The Lucifel refused, at first, to call xemself Hiroaki, even when xe recognized xyr reflection in photographs of the missing pilot. Not until the memories started surfacing and it was confirmed that that Monster was indeed Hiroaki’s Levy M! CHAEL and there was therefore a reason for xyr attachment to it. After that, xe was Hiroaki Minekura again, although nobody really considered xem Hero: Hiroaki’s family wasn’t told and those friends and former teammates who didn’t need to know were never informed. Xe was, perhaps, by DNA and appearance and occasional painful flashes of memory, Hero, Hiroaki Minekura, one of the legendary communications pilots of ANGEL, but he was also – perhaps first and foremost – the Lucifel Engine, whatever that meant.
Xe had been built from ANGEL to become Demonbot, but instead had defected back to ANGEL on some residual memory or instinct, betrayer to both sides of the war. Xe hadn’t really had much choice in either.
Everybody expected xem to get along with Weft, but on the contrary, Hiroaki and Weft avoided each other. Wilde, who was still wandering around in shackles despite having already promised over a number of holy scriptures that he would do nothing to harm anybody and wouldn’t tell a soul – or even, he hastened to add, a digital sentience – about the group, mused that they saw something of themselves in each other that scared them: Weft saw the compulsion to leave the side he was on for something far stronger and stranger than computer logic, and Hiroaki saw that xe’d come back to a place where they weren’t above experiments on humans, either, and had no mechanical sentience to give it reason.
Nobody was really surprised when, after the false dawn had fallen away and sunlight finally showed the entire camp, missing just one vital part: the M35514H Engine. Weft’s Levy, and Weft himself, were gone. Giant Levy-sized footprints disappeared off into the distance, flattened grasses already starting to right themselves, dew aging them. Weft was gone to the Digital Devil, then.
“That’s funny,” Wilde said, sitting in the grass outside the Garuda. “We have the Lucifel Engine and the Devil gets the Messiah.”
“Weft is not joining the Devil,” Sky snapped. “He’s joining Alisha. I think he could care less what happens to the world at large so long as he’s with her.”
Wilde leaned back against the sloping metal sides of the Garuda. His hands were handcuffed in front of him and he held a cigarette to his mouth for a moment. His breath came out half smoke half condensation in the cool air.
“Even if he just fucks Veniss all day and night and never pilots the Messiah against us, Luketic,” Wilde said slowly, like a man explaining something very complicated to somebody very simple or very young. “He’s not piloting the Messiah for us. You’re supposed to be intelligent; act it.”
“I’ll act intelligent the day you watch your mouth,” Sky said, rising. “You maybe out rank me by a factor of hundreds, sir, but this is still my command right now. Weft is still one of us. Messiah is still Levy, not Monster. Alisha is still one of us, and Baxter is doubtless still leviathan. And you know what else, Wilde? Dusty is dead. Dusty died for you. I think you’re in no position to play superior right now.”
“You’ve lost one person,” Wilde said, looking up, all amusement gone. His eyes were cold, his expression hard. “Big whoop, Luketic. I’ve lost hundreds.”
“You lost pawns,” Sky snarled. “I’ve lost friends. You know what this is? Someone who you care for, and who cares for you? I bet you don’t even know the meaning of the word.”
Wilde rose. He was not tall – in fact, he was a considerable amount shorter than Sky – but he could loom ominously nevertheless. “I am not a machine. Delrey or Minekura might be able to tell you the dictionary definition of friendship precise as the last digit of PI, but will it be morally sound?”
“What’s this now? Weft’s emotions don’t mean anything? They’re not morally sound?”
“You heard me perfectly well.”
“Don’t talk to me about morals,” Sky said. He looked a lot calmer than he was; Wilde had to be impressed. The young pilot stood upright, proud, his white hair recently cut short and his engaging blue eyes sharp. There was no emotion in his face, just sheer disdain.
“I’m going to save the world, Luketic,” Wilde said. “Whether the world wants it or not. Morals don’t mean anything on a chess board of that scale. Go mourn your individual pawns. When you’ve got eight billion of them it means bugger all to lose just one.”
