The Amber Rooms by Ian Hocking

Author:Ian Hocking
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Writer As A Stranger
Published: 2012-12-20T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

The band flashed brighter than the magnesium preparation that had illuminated Kamo and Saskia; brighter than the fireworks opening above the square. Saskia covered her eyes with her forearm. She heard grunts from Soso and Kamo. The gun discharged and its bullet roared harmlessly past her neck. She felt the nerves tingle.

In her blindness, she scudded across to Pasha, blinked at the thundercloud of an afterimage on her vision, and hauled him around the base of the model until they were sheltered from the view of the revolutionaries.

She slapped his face.

‘Pavel Eduardovitch Nakhimov.’

Another bullet struck the wall.

She braced her knee against his chest and ripped open his doublet. It was already sticky with blood. She blinked again, desperate to see, and tried to examine his wound with her peripheral vision. She could not.

Saskia closed her eyes. She understood that the blindness was a temporary saturation of the light-sensitive cells on her retina. Other structures, planted by the i-Core, had grown there. These structures supplemented her vision at wavelengths above and below the human band.

Help me, she thought. Let me see.

She opened her eyes on a curiously monochrome world. The vasculature beneath her hand was visible: glassy, slimy, quick with blood after blood. She looked at Pasha’s waistcoat and saw that his pocket watch was twisted open. She smiled with the hope that the watch had saved his life. But the smile failed; the watch had disintegrated. Parts had travelled, with the bullet, into his abdomen. She tore open his shirt. The wound was hard to identify in the welling blood. She pressed upon it.

Pasha coughed. His breath steamed. He was bleeding from his inferior vena cava, which would cause his death long before the septicaemia.

Why was it was so cold?

Saskia leaned around the base of the model. Soso had not moved. He was holding the gun at his hip, like a gunslinger. Kamo gripped his shoulder. It was clear from their hard blinks that both were still blind. Perhaps the blindness was permanent. Who knew what energies were radiating from the band? Perhaps none of them would see naturally again.

The band spun on.

Saskia slowed her vision to look at it, but the rotation was too fast. It had dimmed to a glow. She told herself that the rotation was part of its normal operation, but this was not consistent with its behaviour on board flight DFU323. Jennifer had used it to escape from the fuselage of that falling aircraft. The band had not lowered its temperature then. Neither had it rotated so furiously. Yes, Saskia thought: there was anger in its spin. Was it alive in some sense, like her former companion, Ego? Did it realise that Saskia was not Jennifer? Did it view her as a thief?

A corona of white grew on the floor around the band. The dark and light woods of the floor began to buckle. Saskia felt a sharp pain in her ear. She swallowed and the pain cleared, but a stealing dizziness weakened her muscles.

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