Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

By all meaningful definitions of the word, I was already dead.

But then, by all local definitions of the word, I’d been dead before.

Hating the necessity, I had to climb.

It was a useless gesture. There was no safer place above me worth climbing to. I’d been there already. I knew all I had to look forward to up there was a bloodier death. But the one trait I’d taken from my experiences on Bocai, and nurtured in all the terrible places I’d been since, was an absolute inability to do nothing. Faced with a choice, I’d always seek higher ground, even when higher ground was worse.

I was halfway back to the Uppergrowth when the first spurt of manna juice hit my forehead, stinging my eyes and forcing me to clear my vision with the back of one hand. The Brachiators were slicing away at the vines anchoring my line. The Porrinyards had used an air cannon to drive it through multiple generations of Uppergrowth, and advised me that the anchor was solid enough to support several times my own weight. But it wouldn’t be if it was physically ripped from its foundations. It wouldn’t be if the Brachiators dedicated themselves to cutting away every single vine between them and the anchoring hook. Chances were, they wouldn’t need to excavate it entirely for the cord to give way. The vines between it and the surface were part of what held it fast, after all. Weakening them might be more than enough to loosen my shaky hold on their world. I wouldn’t know until I actually started to fall.

No doubt about it. This would be a goddamned stupid way to die.

The sap started to pour. One spurt drenched my face. I licked my lips, and found it as bitter as the worst unsweetened tea. An acquired taste, all right, though under the circumstances I regretted never tasting the fermented version.

My arms were getting tired.

I pulled myself up another arm’s length, gasped as something sticky flopped against my shoulders, looked down and saw a short length of vine tumbling into the void.

“Oh, Juje! You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Manna juice was pouring down the rope and flowing over my hands.

As the Brachiators slashed and sliced at the vines anchoring my cord, the size of the hole they dug had turned out to be not nearly as dangerous a factor as how much it bled. The Uppergrowth had begun to hemmorhage, and the line anchored in the center of the damage had become the natural conduit for goo. My hands were just now getting the first of it. In a second or two, the line would be as impossible to climb as any other greased pole.

No sooner had I realized that than the lubrication started to perform its magic. I slipped a full meter, stopping only when I hit a section of cord still dry enough to maintain friction against my hands.

I kicked, shouted an obscene word, got another faceful of goo for my troubles, and did the only thing left available to me.

I started to laugh.

This was a stupid way to die, all right.

But also a goddamned funny one.

The more crap splattered my cheeks and splattered my eyes and greased up my hands and sent me sliding downward, the more I sank into a hilarity of a kind I hadn’t enjoyed since the good days on Bocai. It just burst from me, in great big rolling belly-laughs that didn’t banish my terror so much as subsume it.

Damn it all, I might have wanted to live, but if I had to go, then I couldn’t think of any dumber, or more appropriate, way than this.

Another burst of thunder, very loud and very close, drowned out a frantic query from Lastogne. “Counselor? Are you crying?”

“Hell, no! I’m laughing my ass off!”

A pause. “Care to share the joke?”

“You have to be here, Peyrin. But—ack!—rescue me and I’ll be happy to explain it to you!”

My hands gave way. I plunged back to the bottom of my line, spun like a top at the cord’s lowest point, endured a fresh indignity as another spurt of manna juice drenched my head and shoulders, gasped with fresh awareness of the nearness of death, and took vague notice of a dragon bursting from the clouds below with an angry thrash of gigantic wings. One last moment of spectacle before I went.

Lastogne shouted, “Counselor! Do you read?”

I caught my breath. “Not for long, Peyrin. I think we’ve reached the last seconds. Did you do that last roll call?”

“Almost counted wrong,” he said. “Forgot Li-Tsan on the first go-round. She’s still locked up in the transport.”

“And after you count Li-Tsan?”

He said something I missed, because I was too busy shouting.

Because as the dragon leveled off and descended back into the clouds, another object peeled away from it: something that had been using it for cover, something that was now rising as fast as it could toward my position. Something only visible as a bright burst of light.

It didn’t look like a man-sized object in an offensive flying armor.

It looked like a skimmer.

“Oh, God,” I said, let it be…

Lastogne shouted again. “COUNSELOR!”

The object’s flight was erratic, nothing even close to a straight line, but a queasy wobble that made it look off-center, even struggling.

Come on, Come on, Come on…

“COUNSELOR!”

I dropped a meter. The vines anchoring my cord were starting to let go. I had a couple of heartbeats, maybe less, before they failed; not enough time for the Porrinyards to ascend to this altitude.

Who cares? As long as they survive! They can—

A bright, fiery rose blossomed far below; an airburst of some kind, though one too far away to hear quite yet. It was so bright that I lost the object at its center. About half a minute later, the sound reached my position: no longer a deafening cataclysm, just a vague, distant rumble too bearable to represent the loss of two people I didn’t want to see dead.

It took me some time to register that my eyes were closed against a now-torrential rain of manna juice, and that Lastogne was screaming at me: “COUNSELOR! GODDAMNIT, COUNSELOR! I CAN HEAR YOU BREATHING!”

My voice broke three or four times before I managed to get out a word. “Peyrin…?”

“I’m here, Andrea.”

I didn‘t have enough life left in me to protest the use of my first name. “…what was… that count again?”

He spoke quickly. “I was right the…”

My safety line failed.

With the cloudscape many kilometers below me, there were precious few visual cues advising me of my sudden delivery to an inevitable death. It was my spine that felt the sudden loss of control, my skin that registered the rush of air against my face.

I swallowed air and tried to get used to the idea. It wasn’t all that hard. I’d been as good as dead for so many years; in part I’d wanted to be. Nothing ahead of me offered any further surprises. I found even enduring it in the form of a fatal drop didn’t bother me all that much: the anticipation had been such a burden that the real thing came as a relief.

So I spread my limbs, maximizing my surface area against the onrushing wind, and allowed One One One to take me.

I had regrets. One, that I’d never tell Gibb what I’d learned about the Brachiators. Two, that I’d never tell the AIsource what I’d figured out about them. Three, that I’d never find out about the mysterious gifts they’d claimed to hold for me. Four, that I’d never confront the Unseen Demons over everything they’d done to my life.

Five, that I hadn’t made peace with Bringen. He’d indicated a thousand ways that he’d wanted to, and I’d shut him out every single time. I didn’t need his response to my mail to know that I’d misjudged him. I knew I had.

Six, that I hadn’t made a path for myself instead of allowing the Dip Corps to choose my path for me.