Jacket is pay
Ch. 4
The M-16 felt cold to touch,
arcing upward out of the back of his cloth garment, a white overcoat
concealing him from eyes and from the rain. His fingers, touching the
gun, hoped for a moment of calm, shaking as they were.
M wasn’t sure: did he kill
the machine? Why did it try to kill him? And how the hell did it get
a job as a bartender in Wake Alpha?
He looked up at the rays of
light, letting the sun cool him and heat him up in its odd celestial
way. He wondered about the darkness not so far away, the other side
of the planet, and he wanted to remember---for that one moment—what
had really happened on Wake Dark, what had set the evil in motion. A
piece of him, he felt, was over there, and he simply could not figure
out why; the only thought was of father: a man of history, a drinker,
a forgotten soul who wanted to be forgotten after mom died. He felt
the pain gash at him, reeling him in like a net, telling him not to
think anymore and just do.
But that was what his father
had done: stopped thinking. It’s all that made sense anymore. He
had to think; it was the choice; it made him different.
Pulling on the gun, he lost
himself in the wave of walking straight out of the city. “Trapped,”
he whispered to no one, making sense of nothing with it. He knew no
other place, knew few other ways to live, than living and fighting
here.
“Best to make the
best of it,” he recalled his father telling him.
So instead of leaving the
city and running away, he turned in, pushed past the suburbs, walked
into a gang area, still harnessing his weapon; walked past a military
outpost covered in the yellow of the elite warriors of Wake, the
Spartans with direct bloodlines to the old world; walked deeper into
the city, his eyes catching other’s eyes, his steps a tide pushing
him onward. He went to the old world, here, the first settlement
Persepolis, built much like the one of Athens, or at least the
pictures of Athens. He walked right into the eye of a storm, not
realizing it. He walked into the Wake Spartan dining area, looking
for nothing, finding too much, he later realized, finding far too
much.
“Wake Spartans,” said
the recruiter, “aren’t about making choices, or thinking, or
reacting, they act, they make the opponent react, they don’t think.
And you want to know why, brother? You want to know why Wake Spartans
kill more of the Red Monsters than anyone else? Because we have
souls.”
“Souls?”
“A piece of us—“
“Why would we have
souls?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. What are
you, a Christian?”
“Where have you been?”
“In school,” M looked
down.
“Right, they teach you
how to use this,” this warrior said, pointing to his head, “but I
will teach you how to use this,” he said, pointing at his hand,
“and then this.” The fingers rested on M’s heart.
# ##
M took the gun and set it on
the table; the metal of the M-16 calmed him for some reason,
reminding him of his calm father sitting at the table all those
moments ago and telling stories, saying the right things, not
speaking of the madness and how it was in his day, for in those
moments it was his day.
“It’s my only weapon,”
he said smiling through the lie.
“So I see.” His name
was Artimus, a descendant of a great Greek philosopher who turned
into a warrior poet when his family was murdered by Persian
mercenaries; the best kinds of men were made out of extreme pain, as
were the worst. “But do you truly know how to use it? Can you spot
a man six hundred yards away with the sight, can you see a Free
Machine stopping because of one single bullet?”
“In my experience, you
shoot for the head, human or machine, and it works out.”
“Cute, good,” and the
aging Combat Spartan pulled out a cigar, two actually, and handed one
to M. “It’s a nasty habit but it’s doubtful you’ll die from
it.”
“What is it? Drugs?”
“In a sense, but it
doesn’t have the effects of opium or angel dust.”
“Oriental?”
“A bit west of the old
Sparta, a bit west,” lighting it, holding it in his mouth as he
inspected the M-16. “This is a good weapon,” and he tried to
break it in half. What the hell! M screamed. “A good weapon,”
Artimus answered, “is the kind that keeps working when it’s
broken.”
“A blade?”
“That breaks isn’t
worthy of a Combat Spartan. Tell me, where did you get this weapon?”
“Long story.”
“I have all the time in
the world, M.”
“My father gave it to me,
said it was special.”
“Ah, a Talisman, but
there is more.”
“My mother altered it,
the scope, because it was meant for the old world with old gravity.
They say weight is less there, that you can’t move quite as fast.
So she altered the sights to make it work better, even made bullets
out of …” he slowed, a guttural laugh building in his system,
“Silver so my father could kill any wolf that came into my bed when
I was a baby. They spent years putting it together. In one of my
father’s drunken memories, he said he did break it.”