“Tell me something,” Sky said. “If eight million of us are your pawns. Your mysterious master is the king and you’re his lovely Queen. Pray tell, where are your knights? Towers?”
“Don’t extend the metaphor, you imbecile,” Wilde said tiredly. “Everybody’s a pawn. Mister Sarah is a pawn. The Devil is a fucking pawn. With big enough mobs or enough smarts you can crush any superior piece.”
Sky paused. There was so much noise, so much shouting, but they two were silent for a moment. Eventually, he said softly: “If you lost people you know as well as I do how much it hurts. Your wife? Kids? Family? Well, if Dusty means bugger all they mean bugger all. Fuck you, Sha Wilde, you great big hypocrite.”
“You see me crying, Luketic!? Do you?!” Wilde shouted after Sky’s retreating back. “I have not lost anybody that maters. There are no higher pieces!”
Sky pulled his headphone up over his ears and walked away without acknowledging the government man’s rage. Secretly, he was glad he had chosen to make an exit: what he said was true. The people who had really meant something to him, who he would’ve died for, were disappearing one by one. Right then he wanted nothing more than to find Jack and not let her out of his sight lest she too walked away or died. He and she had never been close, but she was the last member of his unit still around and she had been wounded by Dusty’s death more than anybody had.
Sky stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, staring at the clouds but with his eyes closed. He wore his headphones and nothing came from them but pink noise and now he saw nothing and it was the most peaceful thing he’d felt in a months. He had tried talking to God about all this drama, he really had, but He had never answered. Weft had taught him an Enochian chant, not a real one but one synthesized of the same weird words as the originals, and he’d found that concentrating on the strange sounds of that song – and he couldn’t remember what they meant. Knowing Weft, nothing good; besides, he remembered being told that there was no word for love – calmed him down.
But he could not go through the rest of his life, and doubtless a good lot more of it if not the rest of it, feeling sorry for himself and singing in a language that was never alive enough to be called a dead language. The rest of his life was going be a mess: sequels and spin-offs of this nightmarish episode. He had to find something more effective. Drugs were not an option. He wouldn’t kill himself: that was the coward’s way out, and it would only make it worse for his family and for Jack. Besides, Weft and Jack had gone through worse hells than he had and they were still alive. He wouldn’t fall for that one, not unless he had a far better reason than either of them. If they had something to live for than so did he.
He opened his eyes and was blinded by the sun. He spend a few moments blinking blindness out of his eyes before moving on, not sure where he was going. That he had even considered killing himself made him suddenly too ashamed to meet Jack’s hard emerald gaze: she had lost her entire family and now Dusty and Weft and Alisha who were, in some senses, her surrogate parents. She deserved more from him than thoughts of giving up.
Weft’s strange melody rolled in Sky’s head and he recited it under his breath over and over, alone with the buzz of pink noise and the language of the angels, the real angels, not ANGEL. It was peaceful. It also forced him to think, because he couldn’t possibly concentrate on anything else: there was nothing else to concentrate on.
So. He lined events up, sorted them, tried to make sense of what he knew, and what he knew was clearly little. Alisha had left to join the Devil, something that she would never in her life do without good reason. Following that, they’d been called down here and found the Lucifel, who turned out to be Hiroaki, who used to be Alisha’s captain. Wilde thought Alisha and Hiroaki’s situations were linked, although nobody knew if it had been Hiroaki’s choice to join the Devil and even when people asked he could give no real answer, his memory shot to pieces. Wilde was a government agent of many faces who was here to investigate the Lucifel and Weft. Dusty had died because Wilde had needed a distraction to get here by the fastest route.
It was more complicated than that, of course, but at its most fundamental level, that was what had happened. And now here they were, stranded on the wrong side of the Blight, running out of power. They could plug into the electrical wires under the nearby cities, maybe, but those might be tainted or they might have been shut down the by the Devil trying to cripple them further. The Garuda would never be able to lift off without a huge source of power. The Levies would run out of power, and the camp would be a massive sitting duck for any passing Demonbots. They could try taking all the cars and trucks and helicopters and other auxiliary vehicles and seeing how far they could get, but if the Levies even made it all the way back they would be too big a mass of people to defend, especially without Dusty. Weft’s absence made it impossible. They would sooner get SAINT to fly than be able to defend a couple of thousand people with just an aspeed Levy and a limping communications.
