The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) Read online

  Stoakes couldn’t help laughing, even though it hurt to do so. The sickness he felt inside was spreading, rising so that he thought he might retch. Vomit it right out, he thought sarcastically.

  He turned on his heel and walked toward the outer wall, which was pocked with alcoves and heavy doors, seeking an exit. Booms and crashes sounded from outside, but Stoakes didn’t care. If someone got in his way, he would kill them, or not. He was sure he could still beat a hundred normals, but what did it matter?

  He pondered what he should do: help the other Shades? That would be the right thing to do perhaps, but he’d done his stint as a General, and he was so very tired now. Sleep would be good. Surely sleep would drown the ache in his guts and banish the nausea. Even though Ana Tain wouldn’t be waiting for him there, the thought of his bunk back at the Palace was like a balm, but he wasn’t sure he could make it all the way back.

  A chorus of footsteps—another squad of men—sounded from an upper mezzanine level. Stoakes casually glanced over his shoulder, but kept on his way. He moved towards a particularly wide but shallow alcove that opened upon a set of double doors. When he reached the doors, the lights in the alcove blinked twice before coming on. He looked to the right and saw a black screen on the wall, just big enough to accommodate an adult male palm, with a bar of light scanning up from the bottom edge every five seconds.

  Stoakes wasn’t sure what was on the other side of the doors, but knew that passing through them would take him at least that much closer to the outside. He held his hand before him and summoned the Suicide Knife, hoping that he was far enough away from the generator—and still well enough—to make it solid. It came and remained. He gripped the handle firmly, reassuring himself that it was real and that he wasn’t dead just yet. With the swift application of his Longsword Knife technique, the doors fell apart, collapsing into a rain of sharp triangles.

  He stepped over the threshold and had to navigate some more fallen rubble. He was in a foyer that opened to the outside, but he didn’t have to worry about any more doors. There was a good-sized hole in the external wall, one through which he could walk upright, and which explained all the fallen concrete. He took a moment to orient himself and realized that where he stood now was directly below where he had last seen Jav Holson. The hole was likely from the boot of one of the giant robots. He was sure that one had struck the fortress, maybe trying to crush Holson—a vain effort, Stoakes was equally sure—and had probably stepped too close in its attempt.

  Concrete steps led down to a great, sweeping lawn which was bisected by a paved lane. Beyond the lawn was what looked like a public square composed of vast tiles of smooth marble. Gran Mal lay, an inert heap, in the middle of this. There was much more to see up close, though. Three of the giant robots were upon the lawn. One was occupied with Gran Mid, which had wrapped itself up one leg and then the torso. It snapped with great, boney jaws but was held by its vertebral throat at the length of the machine’s one remaining arm. Another of the robots stood still. None of the “life” lights that lit the others shone and Stoakes thought this one had been completely incapacitated somehow. The third appeared to be boxing the empty air, but Stoakes knew better. It was engaged with Holson.

  Stoakes glanced quickly to his right, saw the remaining four robots nearly at the Root Palace. With them was the giant reptile. He was only moderately reassured to see Gran Pham charge one of the machines—to some satisfying effect—and Gran Lej moving to bar the way of the others. He uselessly wished again for fully charged Lightning Gun batteries.

  When he returned his attention to the skirmish on the lawn, his jaw dropped. He saw the one unimpaired machine reach out with with steely fingers and catch Holson in a spreading globe of green light from its palm. Stoakes knew that light, knew its source and knew its danger. He watched the Kaiser Bones erupt in a wave of bubbles and pour off of Holson’s naked frame. He watched the metal giant move with nearly impossible speed, step forward and catch Holson between the fading globe of its outstretched right hand and the flaring one from its left, imprisoning him in the deadly light before clapping both hands together. The hands came away and Holson was no more.

  Stoakes dropped to his knees, violently vomiting both because of the unwitting emotional shock of seeing Jav Holson killed and because of the sudden increase in lethal radiation. Even on his knees, Stoakes was dizzy, unable to remain upright. He collapsed, with his face narrowly missing the mess he’d just made upon the grass.

