The Sigian Bracelet Read online

  “Great Baila, the protocol has been activated!” he said, spitting the news in a hurry. “We found a Sigian mummy with a bracelet on his arm!”

  Gill couldn’t see how Baila IX received the news, but surely he was searching for the Sigian artifacts with at least the same fervor as his current successor, Baila XXI—so it must have pleased him greatly. And indeed, it seemed that the mood of their invisible host suddenly improved because everyone—save for the body lying on the floor—raised their heads and grinned broadly.

  “Five days ago, the rebels ambushed a column north of Odert River, and many tarjis died, Your Greatness. The temples had to take the enemy outpost in Samarrin to make sure it would never happen again. The siege was short and bloody. After the battle, a prisoner led them to a secret vault in the basement of the main tower, where he showed them the Sigian!”

  Some Sigians died on Antyra I, too, realized Gill, not surprised by the news. After all, two ships left Mapu, and Tadeo only discovered one.

  “An ancestor of the prisoner had found the mummy on the bottom of a crevasse, almost a hundred years ago. Since then, they kept it hidden in the tower.”

  What a huge mistake Kirk’an made, to abandon the destroyer on Mapu! Instead of meeting the Rigulians, they ended their lives buried in ice caverns or ripped apart by enemy lasers on Antyra II. And Raman’s world didn’t fare much better, either: the great ancient cities were turned to ashes, with Baila I becoming the new ruler of the Antyrans.

  “The three Antyran guardians of the code brought the remains to the Mordavia Temple. As soon as we got the signal, we took off to recover them.”

  “May we show it to you?” another god dared to ask.

  They turned and ran back toward the ship, followed faithfully by the holoscanner even after they climbed aboard. Gill got a glimpse of a highly irregular ovoid room with bulged walls, curved inward up to the ceiling, apparently made of a moist, organic material. They walked through another irregular opening, and right in the middle of the room, there was a floating platform bathed in a milky light. Five “cerebral” creatures were swarming around it. Needless to say, all of them were identical to the first creature.

  The remains of a Sigian, dressed in what appeared to be an almost-intact orange battle suit, were laid on the table. His bones were covered with patches of paperlike dry skin, his skull still holding a few scattered tufts of white hair.

  But the most fascinating thing was on his right forearm: a golden bracelet!

  “This is it!” exclaimed an awestruck god, walking to the table.

  The five “cerebrals” turned to the holoscanner and made a deep bow. Then, without a word, one of them carefully removed the bracelet from the mummy’s arm and froze, apparently unable to grasp that he was holding it in his hands. After a few moments, he slowly came back to his senses and walked to another translucent table floating nearby.

  Their excitement didn’t last long, though, because as soon as the creature left the bracelet on the table, a deafening buzz burst into the lab. Gill couldn’t hide a satisfied grin, knowing all too well what was about to happen. The aliens knew it too—or at least suspected it—because they started to squirm uselessly while their nodule-ridden faces deformed even more. In the end, one of them found enough courage to grab the bracelet from the table, turning it on all sides.

  “I don’t understand,” the cerebral being whined. “Your Greatness, the information was wrong… It got activated even without wearing it. What shall we do now?”

  “The base is doomed! The ships have to leave now!” shouted one of the “muscle heads,” suddenly awoken from surprise and proving in a rather vocal manner that he, too, was able to use his synapses. He jumped at the closest holo-display to warn the other starships hidden in the cavern.

  The gods were waiting in silence, gazing at the deadly bracelet whose buzz doubled in intensity. A few began to whisper something in a dull hum while others ran at a translucent display to get the ship out of the cave. In a moment, the engine’s deafening sound roared again.

  It seemed, though, that they didn’t have enough time to make it; a blinding flash followed in an instant. The godly hologram imploded in a sphere of light, which slowly shrank into a shiny dot. Then it disappeared altogether, under the prophet’s grieving eyes.

  “The gods died, and we lost Antyra,” he wailed.

