The Sigian Bracelet Page 18

  After making sure she was finally alone, Sandara opened the city index to see if she could find anything about Gillabrian. She had no idea what made her do it, other than a vague instinct that she had to discover more about him. The female tried to ignore the pleasant tingling in her tail. Sandara, he’s just an Antyran, she snooted. Have you forgotten Zagrada’s fall? The thought awakened her rather rudely to reality, and she turned back to work. It seemed, though, that the holoflux had unsettled her greatly because she wasn’t able to focus anymore. More and more “criminals” eluded her spikes, and she couldn’t care less about them. Carefree Walika was right to be happy—to force herself to feel happy—for ominous events were rushing so fast toward their world that any good times were nearly over.

  Gill had no idea how long he lay in his nest, unable to decide what to do next, but he finally got tired, and at the same time, he felt an ugly headache growing inside his skull. His head seemed to crack into hundreds of crumbling fragments. He rubbed his head spikes in a futile attempt to ease the maddening pain, cursing the lack of relaxation seeds, abandoned somewhere in the storeroom of his personal dome. A heavy fog fell over his eyes, and he wasn’t sure anymore if he was awake or dreaming…

  Boring, boring, so many fluxes and nothing to see. Who is that ugly face on the holo—oh, it’s me! Baila made me look hideous so that Alala wouldn’t like me? But… but… she… she lied to me? She played with my tail, she… pretended to love me? Alala! Come back—don’t leave me alone! No, wait a minute, he recalled, confused. Alala’s a spy. She is working for… for… for whom? He couldn’t remember.

  Then something else caught his attention: the three Rigulian envoys were standing near the holotheater, looking at him patiently. He leaped to his feet to greet them, his arms wide open to make sure they couldn’t run from him.

  How small the little one is! he thought. It wasn’t that obvious from the holofluxes, but the Rigulian barely reached Gill’s knee. He wondered where he should put them to make sure they didn’t become lost in the city. A good place might be a shelf in the food store, and they would nicely fill the void left by the fruits he had stolen. Would they mind staying in the dark? he wondered, chuckling.

  His sight became a kaleidoscope of blurry images while his head whirled even faster, on the verge of bursting from the unbearable pain.

  The cold breeze blew over his face, and he immediately felt a bit better. What am I doing in the street? Oh, yes, Gill remembered, I want to check again if it’s empty. Of course it’s empty; there’s no one in the whole neighborhood. But is this real, or am I dreaming? After a brief reflection, he finally concluded that he must have fallen asleep; the street was just an image stored in his memory. He had to stop thinking and take a good nap. He was so tired…

  A sharp pain pierced his right ankle as he missed the last stair of his dome, stepping into the void. The shock felt like an electric shower, making him open his eyes—this time for good. How did I get here? he asked himself, dumbfounded.

  After he reached the middle of the street, Gill walked toward a big intersection where a razog storehouse once functioned. He was still dazed, but he could see a brown air-jet hovering at a distance, with its rooftop folded. A big black ball balanced precariously on the tip of a thin telescopic arm, extended outside the vehicle.

  The distance decreased rapidly, and he couldn’t understand the surprising reason why, all of a sudden, his feet—remarkably docile until that day—were carrying him to the intersection without the slightest request from him to do so. When he looked closely at the black ball, he found the answer, the fear pouring into his bones like the frozen waters of the Eger: a radial inductor! Like a powerful magnet, the ball ordered every unshielded Antyran to fall asleep and run to it…

  The tarjis had captured the Shindam’s strongest weapons and deployed them on the backstreets of the city. Was there any way to oppose them? At the very thought of resisting the induction, he felt the urge to throw up. The merciless ball was pulling him faster and faster, controlling his motor functions with deadly determination.

  “Stop right now!” he shouted at his disobedient feet. They hesitated for a moment, but then they inexorably resumed walking toward his doom.

  Each time he tried to fight the induction, a wave of pain and nausea blurred his eyes; the closer he got to the air-jet, the stronger the torture became. The city blocks seemed deserted, with no one else rushing to fall into the trap.

