Context (99 page)

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53

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422

It
is there: the untouched potential for every long-term fighter to transcend, to
achieve that graceful state beyond the immediate, messy, bloody business of
combat, to reach a place where the flow and the spirit are all that matter.

He fought.

As they spilled into the
corridor, Tom leaped from a hiding place halfway up the wall, knocking a graser
rifle aside with a descending crescent kick as his elbow hooked into the
soldier’s neck, pinpointing the carotid, and even as the man fell Tom used him
as a stepping stone, knee to throat and fingertips to eyes, taking out two more
before they even realized he was upon them.

It was ferocious and it was
unexpected, and they could not deal with him at this range.

He kicked, used a palm-strike—aiming
for a chin, missed, using a knee and whipping the hand back as a hammer fist
and this time he got it but pain exploded in the back of his head.

Then he let loose his animal
spirit, the ravening predator inside us all, and blood-lust curtained his
vision as he kicked, swept a man’s legs from under him, grabbed a
weapon-bearing hand and twisted, breaking fingers—moving, always moving,
confusing his enemies—and stamped upon the fallen soldier, a sharp crack
audible even amid the Chaos.

Faster.

Smoother...

Graser beam, and it scorched his
shoulder but the pain was
nothing
and he took his revenge, kicking
another man into the weapon’s path—shocked features, drained of blood: the
soldier killing his own comrade-in-arms—but there was no chance to follow up as
others were upon him.

Untrained men would have fallen
back but they were used to working as a team, to strive for their comrades’
welfare above their own, and Tom used that to his advantage, taking out those
closest to him where they could not bring weapons to bear.

But their numbers—

Transcend.

Fight faster.

He was a blur, he was violence
incarnate, and he danced among them like a demon, dispensing death and pain,
and he was flooded with a joy such as he had never known, that no civilized
being should experience.

Elva!

Father’s blocky hands, graser
tool, molten metal spitting as he drew the stallion’s form out of a featureless
metal brick. Mother’s cupric tresses, her dreamy smiles. Golden hair and creamy
skin, and Sylvana’s blue eyes regarding him in Lord Velond’s classroom, as the
joys of logosophy blossomed at last. The simple shore and the tranquil cavern
sea, and the Pavilion School where for a while he taught and knew some peace.

And Elva.

Fluid on his hand, hot blood and
worse, and the bodies were one Chaotic group-mass of limbs and torsos, a vast
target, and he smashed and impaled and twisted in his death-dance and then the
bodies close to him were fallen and there was no time left to reach the
soldiers who knelt at the rear and the mirror transmission-faces of their
graser rifles shone like rainbows, shimmering spectra of diffracted colours,
blue the colour of the homeworld’ s skies and red as of the dark blood which
runs through us all, a vast extended river passed on and ever on which flows
along the mainstreams and into the tiniest tributaries of human history, billions
and eventually trillions of actual physical existing feeling thinking
individual people—real warm smelly wonderful healthy dirty loving hating
depressed and disappointed with joy-moments and the high transcendence and the
thousand hidden fears and petty details, the colour and the texture of those
curtains and the taste of today’s breakfast and floating dust which catches the
light and another’s touch and the countless sensations too easy to overlook
which form a universe for every human and every being alone along that tiny
capillary flow of history until suddenly one day with unforeseen abruptness
ends.

And
nothing.

Running.

Nothing in his mind but a prayer
of hate, an oath which spreading virus-like was imprinting itself within his
molecular structure, rewriting every cell, as the animal-organism simply ran
for life.

Empty tunnel after empty tunnel,
as though none would dare oppose him.

I will kill them.

Running.

My brother...

Running harder.

For you
—

Harder.

—
I will kill them all.

~ * ~

54

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422

It
took forty-two days to reach the wild zones.

At the second tenday’s start, he
finally left Grand’aume territory, carefully picking his way through jumbled
broken tunnels—a battleground of two SY before, still shattered but without the
stink—to avoid the border patrols.

In Khitaliaq, the atmosphere was
different; though the Blight’s forces were still everywhere, the occupation
rested more easily upon the local inhabitants.

Because,
he realized after a while,
they
offered no resistance to the takeover.

If
there were deportations, he did
not spot any, and he did not dare to ask. Though he had an emergency cover-ID,
his description alone might throw up an alert in even a routine security check.

There was a store, on the realm’s
outskirts, where he tried to buy some food.

‘I’m sorry.’ An expressive shrug
of the shopkeeper’s shoulders. ‘No cred-spindles accepted. Not since the ...
you know. Only scrip.’

Which, as a non-citizen, Tom did
not possess.

‘I see.’

But, as Tom was leaving, the
shopkeeper stopped him, and handed over a small bundle: baked rolls and a small
bottle, wrapped in cloth. Tom bowed, expressing thanks beyond words.