  So that was the untold story of the Kids’ War! The gods hid on Antyra, inside the distortion, until they got killed by the Sigian artifact they hunted so feverishly. “The history is never what it seems to be,” the great aromary Laixan wisely said. Everything was related to everything else; life throughout the whole universe, animated by its seemingly chaotic laws, was in fact a tumbling waterfall of interconnected events; the smallest lever presses in unexpected places changed the destiny of other civilizations—a supersymmetry principle in action. Gill had witnessed an avalanche of interplanetary consequences.

  “Why didn’t the gods reveal themselves to the Antyrans when the Kids’ War started?” Gill voiced his curiosity. “They could have stopped the riots on the first day.”

  “Baila IX was blinded by pride. He thought he could win without their help.”

  “It would have cost him nothing to do it,” he exclaimed.

  “You don’t understand! The gods can’t… cross the wall as they please,” the prophet said with difficulty, aware that he uttered another huge blasphemy. “Baila thought it could take hundreds of years to find a bracelet. Who knows what the inquiring kyis of the unbelievers might have discovered about them in the meantime, had they known the secret of their presence here.”

  “And our science gets better by the day,” Gill grinned. “If the creatures hadn’t died, we might have detected them by now.”

  “Baila IX considered this small detail when he decided that the gods had to stay hidden,” the prophet said, noticing Gill’s sarcasm. “But his biggest mistake was to forbid them to attack the rebels on Klikoh. They could have bombed them from orbit without fear of being seen or smelled, and the starships wouldn’t have been surprised by the blast inside the base.”

  Once more, the hologram of the glacier popped up in Baila’s hall.

  “Baila IX was left alone with the godly tools,” the prophet said, sighing. “No Antyran was allowed to see them, not even the three Mordavian protectors of the code. And so, the prophet became a simple spectator of his fall from power, unable to turn the tides of the war… unable to turn around the eye of the satellite stuck forever on the same valley.”

  The temple soldiers reached the last stretch of the glacier. Here, the rugged path was crossed by countless crevasses and seracs, which soon brought their advance to a halt despite the best efforts of the pathmakers. And it was happening near the hill where the thermal shadows were waiting in ambush…

  With their narrow bridges hopelessly clogged, the soldiers scattered to search for a way around the largest cracks when, all of a sudden, a mighty battle cry erupted from the nearby hill! Thousands of foot rebels in leather armor burst out of their snow pits, screaming, and charged down the slope, followed on their wings by two small packs of moulan riders dressed in full orzac regalia.

  On the top of the hill, hundreds of moulan slingers called sakka36 sprang from the wooden hatches hidden under the snow. They quickly aimed their slings at the swarm in the valley and hurled the bombs all at once.

  Being placed so high, the first salvo flew more than fifteen hundred feet before landing in the middle of the temples’ vanguard, wreaking havoc. A few well-aimed bombs fell on the bridges and on the unfortunate troops crossing them. The decks immediately caught fire and broke like tinder—not so much due to the fire, but from the commotion caused by the frightened beasts. Howling in terror, scores of soldiers and moulans fell to their death, pulling one another into the dark abyss.

  The panic spread like wildfire, and many more slipped into the crevasses, pushed aside by their frightened companions in the rush to reach solid ice.
/>   Another surprise strike, launched by a small elite sakka unit hidden on a hillside at the rear of the enemy column, smashed the nearby bridges, trapping over half of the temple army. In one blow, the rear guard became cut off from the others, who had no place to retreat except the icy tombs under their feet.

  The temple pathmakers in the vanguard had bigger worries than having to reach back to rebuild the broken bridges; quicker than unfastening a tail tip, the bloodthirsty rebels crashed down the hillside and smashed their scattered flanks, closely followed by another deadly volley of the sakka.

  Under the onslaught, the soldiers in the vanguard had no time to form ranks. Soon, most of them were either mowed down or pushed into the crevasses.

  The other troops caught in the encirclement ran forward to meet the rebels. The surviving pathmakers laid new bridges to replace the broken ones, and for a while, a bloody battle ensued over the crevasses. Antyrans with death in their eyes and hatred in their kyis were fighting and falling together to their doom. In their mad rush to mangle one another, their plight often ended with the bridges breaking under their feet, unable to hold the weight of the heavy armor and moulans.

