“Oramen, sir. The Prince Regent.”
Hippinse had just entered the compartment. He stared down at Holse. “I heard,” he said. “I’ll tell them.”
Holse pressed the barb into the young man’s mottled, bruised-looking flesh. He cleared his throat. “Is the prince here, lad?”
“Through there, sir,” Neguste Puibive said, attempting to nod at the door through to the next compartment. He started to cry thin, bloody tears.
Ferbin cried too, sweeping back the mask section of the suit so that he could let the tears fall. Oramen had been cleaned up carefully; however, his face looked to have been badly beaten. Ferbin touched his gloved hand to his brother’s reddened, staring eyes, trying to get the eyelids to close, failing. Djan Seriy was at the other side of the narrow bed, her hand cupped under the base of their brother’s head, cradling his upper neck.
She gave out a long breath. She too swept her mask back and away. She bowed her head, then let Oramen’s head very gently back down, allowing it to rest on the pillow again. She slid her hand out.
She looked at Ferbin, shook her head.
“No,” she said. “We are too late, brother.” She sniffed, smoothed some of Oramen’s hair across his head, trying not to pull any of it out as she did so. “Days too late.”
The glove of her suit flowed back from her flesh like black liquid, leaving the tips then the whole of her fingers then her hand to the wrist naked. She gently touched Oramen’s bruised, broken cheek, then his mottled forehead. She tried to close his eyes too. One of his eyelids detached and slid over his blood-flecked eye like a piece of boiled fruit skin.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Djan Seriy said softly.
“Anaplian!” Hippinse shouted urgently from the compartment where he and Holse were trying to comfort Neguste Puibive.
“He asked for Earl Droffo, but they’d killed him, sirs. Tyl Loesp’s men, when they came on the air-beasts. They’d already killed him. Him with only one good arm, trying to reload.”
“But what afterwards?” Hippinse insisted, shaking the injured man. “What was it he said, what did you say? Repeat that! Repeat it!”
Djan Seriy and Holse both reached out to touch Hippinse.
“Steady,” Djan Seriy told the avatoid. “What’s wrong?” Holse didn’t understand. What was making Hippinse so upset? It wasn’t his brother lying dead through there. The man wasn’t even a real human. These weren’t his people; he had no people.
“Repeat it!” Hippinse wailed, shaking Puibive again. Djan Seriy took hold of Hippinse’s nearest hand to stop him jolting the dying youth.
“All the rest left, sirs, those that could, on the trains, when we all started to fall ill the second time,” Neguste Puibive said, his eyes rolling around in their sockets, eyelids flickering. “Sorry to… We all took a terrible gastric fever after the big explosion but then we were all right but then—”
“In the name of your WorldGod,” Hippinse pleaded, “what did Oramen say?”
“It was his last understandable word, I think, sirs,” Puibive told them woozily, “though they’re not real, are they? Just monsters from long ago.”
Oh shit, no, Anaplian thought.
“What are, lad?” Holse asked, pushing Hippinse’s other hand away.
“That word, sir. That was the word he kept saying, eventually, when he could speak again for a short while, when they brought him back from the chamber where the Sarcophagus was. Once he knew Earl Droffo was dead. Iln, he kept saying. I couldn’t work it out at first, but he said it a lot, even if it got softer and fainter each time he said it. Iln, he said; Iln, Iln, Iln.”
Hippinse stared at nothing.
“The Iln,” Holse’s suit whispered to him. “Aero-spiniform, gas-giant mid-level ancients originally from the Zunzil Ligature; assumed contemporary sophisticated equiv-tech level, Involved between point eight-three and point seven-eight billion years ago, multi-decieon non-extant, believed extinct, non-Sublimed, no claimed descendancy; now principally remembered for the destruction of approximately two thousand three hundred Shellworlds.”
To Djan Seriy Anaplian it was as though the world beneath her feet dropped away and the stars and the vacuum fell in around her.
Anaplian stood. “Leave him,” she said, snapping her mask back into place and striding out of the compartment. Hippinse rose and followed.
It’s the second-hand word of one dying man transmitted by another, the avatoid sent to the SC agent. Could be false.
Anaplian shook her head. Something spent geological ages in a buried city, wasted several hundred thousand people as it left just for the hell of it and then disappeared, she replied. Let’s assume the worst of the fucker.
Whatever it was, it may not have been the source of the—
“Can’t I stay—” Holse began.
“Yes you can but I’ll need your suit,” Anaplian told him from down the corridor. “It can function as an extra drone.” Her voice changed as Holse’s suit decided her voice was growing too faint and switched to comms. “Same applies to my brother,” she told him.
“Can we not mourn even a moment?” Ferbin’s voice cut in.
“No,” Anaplian said.
Outside, in the cold desert air, Turminder Xuss swept down to join Anaplian and Hippinse as they stepped from the carriage. “Oct,” it told them. “A few still left in the rearmost ship, a klick back under the ice upstream. All dying. Ship systems blown by EMP. Recordings corrupted but they had live feed and saw a black ovoid emerge from a grey cube housed centrally in a prominent chamber beneath the city’s central building. It was joined by three smaller ovoids which emerged from objects the Sarl and Oct co-operated in bringing to the central one. Last thing they saw sounds like a concentric containment enaction; strong vibrations and photon-tunnelling immediately before containment drop and fireball release confirmatory.”
“Thank you,” Anaplian told the machine. She glanced at Hippinse. “Convinced?”
Hippinse nodded, eyes wide, face pale. “Convinced.”
“Ferbin, Holse,” Anaplian said, calling the two men still inside the carriage. “We have to go now. There is an Iln or some weapon left by the Iln loose. It will be at or on its way to the Core of Sursamen. The first thing it will do is kill the WorldGod. Then it will attempt to destroy the world itself. Do you understand? Your suits must come with us, whether you are inside them or not. There would be no dishonour in—”
“We are on our way,” Ferbin said. His voice sounded hollow.
“Coming, ma’am,” Holse confirmed. “There, lad, you just rest easy there, that’s it,” they heard him mutter.
The four suits and the tiny shape of the accompanying machine lifted from the wispily smoking remains of the Hyeng-zhar Settlement and curved up and out, heading for the nearest open Tower, seven thousand kilometres distant. Turminder Xuss powered ahead and up, vanishing from sight almost immediately. Ferbin assumed they were flying in the same diamond formation as before, though the suits were camouflaged again so it was impossible to tell. At least this time they were allowed to communicate without having to touch.
“But this thing must be ancient, ma’am, mustn’t it?” Holse protested. “It’s been under there for an eternity; everybody knows the Iln vanished millions of years ago. Whatever this thing is it can’t be that dangerous, not to more modern powers like the Optimae, the Culture and so on. Can it?”