1: Black October
Daylight on the cusp of waning, Karston moved north, keeping his velocity mostly steady {± 400kph ≈ 250mph}, at a generally stable altitude {± 15km ≈ 9mi}, where a silverblue glint twinkling atop the edge of dead-ahead caught his attention. That first spark reached out left and right along thin, downward arcs bent both west and east, hugging tight to the curve of the Earth.
Flashes of the salt sea snapped haphazardly along the swelling contour of the planet, the flashes connected, thickening the rind of Karston’s frontal horizon. The alert he’d set upon starting north pinged on its mark–400km until he’d hit Algiers, another hour or so left to go.
But as the whitesand-wrapped, brightsun-blue waters broke from the fringe and looped down into the khaki desert below, then spread behind him, overlaying all 360° of the input from his -y scopes...
...and though he’d moved for only a moment over the vast saline lake..
...some vague and unwarranted sense of comfort relaxed his focus on the further target he’d been tracking
..comfort that allowed a shred of clarity to gain a toehold
...soothing him into coming to terms
..he must stop
..there was, really, no choice
..he had to..and ...it would help..he’d be ok if he did ...he’d be ok if he stopped then.
He’d gone on for too long already.
Time to breathe, ..and stop, ...and nourish. He needed it, needed this, needed to do this. Felt warmth in his chest and gave in to it.
Karston initiated a descent angled sharply to the east.
..of a sudden eaten up with a kidlike abashedness that came with his late,.. late and therefore embarrassing recognition of an obvious fact–the fact that he could’ve stopped in so many places better than this.
He would’ve had to stop at some point along the way, no matter what!, and he knew that even before starting north.
Young antelope or baby wildebeests...parts of them at least, ...hyrax, grown hyrax, baby hyrax, hyrax at any stage of development... delicious. Just about anything down south, ..seven, eight hours back, ...hell, a baby hyena a couple hours back would’ve been much more satisfying, more sustaining than whatever he was about to find up here in this sunken place at the top of the Sahara.
For just another moment, Karston felt like he’d be better off turning around.
Stupid.
Feeling.
He continued the drop.
A minute or so later his angle of descent had him positioned far enough eastward to allow for a freefall. He fully disengaged at ± 12km ≈ 7.5mi above the Earth.
The faintness of weightlessness brung a heavy stupor with it, wrapping him with wondering. He flattened out again, belly down, spread-eagle, and the thin bit of air resistance gave some of his weight back, ..still wondering –why’d he been so irrational lately? So many emotions slapping at logic and battering the basics of common sense couldn’t ..had never resulted in decent calculation or action.
Lessons he’d learned hard from early mistakes had held for forty years already, he’d become an armored calculator since then. This week though.. what was causing this week of regression? Why was his mind so scattered again.? why was he realizing his mistakes so late?
Some of the lateness over the past few days was just a moment too late, but late is late. More often though it was hours, even a whole day late. So, how would he find a way to achieve his own goals, his own hopes, or.. at the very least,.. how could he pull off this mission he’d accepted,,? if this,,if his ..being.. was in this way?
± 8km ≈ ±5mi ’til touchdown.
How could he be the hope that some thought he was if this was the way he was operating? Just wanting to get there this time ..to find the source he’d been tasked with tracking, his gut pushing the ideation that a little further would be ok ...when his mind knew better… he knew back there somewhere ..knew better ..knew he should’ve done this, should’ve stopped to eat, drink. He knew this hours ago.
And his ability to finally overcome the gut-push was driven by the fact that he’d seen his destination before, after all. Though he had no grasp on an understanding of why that recollection was so motivating.
It was as good of a memory as it gets anymore.
His Mama seemed happier then than she had at any other time he could still remember. And Daddy was only occasionally an asshole on that trip.
Who knew what Daddy really was even then, even during those beautiful hours? Karston didn’t. His Daddy was probably ..already ...Daffodil.
But Karston was just a kid with his parents on a vacation back then, had no inkling of any of that. Was just him, and his Mama, and his plain ol’ Daddy... ..them together, touring exotic, untouched oases in the French colonies of North Africa. ..years after the Great War.
± 5.6km ≈ ±3.5mi, then the ground.
