The Loss Queen (Approaching Infinity Book 5) Read online

  “Even if your Copies are independent, seems like you’ve just got a downgraded version of Merasec’s Fugue Army: I kill one of you and the whole army disappears.”

  “Not so easy, Holson!” the Biggses shouted. “Your time as First General is finished. I’m going to reveal the lie. I’m going to expose you for the fraud you are.”

  Several versions of Biggs dove for Jav, each brandishing an Ivory Scythe materializing out of thin air. A blade flashed for his head, but Jav leaned back, nearly horizontal, to avoid it, driving a front kick forward to fold a Biggs in half. Another Biggs swept down diagonally with the Scythe, but Jav twisted and slapped the flat of the blade away with the palm of his right hand. Still another Biggs brought his Scythe up from below, but Jav appeared to stand momentarily upon the blade’s edge and use it for a springboard to propel himself up into the air where there were more Biggses waiting.

  Jav reached out for the shaft of the Scythe closest to prevent movement, and with his other hand, raked savagely across that Biggs’s front. False ribs cracked and gave way in an unreal manner. Feathers flew and blood burst forth, but both lost color as the source became a phantom and winked out existence. With this and the very first example, Jav knew that any damage he did to a Copy was not translated in full to the original Biggs. But it did translate. Good enough. He would just have to hit harder.

  Biggs laughed severally. “How many more to go, Holson?”

  “All of you if need be. Are we still keeping score?”

  Biggs grunted and renewed several attacks at once. Jav, however, met each with the same finesse, managing to somehow avoid, block, or divert everything that came his way. Biggs’s frustration grew and became evident in his performance. His anger was beginning to make him sloppy, until all versions stopped.

  “Tell me how you’re doing this!” they all cried. “No one can be that skilled!”

  Jav laughed, lighted upon Gran Mid’s brow once more. “Maybe not. Both your calculation and application of AI are impressive, but you can’t beat me with your Copy Army.”

  “Why not?!”

  “Because the amount of power you’re pouring into each copy makes them stand out like bright and shining beacons. Screaming, vibrating, impossible to miss. Even during my Artifact Competition, I was able to sense Ren Fauer’s AI before he struck. Ren was far more subtle, though, and I’ve had a couple hundred years to develop this sense. So your Army is about as dangerous to me as Merasec’s was to the Gun Golems.” Jav paused to let this statement sink in, to see if it had the effect he’d expected. When Biggs shook with rage, Jav had little doubt that Merasec had been his teacher. “Shall we continue?”

  With a sweep of his skeletal wings, the real Biggs shot forth, raising the Scythe to strike. Silence hit palpably as the Copy Army disappeared.

  Jav stretched his arms out in an apparent gesture of acquiescence. The Scythe came down, but passed harmlessly through a smoke facsimile. Jav popped into existence behind Biggs and delivered the True Kaiser Kick between the wings issuing from his shoulder blades.

  Biggs lurched forward uncontrollably, bouncing along the length of Gran Mid’s spine upon a shoulder, a hip, his head, and so on, until he righted himself with a single flap of his wings.

  “Can you hit that hard?” Jav said, and suddenly closed the distance between them with AI.

  Biggs was surprised by the instantaneous movement, but reacted almost as quickly, bringing his Scythe to bear. Jav ducked and dodged, slapped the blade away, stopped it short by getting too close and restricting the handle.

  “Is that all Merasec taught you?” Jav said.

  Biggs shook free of Jav’s grasp and skidded to the ground. Jav descended as well. Biggs brought his grip together upon the Scythe and yanked his hands apart. Within each was a short-handled sickle, identical to the kind Merasec used except that these appeared to be made of ivory. He proceeded to flourish them with incredible speed.

  Jav was impressed. Biggs was tougher than he’d thought—he’d expected the True Kaiser Kick to cripple him. Plus, despite its failure to work on Jav, Biggs’s facility with AI was staggering. Biggs might have made a good replacement, but for one thing: like Cov Merasec, he couldn’t hit hard enough.

  Biggs charged ahead, his sickles carving intricate patterns through the air, but despite his intentions, not through Jav Holson.