  Both the rebels and the temples threw more and more bridges over the cracks, widening the battlefront with astounding speed. Soon, some abysses were decked from one end to the other.

  The temple slingers, stretched several miles behind the front line, were unable to make an impression on the rebels. A few volleys launched by the ones closer to the battle ended up hitting their own troops, adding to the general chaos.

  Meanwhile, the rebel sakka spread their salvos, filling the valley with the heavy stench of burned flesh and the wailing of the wounded. Crevasse after crevasse, bridge after bridge, the temple troops were losing ground, bowing under the ferocity of the attack. Soon, they were unable to resist anymore. Screaming in terror, the soldiers broke at once and turned their backs on the enemy to flee the massacre, pushing aside the troops coming to their rescue from behind.

  The chaos that followed was easy to imagine. Lacking the help of their pathmakers, disorganized and running on the entire width of the glacier, Baila’s soldiers fell by the thousands in the blue cracks opened under their feet; they crowded the few remaining bridges, breaking them or slipping off the edges. Most had no idea that their retreat was blocked, pushing one another to their death in a vain attempt to run for their lives. In all this time, the rebels advanced quickly, capturing the ones who begged for mercy on their knees.

  Without warning, the strange hologram melted away for the second time.

  “Now do you believe me, Gill, that only the bracelet matters?” Baila asked him.

  He didn’t answer, but for once he had to agree: the bracelet was all that mattered. And he didn’t feel the slightest tail pinch to part with it.

  “I don’t understand why it blew up,” the prophet moaned, “without anyone wearing it.”

  “They’ll work on aliens, too, except for our enemies,” Gill murmured Deko’s words.

  “What did you say?” asked Baila.

  “I remembered an old friend,” he said, smiling.

  “For the last time, I’m telling you: the gods want your bracelet! You have no use for it, and in return, you’ll get everything! You’ll get more than you ever dreamed of, from the very hands of our grateful gods!”

  Then he asked him, grinning broadly, “What say you?”

  An embarrassing silence sank in the room. Baila’s face darkened, realizing that Gill wouldn’t accept this time, either.

  “Why do you hesitate?” Alala asked him. “Don’t you understand you can’t refuse such a—”

  “Sorry,” he replied coldly, “the bracelet is not for giving.”

  “Think well,” hissed Baila. “You can’t hide from me forever! And if I don’t find you, the gods will. Oh, yes, they will! If you walk through that door, I’ll take my hand off your spikes!”

  “I don’t get it; why are you doing this to yourself?” the female insisted.

  “The cloud cities were beautiful beyond words.”

  “What are you talking about?” exclaimed Alala, convinced that Arghail’s corruption ate his kyi.

  “The grays mowed them down without mercy. One by one, they fell to the ground… Time itself froze in the face of such atrocity! When they reached the black seas, giant fires climbed to the orbit—”

  “You’re mad!” she barked at him.

  “On Zhan’s eye, you saw Arghail’s secrets!” exclaimed Baila, almost falling on his back, as if Arghail himself had leaped in front of him.

  This can’t be good, thought Gill. Again, he had that annoying feeling that Baila was much more than he seemed. But he had to take his chances; after all, as long as the gods didn’t return to their “Antyran children,” the Shindam’s fate was hardly sealed. Was Baila bluffing as usual, or could he really call them? He said with his own mouth that not even the gods could pass the firewall as they pleased.

  Are you going to open the firewall for me? I guess there’s only one way to find out, he grinned in his kyi.

  “See, Your Greatness, I can’t help Zhan. Such cruelty can’t be served, not even to save my life. You said we should talk openly. Then why don’t you say the true name of your master? I can’t serve Arghail like you do, Your Greatness,” he threw it in his face and turned to the door to run out.