Descending to the desert well south of those places, where he’d experienced all that fleeting happiness, where he’d first visited oases, and souks, and tasted the unforgettable flavors lacing even the most common tagine ...he was still well south of those places untouched in that past, places that had since been touched meanly by increasing turmoil. But something about those fucked-up feelings meant that he did have to stop before he got there..
..there
..where he remembered being innocently happy
..that he was doing the best thing he could do for himself
..that he wouldn’t need to second-guess this decision later
..regardless of his current awareness of the undeniable fact
...that, again it was
..again emotion
..it was emotion forcing him to submit.
± 3.25km ≈ ±2mi and falling.
Scanning for heatspikes throughout the last klicks of the drop, he realigned his body. Up from a skydiver’s prone sprawl to a fully-vertical, arms-raised, pogo-ready, stomp-stance. Falling faster. He hit the thrust-burners to soften his touchdown and made contact 90 meters from the white edge of the white sea. The temp readout indicated only 31C / 88F, there must be something alive, something worth eating.
No.
Nothing on this flat horizon.
Nothing with a body large enough to stand out.
...but then..a few small, ..sharp flashes in the wavy feedback to his right.
He shot up over a thousand meters at a 45° angle, came back down with a smush into the wet, eastern bank of Chott Melrhir, a couple klicks from where he’d originally landed. His bootplates sunk ankle-deep, pushing foot-wide craters into the sand around them. The metal of the outer Skin heated, glimmered silver. Water on the surface steamed, evaporated, and receded out of the silt for 20 centimeters around, toe to heel.
He started walking.
Water rushed back into the craters he left with each step.
His first footslogs sucked at the silt when they pulled out. The trueskin on his legs inside the Skin felt wet, but he knew it probably wasn’t.
The sole-plates heated further, silversteam puffed from beneath each set of footpads as they made contact. Soon the water was evaporated below his treads before they fully touched down, causing the salt to cake the sand, and, after several of his next sucking steps ..his boots stopped sucking, remained mostly atop the surface, and left only shallow prints behind him.
Whatever food he thought his sensors had picked up had either bugged out, dug in, or wasn’t there to begin with. He’d jumped for nothing. Maybe just the sun’s reflection causing glitchspikes on the readout.
Didn’t really know what kind of life this place could support, but his eagerness for those specks of feedback to be something worth investigating meant that he’d allowed himself to become dangerously malnourished and dehydrated.
An itch snagged a bit of his attention.. he realized that his trueskin was wet after all. The skin on his thighs and calves was separating from his muscles as he moved, strips and globs pulling off–his trueflesh adhered to, then pulled off, stuck to the polymer that lined the metal interior of the NimbleSkin, potsticker dough sticking to the pot. Dehydrated before he’d even crossed the southern border of the Sahara, he again entertained the considerations he’d had back then of turning around, considerations he’d denied, ..second-guessing choices he’d already made.
He should’ve stopped down there, where he knew he should’ve stopped.
No, though.
The signal he was tracking was important enough to initiate three communiques, each from three different Sections, each Section pleading in its own commanding way, however respectfully, pleading for Karston to address the signal they’d detected.
He’d complied. He’d homed in on it, listened to it.
It was a strong signal.
Strong and strange.
Didn’t really match the intel those idiots had been relaying while he was on the way, ..hmn...nothing new there. And even so, their updates just reinforced his gambling, hasty nature, just pushed him on, thinking he’d somehow be able to move on through, figure it out, with or without sustenance.
He remembered running out of gas that time when he was fourteen, driving madly in his brand-new, ’31 Plymouth with the rumbleseat, ...driving to get to Betsy, ..before Daddy ever dreamed of the Kindle, ..much less the Skin.
Same thing this time, just a little further, no way he wouldn’t make it,,
..he didn’t make it back then..
..didn’t make it to Betsy.
..she didn’t make it, because he hadn’t..
...she probably wouldn’t make it now either. A bunch of peoples’ Betsys weren’t gonna make it...
Worse..., worse pieces.., worse bits., worse little fucking snippets of his own memories and dumbness blasting his mind, messing with his calculations ..hungry, thirsty, and no time left to meditate in order to heal his sticky, ripped-off flesh inside the skin.