  Jav moved with fluid speed and grace, ducking, dodging, turning, side-stepping. At first he simply reacted, was purely on the defensive, but once he was satisfied with his evaluation of Biggs’s potential, he acted. First, he caught one sickle blade between thumb and the side of his bent forefinger, then he caught the other, tracking it along its path and snatching it in the same manner in the vice grip of his fingers. Jav spread both blades wide, and Biggs could not force them back or away so was wide open for the front kick that caught him in the midsection and nearly knocked his legs out from under him. Jav crossed his arms with a sudden jerk, yanking the sickles from Biggs’s hands and sending them spinning away like pinwheels. He immediately followed with a right backhanded claw to the right side of Biggs’s avian jaw. In a daze, Biggs spun with the force of the blow, and as he did, Jav gripped a skeletal wing in each hand and pulled savagely while using AI to separate them. The wings came out like a bifurcate weed with a complex root system, dripping blood and gristle. Biggs didn’t cry out. He started to stumble forward, but turned abruptly, crisscrossing the ivory sickles—suddenly back in his hands—with frantic, almost comical, vigor.

  The space between the two filled with ghostly white disks, buzz-sawing for Jav. They were still relatively close to one another, however, and at that range, all Jav could do was cover his face with his arms. Blood shot from numerous thin cuts all over Jav’s body, but wherever one of the disks met one of the Kaiser Bones, it clinked loudly, slowed, revealing itself to be a spinning crescent, and dissipated to nothingness.

  Jav lowered his arms. “Still not hard enough, Biggs,” he said, launching forward with the True Kaiser Kick. His knee crashed into Biggs’s forehead and the follow-up kick sent him skidding, rolling, bouncing this time upon the hard earth.

  Jav walked towards him as he scrambled to his feet and was shocked by his resiliency and the speed with which he rose after such a blow. He saw, though, that Biggs swayed drunkenly, held his head at what seemed like a fixed, insupportable angle now. And that he gibbered.

  “Not hard enough. All right! I’ll show you how hard I can hit, you fraud! I have the means! You will see!” Because of the angle of his head, it looked like he was addressing someone who wasn’t there, but he proceeded to strike with his fist the seed emblem set within one of his false ribs.

  Jav stopped. What was he seeing? The seed was like a pressed button, a plunger, which on returning to its original position inflated to twice its former size. Radiating out from it were pulsing veins, five of them perhaps, giving the impression of an infirm flower, pumping power into Biggs. Biggs stretched his neck, righted it with a series of loud cracks, and seemed to stand taller, broader at the shoulders. Skeletal wings stretched out from his back unevenly, the left and right one-third and one-half their previous sizes. The sickles in his hands gave off a sudden flare of milky white light, transforming into what could only be described as a transitional state, something between a hand sickle and his two-handed scythe. The handles and blades were longer and thicker. They looked unwieldy for one-handed weapons, but Biggs showed that to be a baseless assumption.

  Even as Jav watched the transformation, he felt Biggs pass by in a rush, the two giant sickles whooshing. One, Jav was able to fend off, parrying it with the Kaiser Bones covering his left forearm, but the other cut deeply through his right side, bringing about a sudden—and familiar?—pain that staggered him. He stumbled backwards, gripping the wound as blood squirted through his fingers. Cold, heavy numbness spread from the wound. Behind him, Biggs turned to renew his attack but Jav had had enough. He’d hoped to injure Biggs enough to end the fight without killing him
, but abandoned this hope. He spun his right leg around two-hundred and seventy degrees, doing an about face into a left front-stance, then launched forward with all the AI he could bring to bear, leading with his right claw-hand. Jav did this faster than Biggs could track, despite his increased physical resources, and with the additional AI working on the claw hand, drove it wholly into Biggs’s midsection, reaching up through real ribs for the heart.