“And?”
“And she fixed it. He
says it’s never been the same. He said it’s never been the same.
That the gun lost hope in him.”
“Ah, so you do know of
spirits,” said Artimus, looking down the scope.
“I suppose so. But what
does it matter? A Free Machine has no spirit. I only want to know how
to kill them: where they are, how to end them, where the rest are,
how to blow them all up.”
“Violence.”
“Violence.”
Artimus set the gun down,
pulled up his boot, and laid an old Roman model blade, called a
Gladius, on the table. Yet M saw differences in the design.
Originally, from his history, he knew the Gladius blades come from
the Iberian Peninsula in the, from Spaniard lands. This blade was
different: a red handle, a star on the tip that looked quite like a
diamond, and a heavier edge than a normal Gladius which made it seem
much like an axe hacking downward. He held it in his hands, eyeing
the tip, touching the tip and drawing blood. “Real?”
“Real.”
“Yours?”
“Yours.”
“He found hell
yesterday,” Artimus continued with his own stories of who he was,
what he be, where the stars set for him and his dreams.
M wanted
to ask a question, like exactly what the meaning was, yesterday, but
he let Artimus continue.
“Old ways stopped
working. He broke our phalanx, our supreme weapon against the
darkness of the night, against death herself, and all my brothers
died, and both my sons died, and all that came out of the darkness
was me, a blade in one hand, a handful of pain in the other. I just
couldn’t stop: killing. It changes you, seeing death, and I saw
her.”
“Madness!” M wanted to
say, wanted to scream out. Death? There was no death: the old
visceral idea that hell didn’t serve it, humanity served the
goddess of the underworld. It was all wrapped up in philosophy and
religion. Madness! he wanted to yell, but he bit his tongue and
continued listening.
“There is more—and I
see it in your eyes—to this world than the small battles we face
every day. The archons have fallen from the graces of the light. A
war of attrition, see, between humanity, and it will take one soul to
bring us back together against the Free Machines.”
There was a moment of
silence, M holding his breath the entire time, until he let some air
out, finding the right words, the only word. “Who?”
“Not you.”
“Why not?”
“A girl. A hero born out
of the night of Wake.”
##
Both taking puffs on their
cigars—which M found made his mouth taste like gruel—they left
the small Combat Spartan operation center. M had many questions. Who
… what … where … and why were simply the basics. Who ruled Wake
Dark? Red? That stung him: the evil darkness ruled by a man who sold
out his own people to machines, ending the Wake golden age, killing
so very many. He wanted Red dead. More, he wanted Red’s death to be
painful. He would take him apart piece by piece until there was
nothing left save some DNA evidence; he would burn the that; he would
end his first life.
“I’ve never killed.”
“And you’ve never—“
“A human.”
“Right. If you want to be
a Combat Spartan, you’ll need more than weapons to kill.”
He looked up at space. “Why
can’t we go up instead of around?”
“What do you mean?”
Artimus’s eyes lit up. “You want to hit the Free Machines in
space?”
“Right.”
“No aircraft left not on
full time defense duty.”
“Could we borrow one?”
“Could ‘borrow’ one
if you got past a few battalions and hacked into the net.”
“The net?”
“Don’t ask me, I live
outside of technology. Scares the damn out of me.”
“I have a secret,” M
said, pulling out his own blade, “And it’s one I’ve never told
anyone. I’ve known you one day,” he slowed. He made eye contact
with Artimus, the engineer of the Combat Spartans, the last of a
generation; the rest died by the bottle or smoked themselves
senseless; the rest died in battle, to be remembered or forgotten. “I
have my own blade, a magical blade, a powerful—“
“Spare me the poetry;
don’t show it to me.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not in
the way things go. I must tell you a secret then, and you wouldn’t
want to hear that. No one should hear my secrets.”
The blade in his hand, the
free blade in his palm, he eyed the outskirts of Wake Alpha. It was
the capital, and there was a sort of peace occurring here, a time of
relief. Death was here too, death and the end, not so far from each
other, not so far from Wake. They said—
And he stopped, realizing
Artimus had stepped away, to a small marker on the ground.
“There was a time,”
said the Combat Spartan, “When this line was the one line we had to
hold. I wanted to forget it, but memories that shouldn’t be
forgotten rarely are.”