If he’d stopped earlier he wouldn’t be so dehydrated. He’d be in better shape to continue on and fight. Now though, he’d have to wait until the fighting was done before attempting any regeneration, and he’d have to live through whatever conflict was ahead in order to do that. He’d have to eat and hydrate as much as possible just to be viable ..if there was a battle.
It may not end in fighting, usually does though. More of his trueskin would slough off inside the Skin, he’d rip muscle, break bone. Now he had to search for hydrating nourishment in this desert within a desert. So... so.. stupid.
Karston brought his mind back down to ground and he scanned the salt-laden water. A few brine shrimp flitted around in small shoals ..here ...there. No point in wasting the time or energy it’d take to gather enough of those.
He walked on.
The trueskin on the fronts of his thighs and the backs of his calves was completely gone. He felt raw muscle at those places sticking to and detaching from the surfaces inside the Skin. Turned his stomach to imagine it.
He saw another flash, this time of white, whiter even than the salt.
Bones.
A quick thrust-hop to the spot..
..to the skull and tusks, neck and upper spine, and a few rib-bones of a long-dead boar. Little wads of dry meat and kinky-thick, wiry hair hung off sheltered crooks, sprouted here and there, out from crannies along the skeleton.
Bone chips littered the sand nearby. Scavengers had taken all they wanted of the boar, these few remains had been left there, even by them.
The bones weren’t fully bleached out yet, so he picked the thing up, pushing two fingers into its eye sockets, a boar-skull bowling ball, most of the rest of it held together, the couple of ribs and one of the tusks that fell away weren’t worth stopping for.. so Karston began to walk again, dragging a chord of boar vertebrae, plowing a furrow in the pale sand behind him.
He couldn’t hear it, but the sensation of his skinless leg muscles pushing damp against, then pulling sticky away from the liner of the Skin brought a smacking sound to his mind’s ear, twisting his stomach into an even tighter knot.
Fitful movement activated his peripheral motion sensor, ahead and to the left. Two animals, smaller and thinner than a boar, jerking at some other dead thing, tugging their heads back, tugging back, tug, tug, then a quick thrash to a side, ..back, back, ..then thrashing side to side ..hard to one side, hard to the other ..back, back ..frenzied thrashing side-to-side.
He raised his left arm, activated the dart ring, then lowered his arm again as the jackals noticed his motion, popped their heads up, pricked their ears, and skittered out. They weren’t worth wasting darts he might need later if he missed. He relaxed his arm and deactivated the dart ring. Hopped again.
A few of the boar’s vertebrae and a couple ribs fell off along the way.
Came down next to the carcass the jackals had been pulling on.
Another jackal.
Guts gone.
Head and shoulders submerged in saltwater.
Brine shrimp picking at its nostrils, jostling with each other to get deeper into its ear cavities, tails blooming out from both eyeballs.
A good deal of flesh had been left untouched by its kin, around its shoulders, neck, and head. No doubt because these parts had soaked up too much salt for their taste. It would be too much for Karston’s taste as well, but juiced carrion had never been his favorite, even with a goodly bit of seasoning.
Fresh kill is hardly better, any juiced animal is still juiced. It always tastes the way guts smell...plus puke. Only pure fat and muscle is tolerable, but when had he ever given himself enough time to be choosy while rendering a carcass, except for during extended peace?.. and when was the last time he’d experienced enough peace to feel like he had the time to be so choosy while rendering a carcass? Plus, none of this death was new. He was picking his meals off the landscape with discrimination similar to a keen buzzard, drifting in circles, high over the flats of south Georgia.
He activated the bioanalytic scope in nutrition mode. As he’d expected, the saline content of the ragged jackal’s head and upper torso was way too high. He’d just turn himself into a worse shriveled mess inside the Skin if he drank that. Didn’t have time for water desalination either, that always took too long. He’d found a bit of decent nutrition, but minimal hydration.