  • • •

  Everything had gone quiet. Everything had gone still. Something inside him, something alien, cried out, though, and rallied, refusing to allow the dark to creep in and blot out all else. Biggs heard the cry and returned to his senses, and for the first time in his short life, was assailed by doubt. What was going on? How was this possible? Surely Merasec couldn’t have been wrong about Holson. What were these resources he was bringing to bear? Holson must have received some augmentation from the Loss Queen, some unquantifiable thing that increased his existing powers. How else could he have defeated Gran Ketz in a single stroke? How else could Holson have invalidated his Copy Army?

  Biggs thought these things in the front of his mind, but in the back, in the places he didn’t like to go, where reason and logic and empirical truths sometimes swam but rarely rose to the surface, he couldn’t help but marvel at Holson’s strategy, using Rommel the way he had, or at his facility with AI. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the thought that he might be outclassed wriggled and splashed about. A building sense of anger, of frustration took on substance. It wasn’t fair. He’d been promised a place in Viscain history. His name didn’t matter, not if he could lay claim to Holson’s identity, not if he could be the hero, briefly fallen here on Planet 1612, only to rise again, stronger than before, the hero responsible for ushering in the era of The Place with Many Doors.

  He could feel the seed over his heart, exerting a terrible pull upon him. He wasn’t done yet. He still had the means.

  • • •

  The seed in Biggs’s breast pulsed, issuing a kind of psychic cry, which Jav felt on some instinctive level, perhaps Artifact to Artifact. He could feel it reaching into his head, attempting to compel him to stop, but its power to do so was too raw, too primitive to be effective. Biggs’s muscles hardened around Jav’s hand, halting his progress. He could reach no further so tangled his fingers around what he could and yanked his hand free. A dark spray followed the exit of his hand, and now Biggs staggered back, his arms slack, his sickles hanging impotently at his sides, but only for a moment before he composed himself.

  Biggs heaved his breast and once again, his Copies began to fill the immediate area. These worked their paired sickles, creating some distance between Jav and the original Biggs. Biggs’s strategy must have been to use the Copies as shields since only a portion of the damage they took passed through to the true Biggs, but this would be his downfall. Despite his numbers, Biggs’s movements had grown sluggish compared to Jav’s. Jav already had the advantage of the AI spatial sense, but there was little hope of Biggs carrying out an effective attack now.

  Jav kept his eyes on the original as he engaged one of the Copies, his hands poised for the Kaiser Claw. He gripped the Copy’s head and executed his calculations. Between his hands, the top of the bird skull began to give way to the reducing force created by the Kaiser Claw. The original Biggs dropped his sickles, which disappeared like wisps of mist, then he dropped to his knees, with his head straining against the invisible, remote force of the Claw. The top of the skull cracked, buckled. The line of the beak turned askew and the original Biggs winked out of existence, assuming the Copy’s position, as Jav twisted its head off in his hands.

  “For good or for ill, there is only one Skeleton General,” Jav said, casting the head to the ground.

  Jav raised his right arm, tried to examine the wound in his side. The numbness seemed to have been checked and hadn’t spread too far.

  “We are expediting tissue repair,” the Voice said.

  “Thank you,” Jav said. “It feels deep.”

  Not that a response was necessary, but when none came, Jav had to force himself to shrug off an overwhelming sense of dread and loneliness. He wasn’t alone, not anymore, not with the Bones. The Loss Queen, too, waited for him.

  He thought about what to do next. Ideally he could use the bunker’s jump deck to infiltrate the Palace, but if he left it intact and was unable to satisfy the Loss Queen’s request, she would be within easy reach of the Empire. No, using the deck would make things easier, but leaving it in working order was too dangerous. He would have to destroy it.

  Just to make sure, he double checked the Tether Launch control upon his wrist. Still not functioning. If somehow the Tether Launch bays came back online, the control would be a liability—they could track him and even force his return. He took it from his wrist and crushed it in his right hand.

  He leapt backwards, landing with feather-soft finesse upon Gran Mid’s brow. “Access remote interface.” Before his face, a holographic screen lit up. Jav operated the controls, establishing a link between his and Raus’s bunkers. Though only separated from his own bunker by fifty meters now, the interference from the mist and what it held was enough to raise endless rolls of static and set the image to flickering. He could see, though, that Raus’s deck was filled with corpse troops ready to transport. Perfect.