  When he reached about three hundred feet from the vehicle, he saw the nearby initiates moving to capture him—one of them holding an induction necklace in his hand. The agents wore helmets and armored vests to shield their spinal nerves from the evil sphere.

  Gill knew that the time had come to use the Sigian weapon, even though he had to betray its secrets. Despite the paralyzing grip, he managed to turn his head and pull one space rectangle right behind his tail. Unfortunately, he couldn’t step inside it, his feet ruthlessly dragging him forward. Writhing in the grip of despair, he tried to twist and grab the distortion to pull himself inside it, but his stiffened body didn’t cooperate, either.

  Hanging on his last drop of determination, Gill clenched his teeth, groaned… and stopped his right foot in the air! For a brief moment, he dared to hope that he could walk backward, but the opposition didn’t last long; his treacherous feet resumed their march toward the evil gathering.

  Anyone else would have yielded—a few days ago, he would have done the same, no doubt. Today, however, was quite a different day, and the very thought of betraying the Sigians was giving Gill the power to quell the fear raging inside his body. He felt the transformation growing inside his kyi like a storm surge, rewriting his neural connections and turning him into a cold-blooded fighter. He was amazed how quickly he got over the shock of paralysis and how easily he could wake his sense of smell, in spite of the torture inflicted by the inductor.

  In the little time left before they would catch him, he had to find the hidden path,51 at the end of which he would be alive with the bracelet on his arm—he had to smell it by all costs…

  He breathed deeply, and to his surprise, he immediately smelled the way out. As usual, the key lay in the grid: he looked back over his shoulder to pull one rectangle from behind, and then he turned his head slowly, careful not to lose it. As soon as he dropped it in front of his traitorous feet, his next step, although toward the agents, leaped him fifty feet backward!

  Obviously, his little trick didn’t escape unnoticed… For a brief moment, the agents stopped, paralyzed by fear.

  After Gill made a second jump, they reluctantly rushed to catch him. Unfortunately for them, after a few more jumps, the induction became so weak that he turned his back to the air-jet and started to run down the street, pulling the space at his feet to hasten his escape.

  The induction suddenly disappeared, and the reason was all too obvious, even without looking back: the air-jet had joined the pursuit! The worst thing was, of course, that the agents had raised the alarm!

  Gill was running on a large avenue. His speed was the fastest of any living creature in the Antyran world, even though he still had to learn how to adjust his steps with the grid distortion. He couldn’t jump fifty feet on every step, but he managed to do it often enough to pass 120 miles per hour.

  After he ran undisturbed for about a mile, he started to hope they had lost his tracks—but then he heard the hoarse buzz of some charged turbines. He couldn’t turn his head to see what was happening, but he recognized the sound of a pack of magneto-jets, their fusion reactors heated far beyond the limits of decency.

  Every minute, more and more vehicles darted from the side streets to join the chase. Before long, a wild horde of tarjis and agents sped after his tail.

  Slowly but surely, their turbines devoured the space between them on the empty boulevard—the perfect playground for insanely fast rides. Some overly excited tarjis pulled out their portable inductors, even though they were not nearly close enough to paralyze him
and had to steer their jets with only one hand, in an already dangerous chase.

  As he dashed madly along the boulevard, Gill stalked the moment when his pursuers were close enough to have little time for reaction, hoping that their driving was reckless enough to push them into his trap. Suddenly, without warning and seemingly in gross violation of the inertia laws, he turned to the left on a narrow street near the orange dome of a distribution center.

  The raging roars of the reversed thrusters and the deafening blasts that ripped the tranquility of the abandoned neighborhood left no doubt about what happened. Several jets collided violently when the first tarjis banked sharply in a futile attempt to go after him, and the rest of the pack crashed into them at full speed.