He aimed the bioanalytic scope at the boar bones he’d been carrying, and used the combinatorial analytic algorithm. It came back with an acceptable ratio of calcium to sodium.. so that the final menu of juice consisted of the whole set of bones he had from the boar, the remaining meat and organs below the shoulders of the jackal–its lungs, ..heart, ..along with all its bones, its impermeable tongue, its sheltered brain ...good God. He dragged the half-animal out of the water and sat down.
Karston did his best to cross his legs Indian-style, feet still in the water, he extended the top blade from his right gauntlet, and just as he’d begun carving the sodden jackal carcass.. he sensed it again, anomalous comfort, looked up into the northern sky. The signal was coming from much further east now. His path had been plotting northwest, directly toward Algiers, but over the last hour or so it occasionally wavered, fanned out to encompass a cone centered north-northwest, much like the projected path of a hurricane, as if he didn’t have a true lock on his target. He realized, as he sat there holding his half-jackal, that he’d been tracking two signals.
He stopped cutting and focused on his plotted trajectory. The initial lock was still in Algiers, but the other signal was diffuse, definitely not locked down, appearing and disappearing randomly. It finally disappeared altogether. He began re-recording the wavepattern of the main signal from Algiers, and after a few seconds was able to define a much tighter signature than the one he’d been using. He gave that one an ID, dismissed it, and began searching for the second signal...but it was gone. He searched for another minute or two, gave up, and went back to rending the jackal, sunlight spitting at his sensors off the fine lace of ripples lapping at the bank of the lake.
Once he’d gotten most of the fur and the worst of the putrefied flesh off the carcass, he popped the eyeballs out onto the sand, brush-brushed them into the spitting shallows of the lakewater, for the shrimp. He pried the jackal’s skull open, cut its brain out, slapped the organ over his left gauntlet, broke its jaw back, cut its tongue out and slapped that over his sleeve too. Then he reached into the chest cavity, found the jackal’s trachea, grabbed tight and pulled, bringing it and the jackal’s lungs out with it, hung those over his left shoulder, reached in again, found and retrieved the heart, and when this last piece of the juice puzzle was resting gently in his left hand, he reluctantly initiated the processor.
The large bladeplate at the back of his right shoulder detached, and he caught the scent the true air for a half-second before the liner repressurized and resealed. It smelled as nasty as it looked. He knew the taste would be worse. He leaned over and rinsed the sand off before he dumped the boar skeleton into the chamber. The bones caused no vibration, went down easy as lettuce in a kitchen-sink dispose-all. He stuffed the bulk of the remaining jackal carcass down next, then dropped the last pieces of meat– the tongue, the brain, the lungs, and the heart he’d been cradling in his left hand.
He stood up again as it all broke down, combined, the backplate reattached and the juice began to move. He felt the warmth sliding around within the microtubules running throughout the inner seams of the Skin. He felt the warmth of it making its way up toward his face.
Then.
The semi-soft plastic, slightly curved, vertically flattened feedstraw extended from the left interior of his helmet’s cheekplate, pushing at the corner of his lips. He didn’t open up quite fast enough, didn’t want to open up at all, but the straw receded quick, then went back to pushing, receded, then pushed again at his lips and teeth, prodding to gain entrance.
This kind of thing was the kind of thing that never failed to remind Karston of how trapped he’d been inside this Skin for forty years. The first year had 365 days of hellish revelation built-in, but he got his mind right sometime around the end of that, came to acceptance. It was the juice that stayed true for the other thirty-nine years, delivering thirty-nine years of remorse with each mouthful after remorseful mouthful.
He relaxed his jaw, let the prodding straw in, and reluctantly bit the flat end, opening up the tube and allowing the juice to flow. With each black mouthful Karston relaxed his bite, so the straw could snap back flat and shut, so he could swallow the slurry before more came, so he could take a breath before biting again, before letting another load of that blackshit fill his mouth.
The antinausea compound that the juicer added tasted exactly like puke itself, and was somehow able to be tasted amidst whatever had been juiced, even keeping its flavor within this mix of desiccated jackal rotmeat, and dry boar bone.
How that chemical worked to keep him from vomiting inside his helmet had never been of interest to him.
That it worked while still tasting like the pukiest puke that any puking person had ever tasted while puking through his nose just seemed like a truly sickening joke that only Daffodil could’ve come up with.
