Ten Thousand Thunders by Brian Trent

Author:Brian Trent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
Publisher: Flame Tree Press
Published: 2018-09-03T15:34:23+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Suicide

She was committing suicide to save her life.

The irony came on as giddy terror while she plummeted through the clouds, air bursting from her lungs in the thin sky. Her clothes flapped like a bat swarm at her ears.

Celeste twisted herself, seeing the airship dwindle to a pale point above her. Then it was gone, her world engulfed by pure whiteout, like a snowblind strike into someone’s optics. She was engulfed by clouds. Crazily, she found herself thinking of the pegasus in Athens, effortlessly gliding around the restaurant.

The decision had been pure instinct. The life she was willing to trade for StrikeDown could not be lost on a hijacked airship. She could stay and die, or jump through the breach and…

She couldn’t breathe. The air was so cold it burned her face. Free of the jamming frequencies, she tried again to contact her vessel. “I am here! I am here!”

In the absolute whiteness of cloud, she struggled against terminal velocity to open her virtuboard. The digital overlay appeared; the green font so light against the clouds she needed to squeeze her eyes shut to read it. Again, she said the words, watching them appear on her optics.

“I.

“Am.

“Here.”

And from a lake sixteen miles east of Athens arcology, the Mantid raised an invisible rail-gun turret to the sky and fired.

* * *

The Mantid never slept.

Its intelligence circuits were sufficiently complex that, when its crew was away, it retreated into the gloaming of standby mode. There, systems powered down to a crawl, its consciousness floated in dream-shape abstractions not entirely unlike human REM, purging errors and anxieties that had accumulated in its higher processors. Even then, the Mantid maintained a hypnagogic awareness of its environment.

Its crew was dead.

Their absence upset an accustomed dynamic; they no longer fed their unique inputs into the Mantid’s considerations. Gone, deleted forever. Only Celeste Segarra proved recoverable, and the Mantid was pleased to have recovered her. There was a brief moment when it feared she had died in Babylon – when the Prometheans deactivated her sensorium and there was no way to reach her. During this uncertain epoch, the Mantid sent cautious surveillance feelers into Babylon and discovered Celeste alive, eating an apple, in a hospital food court.

But then she had been transported to Athens. The Mantid followed like a parent discreetly shadowing its child. Watching her transport land at Athens. Descending to the Mediterranean Sea.

To wait.

And now she was in the sky, falling, too far away for the Mantid itself to reach her.

Invisible on the lake, it tracked the pseudopod it had fired into the overcast sky.

* * *

Celeste plummeted towards Earth.

The clouds sheared away and she was gazing on wispy archipelagos of vapor, feebly strung together like pearls over a patchwork planet of muted green, brown, and black. So beautiful! She felt a sob welling in her throat.

I’m going euphoric, she thought, recognizing the sensation and its cause: glucose in her blood rising, blunting her terror into something more manageable. The frantic, impotent reflex of a sentient creature faced with oblivion.

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