Chapter 5: Death's Angel

From the Book of Hephaestion, on the events of Year 07.04.753 of the Vision of the Lady of Holy Waters:
~ ~ ~

It began with a dream.

The interim habitat supervisor, a dry, taciturn intensivist named Josefa Zinn, promised subject 237 that he would not dream. Could not dream. Zinn and her predecessor, Marea-Siris Interlandi, had added Vezdripam to his Endopental therapy, suppressing with toxins most of the electrical activity in subject 237's brain. The result: widespread brain dysfunction.

Interlandi was not convinced drug therapy would prevent the dream state. There wasn't enough science to understand the problem. Interlandi said as much to her patient right before therapy commenced.

Shortly after treatment, subject 237 had no sleep-wake function, no awareness, and on the coma composite scale measured deeply unconscious.

He did not like to dream. Interlandi and Zinn understood this.

With a dream, then, it began.

In the dream subject 237 climbed an escalator, long legs taking two and three steps at a time. Catching something out of place, something he did not understand, 237 gazed distractedly through an immense dome into a gray expanse of sky. He was in an airport. The glowing, metallic framework of intercontinental airbuses lumbered upward. What country was this? Should he know? How many airports had he seen, really? Tangalore's, once. He had flown out of Prejli's capital, too. So, two airports. A pathetic record. It was Prejli International that had the giant dome and the unending escalator in the center of its international departure terminal.

He carried an overnight bag. The bag slipped from his shoulder, annoying him. He wanted to leave the bag in a waste bin but it was unseemly to discard it. He shouldn't draw attention.

The dome darkened, and quickly. Not quite as quickly as a light switch pressed off but almost.

The first sign, his only warning. Shit.

He has since attempted to imagine the way it played out in the critical care unit at the Kinder Complex in Dournay Province, Brianovia.

He imagines that as the sky in his dream darkened, as he dreamed the sky dark, right about then the illumination panels, the actual ones on the critical care unit, where he lay unconscious, began to flicker. His racing heart and increased respiration would have matched the energy pulse scrambling the monitor in the observation chamber. Probably station power failed. The unit on which he was the only subject did okay in the half-second of blackness before the antique fossil-fuel generator kicked in. No sense hooking the critical care unit into the uninterruptible power circuit, because he could fry that, and the habitat's UPS rang in at a million, a million and a half International Credit Units. The ventilator failed but he didn't need the ventilator per se, and the IV was a relic, the old sort that did not have a pump. After the half-second of darkness, Zinn would have pressed the fat red button on the wall, the one under the small white sign with reflective lettering announcing emergency. The alarm would summon the former habitat supervisor, Marea-Siris Interlandi, who would be ordered by the project medical director to take over. He pictured Interlandi's young, stern face turning sharply to Zinn as Interlandi snapped: "How long has he been dreaming?"

With scattered energy fluctuations and his brain activity heating up the resonant imaging scan, Zinn would not argue.

But Interlandi was wrong.

Dreaming is bad. Remembering is worse.

With a dream it began. Now, he was remembering.

The airport in Prejli's capital of Damia. He'd been there in the middle of the night, actually. It was fourteen years ago, although the years, to subject 237, mattered little. Time was an inconvenient contrivance. Why remember Prejli's airport at all? Better to ask how could he forget.

The mission director had said he had to travel at night. A different class of people flew the skies of the new continents at night. Economy flyers. Busy people, in a hurry. As a whole, the passengers were exasperated, unimpressed. The airport was brusque with them, cut back services. Rates were easier but the airport's night staff was thin and overburdened.

He moved along uncared for and uncaring, showed his bag to the distracted security agent, marched up the tiled incline to the departure gates. Every time one of the big airbuses took off the dome vibrated. They were getting old now, the airbuses. Some of them had been in use fifteen, twenty years. He remembered when they were state of the art with their new-age fuel management systems, the big TEC-HRING engines, and their cockpits seven stories above the wheels. He had read that they only crashed at night. It was true. When the seats were full, and under the red mother moon Vahera. The moon wasn't always full but she was up, as in over the horizon, every single instance one of the behemoths went down. There was a red moon that night, fourteen years ago, brushing the sky with soft cerise tones. He was looking at a full-on mother moon when he sat in a bank of chairs beside the boarding gate. Ubel, the little sister moon, was a blue crescent in the east quadrant, giving her mother the sky. Even the diamond north star stood back. Many babies were conceived that night.