Daddy’s assholery reached out, far beyond the curtain of death, reached right down and pushed through, pushed pukey through and right down into his own son’s gullet. And Karston had never gotten used to it. Every meal was a reminder.
As he drank the animals and willfully, forcefully ignored his Daddy, he began again on the flight. A thrust-jump launched him up to an altitude of three kilometers, he engaged the ionizers. Still drinking that blackshit as mechanically as possible, but barely another kilometer along the way, he felt it again, the second signal. Karston dropped the original signal and focused intently on the second one. It still seemed to come and go, but after several long minutes he got a lock and trajectory. He more happily drank down a blackshit, puketasty mouthful when he realized that, at some point or another, he’d be going to Constantine.
Hadn’t been there since the vacation with his Mama and Daddy that he’d thought about earlier. Constantine. Such a beautiful place, The City of Bridges, but it was tiring back then. Mama dragged him through every shop she could find in every narrow alley, and made sure they investigated just about every kiosk in the souk.
He defined the signature as quickly as possible and created an ID for it. And after reactivating the original ID, he had two distinct trajectories on the topographic projection, one northwest toward Algiers–the one he’d been sent to still–the other almost due north.. toward Constantine. The new signature in Constantine was odd looking, still strangely comforting, and had a wide, erratic waveform.
Maybe he was mistaken, maybe it was some sort of reactor malfunctioning. ..not in Constantine...at least he hoped not. That ancient city is a rare jewel, and it would just be a shame for it to be corrupted by modern accident or negligence.
He decided to go to Algiers first, he knew what was going on there, he’d been sent there in the first place, Constantine felt confusing, it could wait, if it even mattered. Besides...wrapping up Algiers would be worth a trip to Constantine, if only to unwind, meditate, recover, and juice up a tasty world of stolen tajine.
He descended slowly toward the city from an altitude of {± 10.5km ≈ ±6.5mi}, at a hard tilt toward the northwest, moving more laterally than downward. The sun was still bright at that altitude, but shone only red down there. Smoke was rising from hundreds of locations across Algiers. Some of the plumes were wide enough to put dozens of city squares into shadow dark as the coming night.
The reddened dusklight reflecting off the homes and streets was striated with both the veins of the random blackplumes rising, and the separate veins of those plumes’ shadows crawling out along the red cityscape, altogether presenting a filetted and bloodied city corpse, well-marbled with blackrot, flayed and layed out at the edge of the cold, midnight-blue waters of the Mediterranean. This wasn’t the Algiers he’d seen sixty years ago with his Mama, it was so much more modern, and all the modern shit was on fire.
He aimed his drop toward the largest blaze, the Riadh El-Feth was burning. The modern, government-built plaza lay at the feet of the Maqam Echahid, on the heights looming east of city-center. The towering Martyrs’ Memorial had dominated the capital before, but now it appeared as a beacon aflame, glowing with undulating reflections of fire, and the billowing soot tower rising from the plaza at its feet seemed to come from the monument itself, reaching higher than the government had ever dared imagine that a construction project could go.
This was a destruction project. Planned with care equal to anything the FLN or Bendjedid could cook up. It smelled of cement ash, charred remains, and Ringo. Karston’s sparse intel from the media indicated that students were protesting.., and certainly they were, they’d had enough ..they knew ..they were sure that they were ready for a real democracy.
But it was surely Ringo fanning the most intense flames. One of his KindleMen was at work, starting fires and smashing structures, homes, even expensive cars that served as symbols of the elite and, according to the HUMINT, they’d each been handpicked as targets, by Ringo himself.
If Ringo succeeded, which from the looks of things was inevitable, there was no way the students would realize their dreams of Democracy, he’d never let them, he’d just let them think they had. He enjoyed leading this kind of uprising from behind an illusion. He was masterful. Once his mayhem began, whoever he’d chosen to embody his illusion, whether it was one person or a hundred of ’em, they all died before it was over, before any press, military, or government agencies could start digging for real answers.
