. The metal was blistered and brittle, already cracking in places like seared skin.
A winged shadow fell over Gripper and Logan, growing until its owner landed. Sir Anthem’s golden hair and glass armor gleamed under the morning sun. The knight looked down at Logan as blackened bleach dripped from the human’s hand and the ruined illonium creaked in weak protest of its abuse.
“Is your job done?” Anthem asked.
“Yes,” Logan answered. He spat red blood into the sand. “The bomb’s been dismantled. I need a box or case to remove the parts. Something with no metal. One of the crates from the Blue Phoenix should do.”
Anthem nodded and relayed the Prian’s instructions to two of his knights in his own lyric language. Logan’s Arcadian was improving, but it was still hard to follow the swift, liquid flow of Anthem’s speech. Gripper poured distilled water over Logan’s burned hand, rinsing away the bleach. Logan didn’t let himself wince. The water wasn’t cold, but it was painful on his exposed wiring.
Gripper bent down to examine Logan’s cybernetics. “It doesn’t look like much of the nitrocycline got inside. You ruined the plating and we need to replace it. All the seals around the fingers and wrist are shot, too.”
“Nothing like this happened when you found the other bomb,” Anthem said.
“The others weren’t nitrocycline,” Logan answered. He stood up and brushed the sand from his pants with one hand. “Our bomber is stepping up his game. That much nitrocycline would have taken out this tower and probably a few of its neighbors.”
“And the sharp… sharpanel…” Anthem said, faltering. His Aver was improving, as well, but still imperfect. The knight sighed. “The broken glass would have hurt many more.”
“But your knights found it first,” Logan said. “The new patrol patterns are working.”
Finding the second bomb — only a day after the theater explosion — had been sheer luck. Duaal had noticed the strange device while on a walk. The bomber seemed to know where Kaellisem’s knights would be and when, making it all too easy to plant their explosives where they wouldn’t be found until it was far too late. But Anthem’s random reassignments and reordering of his knights had eliminated that advantage. Logan would have preferred to find out how the bomber knew in the first place, but…
“But we lack your experience in dealing with explosives,” Sir Anthem said. “Thank you for responding so quickly.”
Logan nodded. There weren’t enough cops on Prianus to make up dedicated bomb response units, so all police there were trained in the basics of dealing with explosives. Logan’s hand grated as the blackened illonium crumbled and pieces caught in the machinery inside. Suddenly, the red Stray dust didn’t seem so bad. Nitrocycline presented a challenge even for experienced demolitions experts. The chemicals were expensive and the byproducts were incredibly toxic. Whoever made this device had probably carved twenty years off their lifespan.
It was getting worse. This was the second bomb Anthem and his knights had found in a week. The Gharib police had been by to collect their bribes but offered no help in dealing with the bombs. How long would Anthem’s randomized patrols keep them ahead of the Kaellisem bomber?
Another Arcadian shadow raced over the city towers and the emptied street below. Anthem and the rest of his remaining knights dropped at once to one knee as Maeve landed. Logan followed suit, bowing his head as much to avoid looking at the fairy queen as out of respect. The throbbing, searing heat in his damaged illonium hand was nothing next to the feeling in his heart.
It’s just a fluid pump, Logan told himself. It doesn’t feel anything.
That was a lie. Logan’s computerized heart hammered achingly behind his ribs as his eyes rose disobediently to Maeve. The fairy queen’s black hair was damp and unbound, spilling like ink across her shoulders. One of the royal handmaidens landed with a puff of dust behind her sovereign. It was the smaller one, Dain, and the girl was panting hard with the effort of keeping up.
“Logan, what happened?” Maeve asked, voice sharp with fear.
“All is well, my queen,” Anthem answered. “We found another bomb, but Coldhand has dealt with it.”
“Is he hurt?”
Maeve ran to Logan before Anthem could answer and reached for the Prian’s burnt left hand. Logan snatched it back and shook his head.
“Don’t touch it,” he said.
Maeve’s hands remained extended. “Why not?”
“I’ll burn you.”
“It’s fine,” Gripper told Maeve. “The acid’s all been neutralized.”
Logan made a mental note to shoot the Arboran just as soon as Maeve wasn’t looking.
Dain lunged at Maeve, but then seemed to think better of tackling her queen, even away from the perceived danger, and fell still. Maeve didn’t seem to have noticed the girl at all. She took Logan’s hand in both of hers. The ruined metal crumbled under her delicate touch. Logan didn’t let himself wince as the raw sensory wiring was suddenly exposed to the hot, gritty air of Stray.
“Can you repair it?” Maeve asked Gripper. “Do you have the supplies?”
“Not on um… hand,” the Arboran answered. “It’s shielding. Illonium mostly only gets installed where there is going to be massive radiation or weapons’ fire. But the Blue Phoenix uses phenno for radiation and we don’t have any guns.”
“How long will it take to get some?” Maeve asked.
Maeve’s skin was smooth and warm and just slightly damp with sweat against Logan’s hand. Or was that his imagination? There was no way that the crude cybernetic sensors could feel so much. Did he miss touching Maeve so much that he was making things up?
Yes.
“I’m not sure. Maybe a few days?” Gripper said. “I can message Unbreakers. I’m sure the Blues can get some.”
Maeve raised her eyes to Logan’s. “Does it hurt?”
“No,” he lied.
She knew better. Maeve released his hand and glanced back over her wings to Dain and Anthem. The little queen straightened. Rust-colored dust clung to her pale dress like bloodstains.
“Anthem, please send one of your knights to see Vyron,” Maeve said. “If they have what Gripper needs to make repairs, then I want it delivered to Kaellisem by evening.”
Anthem saluted, but did not immediately dispatch one of the other fairies. Did he like seeing Logan Coldhand squirm? But the unfailingly regal prince consort was difficult to read.
“There may be a swifter solution, a’shae,” he said.
“What is it?” Maeve asked.
Anthem gestured to the nearby street.
“Glass, my queen,” he said. “Hyra is here in Kaellisem and his glass is as strong as illonium, I think. The casing of a hand does not look so different from a gauntlet.”
Maeve shot a look at Gripper. “Would that work?”
“Maybe…” said the Arboran mechanic. “If we can make some changes to help it withstand impact a little better than the theater did. I need to clean out the broken illonium, but other than that, the damage seems pretty superficial. All Hunter needs is new plating. I don’t see why it couldn’t be glass.”
Maeve turned back to Logan. “Would a hand of Arcadian glass be acceptable?”
“It might be better,” he said. “The nitrocycline reacts particularly violently with metal. Glass should be a little more resilient.”
“Then we will use the Bherrosi glass,” Maeve decided. “It contains no metallic impurities.”
Gripper cleared his throat. “And I’ll order up some amylide, too. Let’s not burn your hand off next time.”
“Yes,” Maeve agreed softly. She didn’t meet Logan’s eye. “I thank you for your bravery and skill, my hunter, but they are poor trade for your life.”
The fairy queen turned quickly away and leapt gracefully up into the clear morning sky. Dain scrambled to follow, leaving Logan alone once more with Gripper and the knights. Anthem held his hand out to Logan.
“Let us get you to the glass-singers,” he said.
Logan pushed himself to his feet without assistance. “I’m not much good to Maeve with a broken hand. Let’s go.”