He became aware that someone was staring. He should not have been surprised but he was. He was early for the 1:00 AM to the capital of Solona, Simeria City, in the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa. The lounge was almost empty. He slid the overnight bag to the floor between his feet, lightly touched a pair of heavy shades, and returned the gaze of a child in the chair diagonally across from his. She was alone.

She was too young at nine years to travel without a chaperone, had been transferred into the care of the airline until a guardian claimed her at the end of her flight. She played a flex game rather seriously on a pink hand-held while listening to music on a jump-jo clipped to her hip. Her hair was drawn from her face in a dark pony's tail, showing off large green eyes that presently were fixed on him.

She stared not just at him but all over him. Her eyes flickered. He felt a jolt, which of course was fear. And then it became something he would not identify for fourteen years. With a nudge at the mental barrier-- held expertly through sheer will between his hyped sensory package and the world --he pricked the girl's small skull. He saw what she saw: his long legs in denim, the unpolished black boots, the faded dark T-shirt stretched over broad shoulders but loose at the waist, the long leather coat with its turned-up collar. Over his shoulders but behind his ears flowed black waves of hair. Some of it billowed above his brow before winging backward. He possessed a long mouth that had only recently recovered some of the softness it had owned in youth. His hands were long-fingered, strong, and sinewy. They said nothing about his vocation, although the alignment of his features suggested a career in front of a camera. The girl reminded him of this. Strangers wanted to remember his face. This had always been so.

The nine-year-old girl with the pink flex and jump-jo also saw illuminated foils undulating from points all over his body. These appendages shot through his garments strong and bright, wending outward and upward like feathers of enormous wings. He saw what she saw on the stage of her mind, and she saw that he saw but never ceased staring, until he spoke.

She switched off the jump-jo and plucked out the ear buds. "What did you say?" She was whispering.

"I said there's nothing to be afraid of. I've flown a hundred times." Over the centuries he had lost his species' abhorrence to lying. "It will be all right."

The girl said, "Will you sit next to me, just in case?"

He was traveling in the executive section. The desk and table ensemble next to his recliner folded into an extra seat. "If the flight crew allows it, yes."

The girl plugged in her ear buds and powered on the jump-jo. She said nothing more but stared a lot, making sure he didn't take off.

The flight crew was pleased to have its charge in the executive section, where attendants were in abundance, so he spent several hours looking after the girl, one in the terminal and two in the air. The child slept without trouble, and she ate from a snack in her travel bag. These were things, snacking and sleeping, his kind did not do casually or deeply. Maybe he had, when he was her age. He had forgotten his childhood, or misplaced it. Misplaced it, most likely. The people who at times believed he was their subject were unwavering in their belief that he possessed total recall. They liked to think that he was by their feeble estimate nearly-- nearly --perfect. He supposed he shouldn't dwell on it, although occasionally their assertions annoyed him. The question, however, was did he snack when he was nine years old. Best not to go there. When he looked at the little girl through his power he saw the life force of a young human. The child's dreams were simple, colorful, and harmless. He tasted them inside, enjoyed them, and let them go as he must, eventually, let her go. If he looked harder at her ability, what good was served? And if she was like him, there were years and years to learn of it. His species hid poorly, though it had been seven hundred years since he encountered one of his own. There had been a revolution among the more common races, the disinclination among certain groups to share the world with his kind. It was called the Purge. For the most part, his species had not survived. Of course, some human children possessed modest but peculiar powers that they grew out of. Maybe that explained the child's ability to track the aura of a shielded affarite.

At the end of the flight an elderly woman collected the girl.

He continued on.

