And you know how it is when you’ve got some device on which you depend for all manner of little tasks that, perhaps, once you could have done without but which is now entirely essential to your well-being. You know how it is when that starts to go wrong, throws up its warning signs, groans and shudders, slows down, won’t start? The sense of aggrieved helplessness that, oh no, I’m going to have to get this fixed now, or I won’t be able to do all the stuff I need to get done. That sense of sick, yawning horror because, despite you being such a civilized sophisticate, you don’t really understand how any of it works to the extent that it might as well be magic? Well, that, basically, except the computer is you, the warning signs and fatal exception errors are you, and if it shuts down and won’t reboot then that’s all she wrote.
And so here I am, just getting rid of the errors, just swiping them off to the left side of my mind’s eye, trying to get to a point where I’m in at least nominal control of my own mind. And I almost miss the big one. Really, they should have made it twice the size of the rest.
Final warning: Ultimate Anti-contamination Measures activated.
I almost just swipe it, because I’m still panicking, in a frenzy of Just get out of the way with all these sleeting cautions and messages my system’s throwing up. I realise what it actually means just in time.
Countermand! I tell it inside my head. Countermand Ultimate Anti-contamination Measures! Acknowledge. I’m not dead! I am not fucking dead!
I think I’m too late, for a second. Warnings are still coming down fast and hard, and the mulish little acknowledgement is nearly lost in the chaos. Up above, I imagine the satellite cruising the heavens, already warmed up and ready to fulfil its most extreme function to preserve the integrity of the culture under study. Because all those rules I’m so cavalier about, the ones I’ve broken far too often and am breaking right now by getting involved, they were supposed to be of supreme importance. No point studying the culture if it gets hold of our stuff and suddenly leaps out of barbarism and into the space age, after all. Where’s the fun in that?
That done, I deal with the rest of the stuff. I reinstall the DCS and get it going again, which means I am immediately better suited to actually respond to the rest of it. I boil down the medical information to something I can digest. Healing procedures are in place. Tissue is regenerating. Considerable damage to several important organs, but I am augmented sufficiently that I could probably take out my own heart and mend it by hand if I had to, so long as I was done within an hour or two. I am going to pull through.
I don’t already know how long it’s been, because system feedback wiped out my internal continuity, but the satellite claims almost two hours have passed since the stabbing. Unless my assailant is taking a really leisurely time about it, I’m unlikely to be stabbed again. Have I been compromised by the infection? Waking up to find myself part of a permanent human pyramid might make me regret I turned down the Ultimate, because it’s not a system I can just activate on a whim.
No, I had formulated my defences and they were in place before the attempted evisceration.
I open my eyes.
We are in a forest clearing. They’ve laid me beside a fallen tree with a blanket under me and another one over, and they’re askew, which suggests Lyn because Esha is very neat in her placement of everything.
Can I sit up? I consult my inner doctor. The tissue regeneration is advanced enough that gentle activity is permitted. I sit up.
Someone screams from right next to me, sending a clench of shock through muscles that really could have done without the exercise. Allwerith—no, Allwer, sorry—has leapt to his feet. Apparently, it was his turn to sit with the dying wizard. Or possibly the dead wizard. I realise belatedly that the blanket being over my face probably had certain cultural implications. Another failure of anthropology.
“Well, that’s why I’m only second class,” I say, which wouldn’t mean anything to them even if I said it in their language.
I look across the clearing and see Lyn.
She has changed clothes. She’d come all this way wearing drab and hard-wearing stuff, animal hide and heavy fabric, the sort of thing you’d want to tramp about the countryside in if you didn’t have my advantages. Now she’s wearing something much finer: a cuirass (is that the word?) of metal scales that must have been rolled up at the bottom of her pack, and under it a magnificently embroidered blouse, black shot through with silver thread. On the shoulders, where the mission insignia would have been on an old colonial uniform, are red blazons showing a spread-winged emblem that can trace its pictographic lineage to the old landing craft that came down just about where the Lanessite palace now stands. She has a little shield rattling about, grip looped over the hilt of her sheathed sword. She is every inch the warrior princess and, even in my current sorry state, I am embarrassed to say that my heart skips a beat.
She looks so much like Astresse. Her ancestor went to war in rather more metal, true, but the colours are the same, and so is the stance. Someone who is going to pick a fight with a demon, a sorcerer, a monster, something superhuman they cannot understand but know they must oppose.
“Are you . . . you?” she asks, and I realise that a hand close to her sword hilt is not just posturing.
“I am not infected.” Although I am less sure now that “infected” is even the right word. “I am proof against it.”
Her eyes are red. Surely not weeping for me. With the cool rationality imposed by the DCS I confirm that, no, not for me, because if it had been then she’d look a bit more cheerful now I’m walking and talking. Allwer is right here, which means . . .
“Esha has it,” she says bleakly. “When the demon-slaves attacked, you destroyed the one that struck you with fire, and we fell on the others, all three of us, and hacked and beat them till they were nothing. But after we carried your body—carried you—from Birchari, she . . . the mark appeared on her.”
“Help me up, please. Take me to her.”
Allwer lends me his arm, the one without fingers at the end of it, and I can get myself to my feet with only a little leaning on him. His eyes are very wide, at least half as scared of me as he is of the demon. Putting one foot in front of another is still something of a complex piece of logistics, and every step throws up a few more laggard error messages I have to deal with, but he gets me over to where Esha is lying.