  “Raus,” Jav said. “Raus, do you read me?”

  “Jav? -- --at you?” Raus’s scattered image blew apart, came together, blew apart.

  “Raus, I’m not sure what your orders are, but I’m initiating emergency transport. Stand by.” Jav muted the audio pick-up and set the jump deck bay door to open. The bunker began to rumble as the bay door—the better part of the west-facing outer wall—rose on great roof-mounted hinges.

  “Jav? What --- --- say? Repeat, ---- --- --- ---”

  “Gran Mid. . .”

  The door reached its peak.

  “Fire,” Jav said. He waited a second before pushing the button commencing the jump. His timing was flawless.

  For an instant, the corpse soldiers occupied both jump decks and at that precise moment, Gran Mid’s fire swept through them, a liquid stream on a ricochet spiral, crashing like countless angry waves against the three walls and ceiling of each jump deck chamber. The corpses erupted into flames, were blasted to charred skeletons. The walls, blistered, puckered, and burst, allowing the flames to ravage both bunkers entirely.

  Through the poor connection, Jav watched Raus scramble and listened to him shout just before the feed cut out. The jump had completed, but it took seconds for the hardware to succumb to the heat and fail. It had occurred to Jav to try to warn Raus, to give him a chance to avoid the conflagration, but he realized that such thinking might not be conducive to succeeding in accomplishing his ultimate goal. Besides, he had little doubt that Raus would—and had—survived.

  He gave his smoldering bunker a two-fingered salute, and urged Gran Mid east. It would be a long trip, but he imagined that Raus would likely meet him halfway—something he was not particularly looking forward to.

  7

  THE CORPSE GENERAL

  10,923.023.0600

  Planet 1612 (Loss)

  3rd Perimeter (Barcos Steppe)

  It didn’t take long to assimilate all of Tattan’s troops into Raus’s army, now a composite of various Lossian divisions. He wasn’t sure what would come next, but had an uneasy feeling about their operation here on Loss, which was strange since they’d destroyed, with no casualties, everything the natives had sent against them so far. Perhaps it was the possibility of a sleeping god that troubled him, but he didn’t think so. When he tried to examine the source of his anxiety, the image of Jav Holson invariably popped into and immediately back out of his mind. Could it be that he was having some kind of premonition? Probably not. Even Ban had ceased having his precognitive fever dreams, originally brought on by the Catalyst Wine, after coming out of his centuries-long coma. Coming to no conclusions, he tried to shrug off the od
d feeling and think of other things, namely what was left of Sacy. Daydreaming about the future was something he particularly enjoyed lately and so he put his mind to that.

  10,923.023.1600

  Planet 1612 (Loss)

  3rd Perimeter (Barcos Steppe)

  The call alert sounded, rousing Raus, who was napping upon Gran Pham’s back with his hands behind his head. Sacy stood upon Gran Pham’s brow like a mute sentinel. He rose and she acknowledged him as he came up beside her.

  “Access remote interface,” Raus said.

  A holographic screen, shot with waves of static, appeared before him, and he pushed a series of buttons there to route the signal. The image of the Emperor filled the screen. Raus bowed nervously—it was unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for the Emperor to contact Shades in the field directly.

  “Yes, Lord Emperor,” he said.

  “Raus Kapler. First General Jav Holson has been compromised by the enemy. Jav Holson has betrayed the Empire.”

  The key phrase unlocked Raus’s mind, unleashing a rush of information and emotions, the latter of which were a combination of real and suggested.

  Jav Holson has betrayed the Empire. Of course he has, Raus thought. It was as if he’d known for some time now, like he’d been privy to a dirty little secret for months and was just now allowed to publicly acknowledge it. A small part of him wondered how and why Jav would turn, but he knew at least one reason Jav might have acquiesced to subversion, if that’s what it was, or outright rebellion. Jav had been toyed with in a crippling way since Raus had met him. Raus had never seen the Emperor’s hand in this directly, but had little doubt as to his involvement. Still, treason was unforgivable.

  “Do you understand, Raus Kapler?” the Emperor wheezed.

  “Yes, Lord Emperor. What are your orders?”