He was in Simeria now. Simeria stank. It was a garbage city of chrome, steel, and brick. He took a public motor coach through the city, over a steel bridge, into a country abundant with factories and waste management plants the size of small cities. He had to go another day to escape a landscape of concrete walls, chemical silos, and recyclers with their rusting hulls and circling metal staircases ten stories high. The United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa, the UKSB, had come some distance from its past as an agriculture giant and haven of free thought. It was one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, next to the Aiglentine Empire. All that freethinking had advanced the UKSB in technology and helped the kingdom shake its dependency on agricultural exports. It was the leading exporter, now, of weapons and warriors and there was always wealth to make more of each, and to make them better. The UKSB imported everything else, almost everything else, including technology, paid top wages for innovation and let its labor classes struggle in service industries that were only an economy shift from disappearing. The government was notoriously brutal. It was the only Intercontinental Treaty (ITAN) nation still televising judicial executions. The country was presently in alert, a condition to which its leaders frequently exposed its fractious populace.

In the town of Folsom he took a room in a country motel using forged credentials provided by the Kinder Group. There were twin beds on a clean carpet, a small plastic table with a chair, and a bathroom with a shower. A television, one of the older models, connected to cable service. The bureau had a mirror. In the mirror he saw a tall man shrugging off a leather coat, rolling his back muscles, the long lean kind, and looking over his shoulder at a young symmetrical face. He flicked off his shades. A Kinder Group engineer had crafted the shades with specialized filters. Without the shades, when he was relaxed, he saw the supernal light that emanated from his pores. His reflection melted in a blur of radiating color. He was used to this and turned away. He was beginning to feel lethargic, hungry.

A knock on the door. He let in a woman soldier, dark-haired, brown-eyed, medium height, wiry. She was a Brianov; her name was Brega Grazdoz. She wore casual slacks, a knit sweater. It was just after the storm season, twenty days before the winter solstice. She carried a long wool coat and wore flat but attractive leather boots. Grazdoz had taken a separate flight from a different country. UKSB security was costly, but not imaginative. A war-team infiltration from different countries had a high probability of success.

Grazdoz had purchased food stuff favored by subject 237. Lean meat, cooked well and without spices and preservatives. Garden vegetables. Spring water. He ate without speaking to her, sampling her thoughts. She was thinking about being alone with him, this sleeping business, which confounded her. She had a gun and was supposed to watch over him while he slept. She considered him formidable with and without his abilities. He was fast, good with his hands, an expert with projectile weapons, and no one, nothing, could sneak up on him. She did not get the sleeping thing at all, why she had to stand guard. She wondered if he wanted her to sleep with him. He never explained the former, never considered the latter. Her concept of intercourse was as inadequate as her understanding of his sleeping habits, which was not her fault. Kinder was selective with information. As for sex, he didn't bother to wonder why she'd want him on the downward spiral of his cycle.

He slept on the floor against the wall. He liked carpets better than he liked beds, and he didn't need covering. She thought he was gallant, found it amusing. When he woke eighteen hours later there were three soldiers in the room and four men outside dressed as civilians and armed with concealed semi-automatic pistols and mini-assault rifles. When he got up to use the toilet and shower the team leader told him everyone was present. The motel room was quiet otherwise. While he dressed no one spoke. The soldiers kept out of his path and their eyes down; they were reverent, even the woman Grazdoz who had wondered if he would take her in his arms. Soldiers in the field were less apt to use the Stoic Mind. While on a mission adrenaline amped the senses and drove different and difficult priorities. He didn't care. The soldiers served the council of seven countries named after the project founder, Dr. Antoni Kinder. The Kinder Group had trained him to work with the international corps. Some of the soldiers he had worked with before. They believed in his ability to finish the mission. As for the mission, he knew what was next.

Grazdoz drove him in a sedan out to H-45, then to RR-8. The others followed in various vehicles, coordinating a loose surveillance. The rural route passed three towns. A stretch of open land followed. 237 thought the land seemed barren and offended. The UKSB military had cut back the wood forty kilometers from the most prominent research base. Hill County Road broke off RR-8 about ten kilometers from the military research installation. Grazdoz stopped the sedan. Ten kilometers. Kinder intelligence said the base's surveillance cams did not go out this far but there was still satellite. Grazdoz put on shades. Subject 237 took his off, showing eyes that looked like liquid metal. He had been alive a long time. In his eyes one saw a hint of this.