“A line?”
“Sometimes you have to
make a stand for something; ours was for survival.”
“Tell me everything.”
“I’ve told you much,”
replied Artimus.
“And I want more.”
The story went slowly at
first, the gate bringing Spartans and even a few Athenians and
Egyptians across the galaxy. There had been stories of gates crossing
the gaps in space before; early Greek science evolved quickly,
explaining that traveling through this space the Earth rescided in,
was quite impossible. But someone, from some other time, perhaps a
dozen millennia before the first Dorians “civilized” Greece, knew
this first. And they built a gate, with a key. And this key took a
mass of Spartans and a few dozen Athenian and Egyptian carpenters and
scientists and philosophers across the gap. To men with faith, it was
a last chance to escape the solar system, Noah’s voyage in action.
Stories of gates were as common as stories of Babel and God, yet this
gate existed, this gate worked, and this gate brought Dorians to
Wake.
“So it went,” said
Artimus, “And they don’t tell you that in school.”
“Some of it.”
“Sure,” Artimus
replied, “there was a ‘magical” gate that took us here, a place
rich in goods. But we changed here on Wake, very early: we became
power mongers and tech lords and opium and rum addicts; we destroyed
more than we created in the first millennia.”
“Millenia! They said
we’ve been here four—“
“Not four generations,
not even close. It’s the believers, who are close on many things,
but want us to believe we’re still connected to the lands of Earth,
that the gods still exist, that God is still here with us. We can’t
believe this is us, we are here, and there is nothing but darkness
and light. It’s too tragic, even for a poet.”
“I don’t believe you,”
said M.
“You don’t have to, my
soldier, because I might be wrong. There are stories of men being
here before even us, the original builders of the gate and some Chaos
God, who were sick with technology when man had yet to build a city.
But it’s what I believe; it’s in the Book of Lights.”
M stopped, pulling a small,
tattered and leather bound copy of Book of Lights out. “The machine
gave me this.”
“Yes?”
“And then tried to kill
me.”
Artimus stopped. They
weren’t going anywhere in particular, in a philosophical sense, but
on the physical level they had left Wake Alpha a dozen miles ago,
going through small hamlets and crossing bridges over dark and sick
looking rivers. They called them the blood rivers; no one drank from
them; no one went there unless they intended to die.
“He gave you the Book of
Lights and then tried to kill you. Ha! You see the symbolism,
correct?”
“No.”
“You will.”
They stopped at a bridge,
where a Combat Spartan in ancient ceremonial gear, with even his
spear and short sword, stood. He walked toward them, his head down
and his walking slow; old, was M’s original thought, for he walked
angled, like a drunk, but held his spear steady and kept his eyes
downward, looking at the stones on the ground.
“Keepers of the Light,”
said the Spartan.
“Bringers of the
Machines,” said Artimus.
“Are the end and the
beginning.”
The Combat Spartan went to
the ground, laying his head on the sand. “I grow old, Artimus.”
“I have—“ but M was
stopped.
“He’s just a Spartan
Poet, my friend, just a Spartan who fought at the Gate so long
ago.” “You fought at the gate?”
“Fraid so.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“How old are you? That
was two centuries ago.”
“I am very old.” And he
was. This veteran missed one eye, had a slight stutter to his voice,
one lip pushing against the other when words came out; his motion was
chaotic, for he danced with death; his body itself was huge, but slim
in the gut, his arms muscled even for an old man. “Have you not
known the ways of the Art?”
“Nope,” said M, sick of
everything and too confused to care.
“it’s the path to
immortality..”
“No one lives forever.”
“True, but some of us
live longer. The keepers of the light, they live on, young man, and I
am one of them.”
“I am a Combat Spartan.”
“Good,” the veteran
said, uncaring.
“I killed a Free
Machine.”
“And what? You want
respect and power.”
M wanted to kill him, to
let his rage out. He wanted to tell him how he’d lived alone for 8
years, living on the streets sometimes, taken in by friends and
strangers, bums and the lowest of society. Because society didn’t
help the fallen, because ..
The Spartans had forgotten
him; he didn’t want their respect; he wanted answers.
“I want more than that.”