  He couldn’t move. Everything was dim. From where he’d fallen, he could still vaguely make out the giant machine, though the canted angle somehow nauseated him further and made his head hurt. Through this, a single thought banged incessantly in his head: Jav Holson couldn’t be dead; Jav Holson couldn’t be dead; Jav Holson couldn’t be dead. . .

  Then dark. Then black. Then nothing.

  3.4 SHATTERED

  10,900.084

  Jav wordlessly urged Gran Mid forward toward the great structure of concrete, glass, and steel. Hilene followed alongside him.

  “Jav,” she said and got no response. “Jav there’s something very important I have to tell you.”

  “In a moment, Hilene. Something wonderful is about to happen.”

  “Jav—”

  Again he gave no response, but cocked his head in an unsettling way, his focus on the building ahead.

  “I said it was important,” she said firmly.

  But Jav was gone, leaving Hilene alone with Gran Mid. She sighed. She had little time to be upset, though. Successive booms rocking the ground alerted her to the approach of several of the giant machines from behind. She turned reflexively to look, counted three of them coming her way, and sighed again. She quickly scanned for Jav, found him where she half-expected to, hovering in front of the building from which the terrible green light emanated.

  She looked down at Gran Mid briefly, shook her head, and raced off towards the oncoming machines.

  • • •

  Jav floated before a great pane of glass, stared through it, into eyes which were doorways to salvation. Hope built behind them like a like a tidal wave rush, promising to wash over him, to cleanse him of ignorance, of the weariness of being, of right and wrong. The hole inside him, festering for so long now, would be filled with that rush, with what was about to be transmitted through those eyes, but another pair of eyes caught his attention and told him otherwise. For a moment, Jav and the other locked eyes, the skull pit-sockets of the Kaiser Bones and the surreal, living soot marks against eddying, nearly-black smoke.

  He registered the knife without breaking eye contact and gave the slightest shake of his head, pleading with the other. He saw regret in the soot eyes, perhaps even tears, but no mercy. Jav understood that this was the agent responsible for each and every piece ripped away from him over the last hundred years or more, but was overwhelmed by the fleeting promise of what the girl had to offer. He shifted his gaze back to her, wanting to drink her in and all that she brought with her, hoping against hope that even a fraction would escape before the blade sank and closed the door. She was suffused with rapt anticipation, seemingly oblivious to all but Jav, in spite of his monstrous appearance in the Kaiser Bones. He reached out for the window with an unconscious application of AI and shattered the glass. He slowly entered the chamber, not wanting to force the other into any sudden movements, not considering that the exploding glass might have provoked such.

  Everything ended in a blood-washed instant. The knife was driven through the girl’s temple, somehow not killing her outright, but extinguishing the light in her eyes and forever closing the doors they had become. The blood came in a jet from the woman next to the girl, from her throat, and it pumped insistently. Jav ignored her and rushed to the girl, catching her as she slumped awkwardly against the animate shadow, now retreating. Both Jav and the girl were bathed in the other woman’s life as it spilled out of her, but neither noticed or cared. He gripped the girl’s shoulders and she looked up at him with now-
vacant eyes. He eased her down, dropping down to one knee, wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight. She was gone, he knew, but he couldn’t let her go.

  The Kaiser Bones hid his tears, which flowed unchecked. He knew he’d been close, that an answer had been within his grasp. Grief, real and deep, stabbed at him, for her waning life and for his loss. Anger—at having been robbed, at the sense of being cheated at the very last moment—boiled up like bile inside him and nearly caused his mind to split in two. At the pinnacle of his rage, he gained a kind of clarity, as sharp and clear as a razor’s purpose. He gently lowered the girl to her back on the floor, but before he was ready to release her, the room exploded around him.