He got out of the sedan, leaving the shades on the dashboard. He was told to expect cars to pass now and then, and he had said it wouldn't matter, he would look like he was kneeling at the roadside. He put one knee on the pavement, put his hand next to it. He said, "Your ears are going to burn. Go lean on something."

Grazdoz went to the other side of the car, put her hands on the hood.

He started. The trick was to get nature to perform and not backfire. He had tasted the whiplash of nature before and possessed, as a result, limited faculty for grief and regret. Which was why he liked the dark, and to have his dream function disabled by medication. On the Kinder Complex habitat ring, in critical care, he preferred something just this side of a near vegetative state, and he liked to live that way six or seven calendar months. He resented time but the long lightless months blunted the sharp bitterness somewhat. Could not clean him up, no. Not on the inside. What could? But the months of dreamless sleep let him escape memory, the missions, his past, and his sins. And here was one, a sin of his.

He felt, in a little while, the answering gasp of the underground complaining. Its seal was broken. Into its widening lips he poured himself. He filled the cracks with power, pushing outward and away. He tried at first to guide the fissures, but after a while the effort became tremendous. Heavy liquid scalded his cheeks, ran into the corner of his mouth. With his mind he pushed harder. The sawing of the underground was palpable. The stone and soil, violated, gave with a shudder, and somewhere things were collapsing, structures were failing, a research facility, a cantina, barracks, falling an undetermined depth, their people falling too.

It was over quickly, though never quickly enough.

Time to get into the sedan. He was unsteady and his face was wet. He wept blood. If he touched himself he'd make a clown's mask of his face and soil his clothes. He had to wash with something wet, and put ice on the bridge of his nose for as long as he could stand it, which was until he passed out.

He was in the sedan when he fainted, settled into the passenger seat. He was out about an hour. When he came to, Grazdoz had him back out on H-45. She had hard bread ready, and a liter of spring water. He needed to recharge his power. His head ached. He gathered more ice from a cooler, crushed the ice into a handkerchief, pressed the handkerchief to his temple.

"Are you all right?" the woman asked.

He said nothing. He had four bases today-- three more --to sink into wounds he made in the world.

* * *

Charles Cotas, medical director and project coordinator in charge of subject 237, approached the breakfast pastry window in the executive dining room of level three in the Admin Pavilion, a cup of steaming cafe in his hand. He was looking at the pastries when the habitat critical care silent alarm flashed. The alarm was an azure bulb mounted near the ceiling. There was an alarm in every corner of the meal room.

A second later, his flex vibrated.

The cafe in its paper cup sloshed. Across the dining room, men and women leaped from chars, fleeing like soldiers ordered to stations for battle.

Charles, a tall thin man of fifty years, felt a similar, frantic charge of adrenaline. The cafe had spilled over his tray, splashing him. His hand and shirt were wet.

He tapped the flex, moistened his lips. "Yes."

It was Dr. Josefa Zinn, interim habitat supervisor until the Kinder Group found a permanent replacement for Dr. Marea-Siris Interlandi.

Zinn said, "Subject 237 is causing power fluctuations in the critical unit and the condition has spread to the residence."

Charles, said, immediately, "Increase the Endopental to seven cc's."

Zinn interrupted, "We are at twelve cc's. It's aggravated, not mitigated the event."

Charles opened his mouth, closed it. He knew of course that increasing the dosage could never aggravate the event. What Zinn meant was the medication was having no effect. If Zinn had more experience as habitat supervisor she would have gone all the way to 20 cc's before pushing the alarm.

Zinn said, "My staff is quite concerned. We're becoming diaphoretic, experiencing vertigo."

Charles frowned. This was his fault. Not the problem with subject 237, but the alarm. He had replaced Dr. Interlandi without the standard transition protocol. Siris would have kept her team calm.

"All right, Josefa. You must increase the medication to twenty cc's--"

"That is a fatal dose."

"Not for 237. I am going to send Dr. Interlandi into the habitat. She is compromised, I know," he cut off Zinn's protest. "She can make an assessment very quickly. If we have to take 237 terminal, she has the experience to handle the procedure."

Josefa was silent.