“Ah, ambition is a sin to
certain of us. Not me. Certainly not me.” The Spartan pulled off
his helmet, a long wave of graying hair falling down around his
shoulders, then set his blade on the ground, giving M his good eye
for a moment when he did so.
“I have better blades.”
“You don’t. This one
speaks. Took it off a Free Machine at the gate.”
“This was made by a Free
Machine,” replied M.
“What!”
Artimus let out a laugh.
“The old sage is surprised.”
“Let me see this blade,”
said the veteran.
“For what?”
“You want something?”
“Yes.”
“As always. I will tell
you a story.”
“I want access to this
gate. No stories.”
The gate stood, casting
a shadow over the expanse. It held the old Dorians, it was said, or
it held the keepers of hell, others said. If you saw this gate on an
ordinary day—and which are those?—you might get a quick glimpse
and keep walking. The doorway was made of wood, a gentle blacksmith
had placed gems on the handles; an old door, this gate, and it didn’t
seem to mind them staring at it. For some reason, M wanted to speak
with it, like it had much to say.
“You’re saying this old
beaten doorway took man to the stars?”
“Quit reading your
textbooks and open your eyes.”
“To what?”
“The wood, feel the wood,
an old tree, from a time of angels on this earth. An old soul, not
from a man or a women, not from a dog or a cat; this beast is alive
with the very beginning of the universe, created by a race before
even the angels, long before the Dorians.”
“It’s a wooden
doorway.”
“Is he always this
questioning?” The old man asked.
They weren’t in a
physical place, quite, but at a place in between times, in an arc of
Wake world, the so called no mans land where light and darkness mixed
and brought many beastial creatures to life, and housed most of the
Keepers of the Light. There were no cities; there were no hamlets,
villages with walls; all that there was wasn’t tangible. It was an
odd place for a warrior to be, it was the time of the philosopher,
the space of the poet.
“It’s not even straight,” he almost
said, but didn’t. He believed, for in ancient Greece, so the story
went, strong wood was more valuable than twice its weight in gold. It
built ships, ships that colonized the world; and it built homes,
homes which stopped the storms; and walls, walls that kept the
darkness at bay.
He almost fell over, his
blade falling out at a very odd time. It came out like it had a life
of it’s own. “Come back, friend,” he whispered to it, waiting
for a response. But the machine, or the AI, or the spirit, had
nothing to say—it just lit up the entire area, pushing the darkness
away. M smelled beasts approaching; a few called out, screaming at
the light spreading.
“An old tree which could
keep even the most evil techlords at bay.”
“But they didn’t have
tech then,right?”
“There were aliens, there
were wars, there were rifts in heaven and in time. It gets
complicated.”
“So angels came through
here?”
“Angels did, in fact,
come through this gate. And one other, on Wake Dark. Here the Keepers
kept them at bay; it wasn’t as good on the other side of the
planet, where their wings took them straight into the capital city.
Angry angels. Killer angels.”
“Angry. Why?”
“No one knows,” said
the old keeper, his teeth showing, his lie showing.
M looked around, lost in a
sense. His physical body, he learned, would transcend this shell, but
that was much later in his journey. He just didn’t know where he
was, but where he went, it seemed hell would follow. It always had.
He turned in time to see
the flock of angels approaching, and for some reason, perhaps the
right one, the blade went straight into his open right hand, it’s
coolness creating goosebumps on his wrist and arms, and it was
angry—he felt that too.
“I won’t even ask,”
he said, turning around to see the old keeper narrowing an old
fashioned crossbow, the kind created a century or two ago by an aging
inventor; and he saw Artimus pulling out his Gladious blade, ready
for combat and always willing to kill. The angels stopped, eyeing the
gate, screaming out in an old angel language lost around the time of
the gate..
“Where exactly are we?”
“In angel territory.”
“The gate is—“
“Yes.” The old keeper
shot an arrow toward the angels, who quickly darted around them and
cascaded into the hills, as though the three showed no threat to the
gate. Or maybe it was something else.
Or maybe, M thought, they
retreated.
“I am leaving.”
“Right.” There was no
argument. The three approached the wilderness with a gate to another
place at their back, a crossover through space and time holding them
tightly. All three, one an aging Combat Spartan with an eye for
blades, another an old keeper with a few centuries under his belt,
and of course our renegade hero M—all three looked back to the gate
with hopeful eyes. They would see it’s true purpose, the stars
said, soon enough.
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