  Chunks of concrete shot with rebar rained down from the crumbled walls and ceiling, cracking the floor and threatening to cave it in. As it was, Jav thought that the whole building had been knocked off its foundation. Perhaps not quite, but smaller debris bounced and rolled away from him, down a noticeable slope. Still holding the girl, Jav turned his head to see great metal fingers splaying, readying to close on him. He considered letting them, using the Ghost Kaiser to get clear, but he was too enraged by all that had transpired and then by this foolish move which ignored entirely the safety of anyone else still alive in the room. He swung around raising his hand in a similar fashion, calculating AI, first to prevent the fingers from closing, then to compress the arm upon itself. Jav watched the unreal ripple move down the massive black arm as he exceeded infinity. Metal exploded in shards and splinters in every direction except from where the ripple originated, until it had gone the length of the arm, obliterating it to the shoulder. The force of the spatial assault forced the robot backwards, exposing the ruined room to the outdoors.

  Dizziness spread through Jav’s head like a kaleidoscope show and he nearly collapsed down upon the girl. He shook his head to clear it, but couldn’t completely banish the muzziness. He’d been pushing himself pretty hard over the last twenty-four hours. Perhaps it was catching up with him. Exhaustion would have to wait, though, at least until his rage had been satiated.

  He laid the girl down carefully, placing her arms over her chest. She still breathed. Her eyes were still open, but they were dull and as good as lifeless. Jav gave her hands a farewell squeeze and rose to his feet. He walked to the edge of the broken floor and stared out at the robot he’d just crippled and another one just like it.

  They were nearly identical, armored with some glossy black metal that looked like smooth sheets of interlocking obsidian. Only their heads were noticeably different. The one minus its left arm had a great, jutting lower jaw that flared at the bottom like a stylized beard and its crown was topped with a tall conical spire. The other had a pair of segmented horns that curved out and then back in with each segment as they rose. A vertical grate covered the lower half of its face and butted up against strangely living green eyes. Both machines, though sleek, streamlined figures with the exception of their elaborate joints, were shot with green “veins”, lines that throbbed in complex, irregular rhythms and may have acted as a circulatory system for power.

  Jav had become aware of a rush of words, either directed at him or passing between the two robots, which were at first incomprehensible but were fast beginning to make sense to him. He heard something like Godsort, referring to the giant robots, then the word sister then kill. He watched the pristine Godsort focus on him and gathered that he’d just been accused of murder. Of murder, Jav was certainly guilty, many hundreds of thousands of times over, but not this time.

  The Godsort drew back its arm to strike, and it or its pilot cried out, “High Formation!”

  Jav cocked his head and said simply, “No.”

  Despite the haze in his head Jav calculated hard and fast and true. The Godsort was at a distance which provided him with all the necessary reference points, so he pushed it bodily, virtually reducing the space between it and the remains of Gran Mal, bumping it up and behind, then releasing it, much in the way he’d practiced Cov Merasec’s Copy Twin so long ago.

  The strain was incredible, and he was pretty sure his nose was bleeding beneath the Kaiser Bones. He’d never moved something so large so far, but the effect was more than gratifying. From Jav’s perspective, the giant machine shot from its place on the ground, moved linearly as if being drawn by a powerful magnet—narrowly missing Gran Mid—rose up above Gran Mal to avoid crashing into it, then dropped down behind it. When he released it, the virtual space returned to actual space and the Godsort attempted to snap back like a rubber band, straight to its origin point, without the additional up and down Jav provided. From anyone else’s perspective, the Godsort was standing next to its one-armed fellow one moment, and erupting in a spectacular shower of shredded steel up against Gran Mal the next.

  When it struck Gran Mal, even with only a few meters separating them, the impact was devastating because of the return velocity, which was well over a kilometer per second. Gran Mal’s armored shell blew apart, sending great hexagonal plates spinning through the air, and chinking into the marble square when they came down on edge. Hydraulic systems and other machinery built around Gran Mal’s chassis shot out like shrapnel, some bits as big as houses.