  An intricate network of roads crisscrossed the huge mountain range. If he managed to reach them alive, he’d have dozens of tunnels to hide his tracks. The Shindam would have been more than able to find a fugitive using their eyes in the sky,37 but the temples didn’t have the same capabilities. At least not yet.

  “Don’t run from me, little Antyran. We have other means to reach our goals. I hope you realize that. The neural probes are not a pleasure,” Baila threatened him.

  Gill didn’t consider the prophet worthy of an answer.

  “I’ll make sure your agony will be long!” the prophet screamed in a high-pitched voice, watching him angrily as he went out.

  “You’ll never get me alive!” he replied defiantly from the doorstep, then turned his back to step outside.

  He knew he made the right choice; too many had died to guard the secret for him to betray them like that. He had to help the beings from the bracelet’s dreams, to help a civilization lost in the mist of time to be reborn from its ashes. Maybe the decision would lead to his death, but he had to keep fighting the “Sigian war” into which he had been dragged. No, he thought, it’s our war, too. When the Sigians hid on Antyra, they unwillingly entangled their destiny with that of the Antyrans. The firewall separated them from the rest of the universe, and from that day on, the war against the gray gods became theirs, too.

  Gill opened the door and rushed to the jet, his pulse beating madly in the head spikes; he could hear Baila’s hologram shouting something behind him, surely an order for the tarjis to get on his tail. The hunting began!

  After the first few steps, he felt the cold air biting his skin. The temperature was falling quickly, a normal thing considering he was at an altitude of over eight thousand feet, and it was close to nightfall.

  He ran, the snow cracking under his feet, around a small cliff that hid the parking lot. The transparent ceiling of the magneto-jet became visible over the mounds of snow left on the sides of the road.

  Only a few steps remained between him and the relative safety of his vehicle, when… he ran out of luck: he stumbled upon two silhouettes hidden by the snow piles. It only took him a heartbeat to understand the terrible truth. The temple agents! How did they arrive so quickly? Most likely they had been there all along.

  One of them was holding a portable flexi-display and listened to something on a tiny receiver glued to his ear. The other one raised his head and saw him.

  “Look who’s here!” he exclaimed.

  To his great surprise, he didn’t lose his tail as usual. He turned back before they had time to blink and ran away on the same path, his muscle
s tense in anticipation of the paralyzing whips. But they didn’t come.

  His little rebellion would be even shorter than he expected. The portable display could only mean one thing: the area was being watched from the air. An air-jet had to be hovering somewhere nearby, stalking his every step. He turned his head to see if the agents followed him, but he saw no one; alas, he knew he had no reason to feel happy.

  The recreation dome was built on the banks of a small stream fed by an ice tongue, which was barely visible somewhere at the bottom of the valley. Up in the mountains, at an altitude of over three miles, a sharp ridge split the small glacier right from the hearts of Eger.38

  There was no time to check his surroundings, so he just blindly followed the path close to the water, leading to the mountains. He couldn’t think of a way to get out of trouble; his only choice was to run, even though he had no hope of escape from the deadly trap into which he had fallen.

  The snow, although deep, had a thick enough crust to support his weight, allowing him to run on it easily. Sometimes, though, the frozen layer gave way, and his foot sank in the powder beneath, slowing his escape.

  On the right side of the stream, there was a mostly vertical wall covered in ice cascades, impossible to climb without a sticky suit. The other bank didn’t look better, either: the same ridge that split a slice of the Eger became a rocky hill with steep slopes, holding the narrow valley separated from the one of the giant glacier. Besides, it would have been a bit of a mistake to get wet by crossing the stream. His options were not exactly plentiful.

  Not far from the dome, the valley began to open, and he got a glimpse of the ice tongue just a few miles away from him, shining magically in the red and orange hues of the star-set. This time, though, he didn’t have eyes to admire the most beautiful view in the whole of Antyra, too busy trying to stay alive.

  He gazed over his shoulder to make sure no one followed him, just when two Antyrans appeared from behind the dome and rushed in his direction. Despite the distance, he figured they were not the ones from the parking lot; the valley was teeming with Baila’s agents!