Ringo’s KindleMan was here to ensure that those deaths occurred, as well as to aid in destroying these status symbols, and thereby, to aid in destroying the status quo. Rhodri Gracilis was meticulous in his targeting, and his marks always served more than one purpose, often many. This sometimes seemed counteractive, but that was only upon initial assessment. Once all the chips had fallen, even if it took years, a sickening pattern of confusion would give way to an outcome that was both precise and profitable, if only for Ringo himself.
Karston initiated his final drop from amongst the feathery cirrus in the blue and white still shining at that elevation, fell down into the heavy, smogged-white cumulate rising from the Riadh El-Feth at its highest and widest swell. He descended more and more rapidly into darkness, remaining at the center of the huge, dense column of blustery, flaring smoke that became solid flame while he was still at an altitude of 200 meters, landing amidst rippling inferno and tumbling destruction, smashing through whatever platform he first made contact with, it may have been a second or third floor of the building, too brittle, unable to support his weight in the NimbleSkin.
As he crashed to a stop, chunks of the concrete he’d busted through fell down around him. He gained a spotty awareness of the electromotive potential being generated between the KindleCast and its wearer. Whoever the KindleMan was, he was still engaged in violent action, busily and angrily carrying out whatever program Ringo had forced upon his psyche with the EncephaloCode.
Karston stilled himself, stilled his mind, and concentrated, standing amidst the rising flame and failing structure. A broad and glowing, heat-softened, heat-thickened metal plate toppled end-over-end from some great height, plowed through him and the floor he was on, pinned him. He was definitely at ground level now. It hit with a force he should’ve sensed coming, but the kinetic energy of its fall was masked by the frenzied air itself, and by his own mindfulness of his target’s kinesis emanating from somewhere nearby.
The slab of metal crushed down on his legs and chest, flattening him, breaking a few ribs, and he thought his pelvis may have cracked. He pushed it up with his elbows as much as he could and quickly pivoted beneath it, grasping with both gloves while simultaneously initiating the lever-action of his ankles, knees, waist, and shoulders ..to push it and himself up to a vertical position again. He felt small bones shattering in his feet and fingers as the NimbleSkin forced itself upright.
The edge of the heat-softened plate bowed where it met the ground and was almost bent horizontal at the bottom. His toes were mushy inside the bootplates. The trueskin on his feet had frayed upon landing earlier, but now there was nothing but jelly left where his toes had been. His mobility and agility would be severely hampered. If he got the chance to attempt regeneration after this, ..it would be an onerous process.
Karston shoved the orange, glowing, beaming piece of metal over with his right arm, which was more intact than his left, and the plate fell to the side with a weight that caused the ground to shudder. Sparks erupted from all its whitehot edges.
He concentrated on the signal again. Nearer than it was. Must’ve been above it earlier. Turned in a slow circle, stopped, pushed forward through mounds of debris and, as he swiped away another muddle of rebar and concrete, he saw him.
The KindleMan was smashing and tearing aimlessly at the fiery, disintegrating bits that had fallen into the open-air center of the plaza. There was no point to it. The whole building had clearly been damaged beyond repair already. This KindleMan was still pummeling the rubble.
Karston projected his thoughts into the KindleCast’s circuitry, trying to overcome Ringo’s programming, which had either been flawed from the start or had become corrupted along the way, perhaps due to the intense heat engulfing the area. There was definitely something wrong, the EncephaloCrypts he was trying to intercept were changing. The KindleMan noticed Karston, but stopped only briefly before beginning again to thrash at the ruins.
Karston engaged. He thrust and crashed against the KindleMan’s side, knocking him into a fractured wall that then collapsed down onto him. The KindleMan rose, shaking off chunks of concrete and thrust himself up and over, thirty meters or so past Karston, and began to create a finer-grained pile of debris out of one that was nearly powdered already.
Again Karston engaged.
He tried to fight.
The KindleMan wasn’t interested.
They were usually programmed to neutralize any attacker. Every one he’d ever come across, upon becoming aware that it was him, that it was Karston, preemptively attacked him. Something was very wrong with this one.
But then it abruptly ceased its wailing at the wreckage and started scanning. Karston could both see and feel it analyzing its target. It began to focus on something distant, looked deeply into the east, and thrust-jumped in that direction, up and out of the flames, through what was left of the outer walls, hitting its burners before the jump had reached an apex. Karston jumped too, and followed.