  • • •

  Just to the left of the Godsort’s flash-trajectory, Hilene was engaged with the last of the three robots that had come to protect the fortress—the other four were making an assault on the Root Palace. Hilene, with her already hyper-sensitive perceptions combined with those developed during her studies and application of Approaching Infinity theory, had seen what Jav had not. She had seen the Godsort transform, had seen the green light veins running up and down its limbs and torso surge with power. She felt the rise in power sicken her, both physically and with raw dread. She saw the Godsort expand about the veins and become something more, something beyond mere mechanization. It was a fusion of man and machine that she could not help but compare with divinity. So she knew, even as Gran Mal was blown to pieces, that the native machine would emerge from the impact with little more than scratches. She thought of Vays when he initiated his psychic power while Dark with the Titan Star, but she laughed a laugh born of hopelessness, thinking that Vays’s paltry 120% would be much preferred over what was to come.

  She hurried with her present task, glad beyond measure that the machine she was facing—piloted by a child!—had not powered up similarly, and that he was preoccupied with the noisy spectacle Gran Mal had become. She executed the Ten Deaths, careful to avoid the green power lines and the pilot compartment, targeting the joints off the torso, and various other central points. Her target choices were perhaps unwise, but the power lines radiated death, she was sure, even to her, and she couldn’t bring herself to murder a child, not by direct action, no matter the circumstances. She was confident, though, that she’d crippled the machine, at least for now, and made her way back towards Jav.

  She had to hurry. She had to tell him. The sickness she felt was creeping in from every direction. Her ears tickled and she thought that they felt warm and wet. Her nose, too. Very strange as she was still Dark and completely intangible. She shook her head and forced herself to go faster.

  • • •

  Stol Kossig didn’t know what to think. Animate human skeletons that could fly? Their giant pet serpents, similarly accoutered? And now a sparkling translucent ghost of a woman, too? Raohan La had assured him that these humans were dangerous, and he knew not to challenge Raohan La’s statements, however farfetched they may have seemed.

  The interlopers’ progress towards the Citadel, where he and his family had grown up, bothered him. The Perpetual Motion Machine, housed inside, had been perfectly safe since the war had ended, but years of peace had brought about ever more relaxed security. He knew that it would be a prime target. More than that, though, he feared for his sister, Isleyna, who, hopefully, still slept and remained ignorant of the threat that had come to Stolom.

  Stol didn’t know how, but in the span of a single blink, the skel
eton was at the Citadel—at his sister’s window. His anxiety spiked and he brought his Godsort to a run, calling for his brother and cousin to do the same. The ghost woman turned their way and came at them like a streak.

  “Raohan La said they were dangerous, Stol,” Temmus said over the radio. “Let me take her.”

  Stol ground his teeth at the flippant confidence he heard. “This is not training, Temmus,” he said more sternly than he meant to.

  “I know,” Temmus said, sobering. “Please give me this chance.”

  Stol looked at the ghost, at the far-off skeleton man and the massive skeleton serpent between them. He bit his lower lip. “All right. But remember, Raohan La said they were dangerous, not one of your schoolmates.”

  “Yes, Stol. Thank you.”

  He sensed the genuine gratitude and pleasure in his little brother’s voice.

  “Enzo!” Stol cried, “Split up and converge on the Citadel. Let Temmus have this one.”

  “Understood.”

  Stol, leading in the middle, broke right, crossing in front of Enzo and his Godsort. Enzo paused briefly in his stride, then shot left in front of Temmus, who shifted to the middle position then bolted with renewed speed towards the onrushing ghost woman.

  Stol watched her do a double take, but she couldn’t be in three places at once, so she ignored the wide-flanking Godsorts, and continued on towards Temmus. Success for now.

  He passed the serpent, slowing in case it showed interest, but it didn’t make a move towards him or Enzo, who streaked by much closer—recklessly close, Stol thought. He resumed his previous pace and was coming up fast on the Citadel, but Enzo would reach it before him. Isleyna’s window shattered suddenly and the skeleton entered into her apartment just as Enzo’s Godsort obscured his view. What he saw next, though, nearly made him retch.