They had sent messages for help. There were two Phoenixes coming in their direction, bearing eight Leviathans, but they were far away and it was extremely unlikely that they would get there in time. Oh, it was perfectly possible but the likelihood was minimal. Even then, the Garuda would still be here and a substantial number of its pilots and technicians would refuse to leave it, resulting in unnecessary deaths. Sky had run through the pros and cons of every possibility he could think of. He had thought of everything: everybody had. Everything was luck and risk now: they could try to go for power for Levies and or the Garuda in a nearby town, meaning they would have to split the team: one would have to defend the convoy and the cable and the other would have to protect the Garuda. That wasn’t an option unless they could find a cable very near to their present location, and then it was just hoping that the Devil hadn’t switched that cable off or worse yet tainted it with some virus that would corrupt the Tween AI in the Leviathans.
Sky stopped for a moment to check where he was. The camp was a little way behind him: he’d just walked on through it. He turned back and for a moment stood utterly floored by the scope of what he was seeing: from the top of the slight rise he was standing on he could look directly down on the Garuda and the camp around it. The shanties looked more permanent, but they were all up close against the sides of the Phoenix; they huddled together like scared children, seeking protection. There were barricades, reflexive constructions that wouldn’t even stop demonbots – they would fly right over them.
“It’s a last stand,” Sky whispered. And it was: none of them could hope to survive it. Weft had made the wise choice in leaving, and for a moment Sky wondered if it was cowardice that had caused Weft to leave: but the lunatic didn’t know what fear was, not of man and not of the Devil. Not in any sense that would cause him to run away. Weft was the kind of person who got attached to lost causes and died for them because he believed in them. He probably hadn’t even realized that in leaving he was making the Garuda’s plight even more hopeless and that people would think him a coward.
No, Sky realized, they wouldn’t. Since the Garuda’s community had been attached to one sixteen, to Alisha’s fledgling unit, they had known who the pilots were, nodded at them, were friends with them on at least the most basic of levels. They probably felt Weft’s leaving the same way Sky did: a betrayal but only because he had chosen Alisha over them, not because he was abandoning them or ‘joining the Devil’.
Sky laughed. He didn’t know why. He just stood there suddenly feeling cosmically aware of how silly everything was, especially himself, and laughed. Nobody could hear him this far out, and they might see his vague outline against the blue of the sky, but they would not understand why he was shaking and doubled up.
When Sky returned, he went straight to the mechanic’s sector and requested to be given something to fix. A few startled mechanics pointed him to Weft’s combox, which had been left behind. It was the only thing, they said, that still need repairing. They two were just waiting for the fight to start so that they would be able to do their jobs. He thanked them and said that it was perfect before sitting down and examining the sheer gap in the metal.
Fixing things and working with communications equipment. Both of these things always managed to cheer Sky up and doubtless if he focused enough he might gain a clearer perspective of what he should do. He took off his headphone and combox, leaving them nearby so he could hear if a message came through, but far enough that me might miss a message unless it was urgent enough to be shouted. He pulled off his jacket and stood, feeling terribly naked without his headphone, before the shoebox- sized piece of technology in front of him. There was no point in fixing it, really, because it only sync’d with M35514H, but it would give him something to do. He picked up a screwdriver from the tarpaulin spread over the grass and got to work, still humming.
The mechanics watched discretely, wondering how he could be so calm with so many calamities stacking up on top of him. They knew him by his reputation as ice king, their first impression of him, and then of the fiercely loyal, calm, sensible young pilot that he turned out to be in actuality. But they’d seen him on his knees with tears streaming down his cheeks after Dusty had died, and they expected that same sorrow somewhere with the threat of many, many more going the same way as his late powerhouse.
But they saw him humming an odd melody and fixing a useless piece of technology and wondered if Weft’s madness was contagious.
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