  The tarjis’ problem became obvious; if they ever held the naïve opinion that the chase would be easy, they were in for a nasty surprise. Gill was running with the average speed of a normal Antyran, but the bracelet allowed him to jump great distances through the “shortcuts” of the space continuum. The magneto-jets, on the other tail, were traveling at over 130 miles per hour, and they obviously had to handle different inertia and centrifugal forces than the archivist. And because the tarjis drove their vehicles with their own hands,52 no artificial intelligence could save them from collisions.

  Four fusion-core blasts53 shook the city windows as far as the main square. The greenish boulevard was excavated down to nine feet deep, the remains of the vehicles and the moulan statues from the walkways being blown over the neighborhood or stuck in the nearby dome walls that had survived the explosions.

  The rest of the magneto-jets were immediately disabled by their danger alarms, leaving the surviving tarjis in the unenviable situation of chasing Gillabrian on foot. Some started to run on the side street where the archivist had disappeared, even though their efforts to catch him became ridiculous.

  Gill followed a narrow street leading to another large avenue, parallel to the first one. His plan was to reach his magneto-jet on the eastern outskirts, but several vehicles appeared in front of him from the side streets. He had no intention of confronting the proximity inductors, even though it crossed his kyi to twist the space in front of the jets and make them crash into one another. Unfortunately, from fifty feet and without an armored wall, one single core blast would surely kill him, so it was smarter just to step out of their way. Therefore, he turned on his heels and ran in the opposite direction.

  The pack of tarjis swelled with every moment. A quick change of direction was enough to lose them, sometimes leaving piles of smoking debris in his wake, but a couple of times, he felt the passing impact of a neural inductor whipping his tortured muscles when some hidden tarji jumped from a narrow street, right on his tail. Luckily, the painful touch was always too short to be effective because the difference in speed quickly pushed him outside the paralysis cone.

  An unimaginable ruckus was taking place in the western part of the city. Unbeknownst to Gill, a million tarjis had marched back to Alixxor to take part in the final battle and fulfill Baila’s prophecy. The first ones to arrive rushed to raise barricades around the district, some climbing to all sorts of dangerous places to make sure they didn’t leave any holes in the net.

  Although the Security Tower lay in ruins, the same couldn’t be said about its redoubtable weapons: Baila’s agents were using the Shindam’s orbital platforms to track his steps in real time. A detailed hologram of the sector was rendered in a huge holotheater installed in Belamia’s pyramid dome; about two dozen initiates gathered around it followed Gill’s every move, shouting orders to the leaders in the streets.

  An ominous thud followed by a loud hissing shook the windows of the surrounding domes. The armored chameleons captured by the initiates were coming for him, jumping over the domes raised in their way, and even the slightest chance of escape would be gone when they turned on their powerful inductors. He could only imagine the chaos—hundreds of unshielded tarjis would jump to their death from the rooftops or air-jets under the ruthless commands forced into their hearing lobes, just to capture one foolhardy archivist.

  Sometimes Gill found his path blocked by barriers even on the side streets. He felt the noose tightening around him. The tarjis probably realized they couldn’t simply paralyze him on the run, so they forced him to move in circles to exhaust his muscles.

  Gill had just entered a narrow street, apparently deserted, when two jets jumped in front of him. He was about to turn back, but the noise of several charged turbines coming from behind told him that he fell into a new trap. The vibration was growing so quickly that his tail contracted involuntarily, expecting the whips of the neural inductors. He had to find an escape, and quick! Without thinking too much about how stupid the thing he intended to do was, Gill grabbed the space over the dome on his left and pulled it at his feet.

  He stepped into the void, aware of what to expect next—namely, a free fall, in which he would have only a fraction of a second to frame a piece of land and drag it under his feet before his speed would become too great to land in “one piece.”

  As he headed straight toward the dome’s ornate cornice, he realized, to his horror, that the ground was moving too fast to be able to see anything. After a moment longer than eternity, he finally spotted another street running parallel to the one from where he had taken off. He quickly dragged a plastoceramic tile under his feet and braced for the landing. He didn’t have to wait for long. He felt a strong punch in his face—it might have been one of his knees—and he lost consciousness.