Charles said, "Can you assist her?"

Zinn said, "Tell Interlandi to move her ass."

* * *

Marea-Siris Interlandi was running. She had been in the Science Lab when the alarm went off. The routine of supervising 237's habitat had propelled her to her feet, sent her racing down the hall. She was at the lift, now, blond hair gathered in a knot, ready to flash a prox card for access. She froze. The alarm above the lift whipped azure beams over the back of her hand. If she were any closer to the card reader, she would have seen the red glow of rejection.

She was no longer cleared into 237's habitat.

She had been replaced. She was no longer required personnel.

The air rushed out of her, and she stepped back, gray eyes unfocused.

What was going on below?

Her flex vibrated.

She tapped it urgently.

"Siris," Charles said, "are you at your desk?"

No need to tell him she was in the corridor, desperate to go to the unit. "Yes, Charles."

"Go to the lift. I've cleared your entry into the habitat. Zinn is facing a crisis. It's too soon for her to perform adequately at the present level of crisis. You are to assist her by analyzing 237 for revival or termination. Do you understand?"

Siris understood that subject 237 was dreaming. Or, more accurately, the subject was throwing its psychic energy around. Careless and unauthorized projections of its power were a recent and dangerous complication. Revival or termination-- yes, she was the most qualified person on site to take the lead. After what the subject had done to her, she was overqualified.

She waved her prox card. The lift began its ascent to the science ring. "I'll help, Charles. Where will you be?"

Charles Cotas said, "Watching from a secure distance."

* * *

Siris Interlandi found the critical care unit in disarray. Equipment disconnected and shoved aside, tubing and wiring crossing the pale tiles, some with frayed ends. A storm of electromagnetic activity had occurred. The atmosphere was charged but there was, Siris noted, no edge. The additional medication had blunted the subject's exertions.

The source of the energy lay in the center of the storm, an inoffensive young patient, benignly handsome, eyes closed, arms at his side, hair smoothed back and in order. The subject's brain function so severely inhibited it ought to have been dead but she could feel 237 in the air like a love song about remembrance. Except 237's presence in the ether was real.

She could taste it.

A pasty medical assistant and Josefa Zinn staffed the unit. The rest of Zinn's staff had evacuated, presumably on Zinn's command.

Siris sighed. A poor solution to an obvious problem.

Unlike Siris, Zinn knew enough to be afraid of the subject but not enough to understand fear was useless.

If 237 decided to rampage, he would.

Siris tapped her flex bracelet. "Charles."

Cotas answered immediately. "How is it?"

"Dr. Zinn has already increased the Endopental. It's not working."

There was hesitation.

Siris felt she should spell it out. "There is real risk here. What do you want to do?"

"Can't we bring 237 out of it? Go the other way?"

"It would mean giving 237 greater access to power without any certainty he'd have self-control."

"I'll have to make a report."

Bugger your reports, Siris thought. Cotas was such an officious prick. "Charles, do I have your authorization?"

"Yes, all right."

She waved her hand at Zinn. The syringes had been prepared. Zinn, dismayed by fluctuations in light levels and the sizzling in the air, rushed the syringes to Siris.

Siris bared the subject's forearm. Ordinary flesh, healthy, roped with muscle. The subject maintained an ideal physique. An IV lock, orphaned by its tubing, remained. Siris pushed the first syringe as quickly as possible. Vezdrin at 50 cc's. The dose would take down a gorilla and kill a strong man in thirty seconds. She gathered her breath and waited. The monitors were meters away. No doubt they had stopped working a while ago. She measured the subject's vitals manually.

Siris knew that 237 was aware of her presence. It would, she'd come to understand, notice a change in the room's electromagnetic field as easily as she noticed a sudden breeze. It didn't matter that 237 had been on a steady intravenous Endopental-Vezdripam drip.

Zinn sighed and grew quiet

The medical assistant, however, appeared stricken.

Siris looked at the young man. "It won't feel pain. It's all right."

Critical care staff lasted three, four years tops. The staff grew attached, lost perspective. Dr. Mozun, a Kinder psychologist, once told her that one day he was looking at a demian subject, the last of its kind. The next day he looked at the subject and saw all the ages of the world. He saw rapture.