The KindleMan was rapidly gaining altitude, appeared to be leaving Algiers. Karston looked down at the broiling city, he needed to help them. He wanted to. But he was still chasing the KindleMan anyway.
He was again lost in emotion, unable to decide what to do, which critical path he should follow. He sensed the second signature at that moment and activated the ID he’d created for it earlier. The KindleMan was obviously tracking it too, but how? The older tech in those suits wasn’t able to detect or track signals like that, not from such a distance. They were only made to detect each other, other KindleMen, and only within a radius of a few klicks. ..which was a troublesome-enough ability, especially when they were acting en masse. This KindleMan had seemed to be malfunctioning until then, until it then began functioning at a greater level than a KindleMan can.
They flew higher and faster and further east, night took full hold down on the ground, and Karston could see fires burning in other cities below. Dar El Beïda, then Tizi Ouzou apparently had riots, and as they continued he could see the flames of unrest to the south in Setif, and finally, directly ahead, even in Constantine.
He was immediately saddened by that, but even worse, as they approached, got closer, Karston refined the other signature they were tracking, and it appeared to be another KindleCast. It was moving unbelievably rapidly between areas of riot and flame in this sublime city. Karston was saddened because he, and it, and the KindleMan he was already chasing were all about to collide there.
Struggles between Karston in his NimbleSkin, and Ringo’s armies in their KindleCasts... with all the heat, projectiles, and percussive forces they each employed were invariably destructive to the surroundings. Karston always tried to lure Ringo’s zombies out of populated areas whenever he was forced to engage, but he wasn’t always successful.
The way this one was acting and the erratic structure of the signal they were both tracking meant that they were about to bring some serious amount of desolation to this oasis. He could already see the El-Kantara bridge, abutments of fire anchoring it to both sides of the gorge. Karston didn’t want to take part in this. If the people, the locals, if they wanted new government that badly– it was their city to destroy, not his, not Ringo’s, and not these KindleMen’s –not the one he was chasing, nor the one on the ground.
Karston engaged again, this time in mid-flight. He hadn’t done that since his first year in the Skin, when he should’ve been killed. And when he did it this time, at the moment he impacted the mindless soldier he was chasing, the soldier who was now careening down toward the center of the stone bridge, as he made contact, a familiar awareness struck him in every synapse. He ignored her and grabbed at the KindleMan’s burners, pulled with all the force he could generate, and diverted their path up, up and away from the bridge, over the fire at its far landing, and into a building sixty meters further eastward.
As soon as they’d crashed through, the soldier shook Karston off, raised up, and loosed a couple-hundred AP shells at Karston’s vitals–at his eyes, his joints, and his groin. None made it through, but still, Karston’s body inside the Skin was losing all vitality and he dropped to his knees, looked up just as the KindleMan was arcing down toward him at the end of a thrust-hop, both forearm blades extended, both shoulder mounts firing.
Karston raised his arms, put his hands to his face for cover and deployed the gauntletplates out to flat, to shield himself from both impact and puncture. The KindleMan deflected off Karston’s forearms and flopped over a few times, coming to rest several meters behind him. Karston was smacked to his back. He rolled and raised himself as much as he could, ..alert, ...hurt.
The KindleMan didn’t rest long, up within a second, lunging again. He was fighting now. Karston flattened. The momentum the other soldier generated with his lunge carried him over, past Karston, before he realized he’d even missed.
Karston focused his mind again, trying to disable the EncephaloCrypts that were driving this madness, pivoting, belly to the ground. He realized, as he simultaneously tried to deflect the KindleMan’s blows and decipher the crypts, that the crypts weren’t corrupted, this KindleMan was being controlled remotely. It wasn’t mindless, rabid code that had malfunctioned and gone awry. The KindleMan was doing exactly what someone, probably Ringo himself, wanted it to do… it was being controlled in real-time.
His only choice would be to fully intervene between the remote signal and the suit. He’d have to try and convert the man inside, to take control of him. He knew before he’d even begun to adjust his mental patterns that it would be impossible to do this while at the same time guiding his own actions well enough to defend himself, much less fight back.