  Gill opened his eyes, panicked, expecting to see tarjis bent over him. There was no one nearby. A warm fluid was leaking on his face, and he needed no holophone to know he was losing blood in abundance.

  Wobbling on his feet from exhaustion and shock, he walked toward a large avenue. He recognized it at a glance, if only by the smoldering craters dug in the magnetic pavement and the flaming debris spread everywhere. It was the place of the first chain collision. A couple of domes were in flames, their automatic fire systems trying hard to extinguish them, splashing pink foam on the walkways.

  He stopped at the edge of a crater, completely exhausted. Several dozen magneto-jets appeared on the avenue. The tarjis sensed that the hunt was drawing to an end; they approached slowly with the inductors in their hands, ready to paralyze him.

  The vehicles stopped less than seven hundred feet from Gill—the fire sensors had deactivated their reactors when they came too close to the disaster area. The tarjis looked at one another, disconcerted. They stepped out of the jets and moved toward him in quick steps, trying hard not to seem to be running.

  At the other end of the avenue, Gill could see the elusive silhouettes of other jets through the thick smoke coming from the craters. Surely the side streets were also blocked.

  He feverishly sought a way out, although he knew that the situation had become hopeless. He wasn’t afraid. He didn’t want to be afraid anymore. The sight of the titanic struggle of the Sigians, so abandoned by hope, so outnumbered, instilled in him the power of their despair, which now became his.

  With the tarjis approaching fast, Gill decided where to make his last stand. He sprung toward the huge dome close to him, which was the center of acajaa-flour distribution for the neighborhood. Several decorative windows were smashed by the blast wave. He pulled the space and jumped inside through the nearest one.

  Seeing this, the horde burst after him, howling like a pack of guvals.

  The orange dome, perfectly transparent from the inside, covered a large room thirty feet below the ground level. This was the place where the flour distribution had taken place before the madness. Now everything was gone—the shelves for the partially cooked meal, the AI funnels for smelling the flour quality, and the seeds for tired nostrils. The only thing left was the orange floor, strangely smooth and empty, which could be reached from two large white staircases at its ends. It looked like a deep pool, bordered by ornate handrails resembling acajaa spikes, also painted orange.


  The shards of the broken windows lay scattered around the place, tangled with various remains of jets and moulan statues. Even though the air was full of smoke, the fire extinguishers were silent.

  Gill jumped the stairs in one step and reached the middle of the pool. He had nowhere to run from there, but he didn’t intend to. He quelled a shudder of fear that tried insidiously to seep into his kyi. Gill remembered the thought of the bracelet bearer before the final battle: “The ark is lost anyway. The only thing that matters now is to bring a rich harvest with us to the river of shadows.” The ritual words would finally fulfill their meaning, for there was no Sigian fleet to save him this time. The war didn’t end when the beautiful town of the desert fell. Today is the last battle of the Sigians, he thought, smiling bitterly. It looked like he wouldn’t stand a better chance than the Sigian fleet fighting the gray armada around their homeworld, but he was proud to fight like they fought, to fight until the last breath defending the secret hidden on Mapu. He felt a wave of warmth and peace flooding his kyi. It will be a battle worthy of you, he promised.

  The tarjis ran down the stairs to the lower level, but they slowed their steps when they saw Gill immobile in the middle of the floor, waiting for them. They readied their inductors, weighing every step and fending their eyes. They knew they were fighting Arghail himself, who was surely hiding in a dark crack somewhere, eager to gaze into their eyes. Victory or defeat depended solely on them. If they made a mistake now, they could jeopardize not only their feeble lives—for which they didn’t care much anyway—but the very eternity of their kyis!

  Seeing him gasping for air, his pursuers suddenly found their courage: he wasn’t immune to paralysis—he could be restrained! The next simple conclusion popped up in their excited kyis: the one who will capture Abrian will get his reward from Zhan’s hand!

  Completely forgetting their earlier fears, the tarjis rushed forward, each hoping to be the one to hang his collar on Gill’s neck.