"First," Mozun had said, "you fall to the power of its physical beauty, then to its otherness. Even if you resist, it wins. Because it knows. It always knows what you want. Then it performs some feat of wonder, and you kneel to it, call it god."

Siris raised the second syringe, potassium chloride, and the medical assistant gasped.

"It's getting better now," Zinn said about the air static.

Siris supposed this was true. But for the subject there had to be a reset. 237 called it a trip to the gates. Termination of life function, for the subject, was merely disconnection from the corporeal. Its power stayed with its flesh. It didn't matter that its consciousness was free to roam. When 237 was discarnate, it was helpless. It couldn't hurt anyone.

Siris emptied the second syringe into the IV lock, then reached slowly and purposefully for the subject's hand. She was always surprised by the size of 237's hand, by the subject's intense masculinity. It looked like a twenty-five-year-old human male but was in fact a singular species of unfathomable age.

"This is its forty-seventh death," Siris breathed, mainly to the medical assistant. Zinn would know this. "Its first death was by hanging. A lift, not a drop, with its hands tied behind its back. It was sixteen years."

The assistant nodded, regarding Siris with wide, moist eyes.

Siris wanted to smile but did not. Tears for subject 237? Oh, yes, let the whole world weep. And cower. The subject had torn a chunk from the world for that first death, and there had been blood.

She added, "It knows when it's dying, so we don't leave it alone."

The assistant wondered, "How does he know?"

"That's a good question, isn't it?" Siris supposed the answer was simple. Its consciousness flared like a struck match when the body was threatened. But how did she know that? 237 never told her. "When we understand that ..." A common Kinder saying. When we understand that, we'll be a lot closer to understanding the subject. But they never were, were they?

The subject had been the core and soul of the Kinder Group seventy-seven years. Prior to that, it was a guest in a Currani tomb excavated by Antoni Kinder in the Northern Nations on the Wolf Islands. The tomb was constructed around two thousand years ago. Subject 237 had been placed above a Currani king's casket on what was called a funeral altar somewhere around four hundred years before Antoni Kinder unsealed the door-stone. The Currani of the age were typically fair-haired. Subject 237 was dark-haired. It had ten fingers, ten toes. Its blood was red. The most sought after blood on the planet. Powerful stuff. Well-connected members of Kinder Group governments received health and vigor through 237's blood. The subject's anathema was fire, nothing else.

Siris lay two fingers along 237's carotid artery. "Travel lightly, Hephaestion."

237 called itself Hephaestion. There was a Hephaestion on the Old Continent circa Y150 who crusaded in the name of the Lady of the Holy Waters. The historical Hephaestion would have carried a sword and shield. His hands would have been as strong and sinewy as the hand Siris raised now. He would have spoken a defunct language, worn a pleated linen cloak and leather boots that buckled over the knee. He would have been one of the most proficient hand-to-hand killers of the era.

Siris sighed.

The subject was without pulse, without respiration. Clinically dead. Which was as dead as Hephaestion got.

"Let's clean up 237 and move our patient to recovery," Siris said. The hand in hers had become cool. She settled it on 237's breast. "Spontaneous rhythm will be in forty-eight hours." She flexed an eyebrow-- it wasn't science. It was more a prediction. In spite of Kinder's assertion to the contrary, there was nothing scientific about any of this.

"When will it know what's happened to it?" the assistant wondered.

Siris said, low-voiced, "I remember my first code. Don't worry, it probably already knows what happened and why. Never confuse dormancy for 237's species with death as we understand it for a human. It's told us about conversations that took place in other areas of the complex hours after it went dormant. Its consciousness stays active. Amazing, but hardly new. You can read Mozun, Kalister, or Treppin if you like demian theory. Mozun has an especially good piece in the archives on affarites." Abruptly, "I want no lines," she told Zinn. "No chemical aid. Let it come out of this on its own."

Zinn looked cooperative.

Siris turned away. "And turn up the scanners, please. Let's see if 237 is staying with us or leaving the complex. My bet is on the latter. Something distressed it. It will seek the source and come back when it's found it."

The handlers were coming.

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