He enabled the armadillo function and rolled down, knees to ground, chest to knees, head to chest, baring only the extended backplates of the NimbleSkin to his attacker. The KindleMan flailed at Karston’s armor, smashing stone chunks down onto his backplates and battering at their edges on the ground, especially where his head was tucked under.
Karston wasn’t getting through at all. The remote signal was too strong for him to intercede mentally. He thought again about the KindleMan punching debris back in Algiers. None of it made any sense. Why would whoever was in control have the KindleMan doing that in Algiers and ignoring Karston, but now fighting Karston in Constantine and ignoring the riots?.. ignoring the other Kindleman? This one was acting too randomly for it to be Ringo who was in control. Ringo wasn’t random.
Maybe this wasn’t random.
With each thrash at the Skin, Karston felt his vertebrae cracking and separating from each other. He wouldn’t survive much longer, he had to try and get away, ..maybe this drone would follow him out. Maybe he could come back for the other one later.
He straightened his body out flat, punched the ground with both fists, and hit the burners at the same moment, shooting up at an angle of twenty degrees, catching the KindleMan’s chin, knocking his head back so violently that, for an instant, Karston thought he may have decapitated or, at the least, pulled the soldier’s skull far enough from his spine to just kill him...an internal decapitation. He paused above the KindleMan as it fell backward, landing flat on its back.. so still.. so very still...for almost a whole moment.
It rolled, then stood again and looked up at Karston hovering several meters above, engaged it’s burners and returned the favor, smashing into Karston’s torso at full thrust. They lurched into the air a few hundred meters and fell back down into the dirt of a tight alley, behind a shop that was burning. The KindleMan straightened up again, stood up. Karston couldn’t even do that. He was on a knee, hunched and trying one more time to guide his thoughts into the KindleMan, to take him over, to turn him. It was useless.
Again the armored soldier came at him, and this time Karston had no defense. They crashed backward through the walls of another burning shop, deep into the Souk dotted with flaming kiosks. When they came to rest the KindleMan was hugging Karston with murderous malice, using his python grip, he stood again, pulled them both upright, leaned back. Karston’s feet weren’t even touching the ground, he bent his head down, grasped the Kindleman’s faceplates, the foreheads of their helmets touching.
This would be the end. The KindleMan was going to crush Karston’s chest with the hydraulic pistons in the arms of the KindleCast. Karston’s NimbleSkin would resist, but would eventually bend inward, and his chest would cave in, and his heart and lungs would stop. He couldn’t regenerate those later, he’d be too dead to try.
They were face-to-face, eyeglass to eyeglass as the KindleMan tightened his squeeze in increments. Then an enormous, brilliant flash from directly behind Karston reflected off the KindleMan’s left camera eye, the one closest to Karston’s own. A familiar, fifty-years-ago feeling rushed through. Oases. Tagine. Souks. Dazzling light streaming off the curved surface of the KindleMan’s eye.
The trillions of electrodynamic interactions between Karston’s body and his Skin began vibrating with that remembrance. The sunbright explosion behind him was blinding ..was the source of the flash of comfort that had forced him down to the surface earlier, forced him to stop and drink boar and jackal juice at Chott Melrhir ..the source of his memories of Constantine ..the source that had him worried about demolishing Constantine.
Its light spread in all directions, and as it dimmed slightly, and Karston’s vision burnt out, he first saw the shape of a blackbird’s wings curving skyward, reaching up and inward, tips close to touching, then immediately fading, its wings faded from black, narrowed, tightened, brightened into the white horns of a cow that, once they’d reached their points of apex, curved out and down again, rounding, re-touching the sides at the bottom, connecting both downward and inward, filling in, filling into the silhouette of a cobra, raised up, its hood spread, unseen fangs set and ready to strike from the blackwhite muddle in the middle, until each side of the snake’s wide hood pushed upward again, softly, toward points outward and above, slowly, never making it, still rounded, shifting up and out to the sides, then, in the last part of that flash of a second, Karston saw the ears of a lioness, her fangs unseen, bared wide and ready, hidden in the middle.
His mind sputtered a last thought…
..he might’ve even said it out loud...
‘mother f..f.f…’
