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Save Point: The Nuclear Dance

The Wound In The World

"The locals call it Crescent-Moon Bay or Half-Moon Bay, because it forms an unusually perfect semi-circle. But there's another name for it too, that seems to be something out of folklore - 'The Wound in the World' although we haven't been able to track down what it means or the story behind it. The local people are perfectly happy to fish off the bay or beach boats there, but they don't like to go up onto the peninsula itself. And that's all we've got."

"Maybe it's an impact crater," suggests Terrowne. "There are some cultures a bit weird about stuff like that."

"Could be. We looked at it just now in old aerial photographs of the coastline and geomagnetic scans and similar, and it's very symmetrical. Like there's something in the middle going way, way down. We haven't had time to do any serious analysis yet but it looks entirely natural. No metals or anything out of the ordinary, it's just rock."

Some sort of intern bursts in with a new scan and slaps it down on the table. It's the same view, but there's a concisely defined area of blurring where the bay should be, almost opaque at the center and fading out toward the edges. The image quality is impressively good and Cleo can make out small rectangular objects spaced at regular intervals around the edges, marking the boundaries of the effect.

"Yeah, I think we have the right place," concedes Terrowne.

~*~

As they emerge out from under the overhang, the light of the sky is revealed again somewhere overhead. They seem to have emerged into a crack or ravine in the earth where the top-most couple of stories of the ruins intersect the surface.

The fracture in the earth seems to follow an alignment in the layout of the rooms, where some sort of hallway or series of chambers share a common wall stronger than its surroundings. The uneven application of geological forces to either site has opened a narrow way down into the ruins, with the floor above cracked open in an irregular pattern that suggests it originally consisted of square flat panels each the size of a small room themselves, laid out sequentially along the length of the corridor. Crossbeams still hold up sheared-off sections of the layer up above, forming a sort of irregular covered passage.

The outer part slopes toward the cliff where they first came in, which would be why the site is still dry and hasn't been filled by rainwater sometime in recent centuries.

Cleo sprints forward, dashes up a fallen inclined slab, swings back and forth off the edge of the layer above it's broken free of and then hauls herself smoothly up. Her co-ordination is still a little off after getting driven literally through a length of stone flooring by the enraged weight of a small dragon, but still looks passably smooth by normal human standards. Lots of status markers cluster in the corners of her vision, elongate hexagons with lots of tiny text that she ignores and semi-translucent neon-purple borders that indicate neurological injury.

There are a couple of dull red ones where parts of her vascular system are being patched, but most of the other color codes are being swept behind the enormous wave of purple. Maximum efforts seem to be going to try and fix all sorts of subtle but non-critical damage that impairs her autonomic systems and thought processes. It's mostly background as long as she doesn't get hit again immediately.

There are tiny square shallow grooves running along the remaining material of the upper floor, with discolored blooms around them that suggest moisture over time has bled the last remains of metal linings into the surrounding rock. Whatever was used must have been tough, to last this long even as a faded trace.

Terrowne follows her and scrambles up, using his daggers as climbing hooks. There's enough of the upper floor left in the crevice to walk along by jumping over the intervening spaces all along the edges and heading outward far enough to reach a point where the descending outer cliffside intersects the surface. It's perilously suspended and gulls circle far below, where the sethura are still being distracted from their plan by an extremely intermittent firefight.

Visibility is low due to the greyish weather and the mist of condensation just above the ocean, but it appears that several have already fallen on both sides because blood has soaked into the damp sand in places. Whoever got hit seems to have been dragged behind whatever cover is available. There's an occasional muzzle flash as the remaining Ramanae shoot from outside the perimeter, and the sethura retaliate cautiously with various classical low-energy solutions that still work from inside it. Anything that can be lobbed outside the marker pillars works just as well as it would normally, so the conflict has degenerated into an impasse.

This high up the air is clearer as the wind carries away the sea-spray, and as they scramble up onto the edge of the peninsula, trying to see what they're dealing with, the secure coms they were issued with start to crackle and come back on line. The sun is low and glares whitely at a sideways angle under the scudding clouds.

Cleo flicks the coms talisman clipped into her ear and tries to signal base on the open channel. Admittedly the open channel is already subject to a continuously shifting adaptive encryption, but to the sethura this is probably about as secure as two children chatting with a taunt string and a couple of tin cans, so they've agreed to go purely euphemistic on this one.

"This is the Firekat. We are approaching the dance floor. A routine has been improvised. Shadow Dragon will be my dance partner for this number."

She has to repeat herself several times before she gets a reply and all sorts of things seem to be going on over the open channel that shouldn't be there, shouts and arguments and noises in the background. When she finally gets an answer it doesn't help.

"This is Kalikshutra base. Firekat, you are late for the party, I repeat late for the party. View of the dance floor is still obscured and a general fight has broken out."

"Are fighters local hoodlums or illegal aliens, over?"

"Fighters are local hoodlums. The mad bastards are launching nukes at each other!"

It seems that regional politics is considered a known quantity, because whoever she's got on the line drops out of code completely as they try to explain what is going on, apparently whilst also holding the same discussion with several other people and trying desperately to keep the lid on an impossible situation. She catches brief snatches of misdirected coms traffic as lines are accidentally crossed and far too few personnel try to field far too many calls.

"...so far it's nothing that exceeds conventional but when they realize they might lose they're bound to start in with the heavy stuff..."

"...current estimate is eleven million, three hundred and thirty-three thousand dead, I repeat, eleven and one-third million casualties..."

"...Firekat, be advised the dance floor has coastal views, I repeat the dance floor has coastal views. There are least five minor port cities in possible effective radius of your position and they're likely to hit them next if this keeps up..."

"...we're trying to shoot them down but there are just too many!"

Cleo thinks about it hard and swallows.

"We are still going to try and hit the jukebox. Do not throw coins, I repeat, do not throw coins. It is unlikely to be effective," she declares decisively. "Changing the song may clear the dance floor for general audience participation."

There is a moment while her contact tries to mentally translate her meaning. Most of the guys at the base know both Ramanae and Azatlani for professional reasons - it's the language of the enemy they valued so highly, an external target that kept them from splintering apart - but this sort of creative usage is something of a challenge.

"Affirmative," concludes their anonymous handler. "We are ready to blow the speakers on your mark. You will need to rock the party right now, because this evening is almost over."

"Commencing our best exotic dance number. Over and out."

~*~

In complete silence the light waxes, rising up and getting steadily brighter until inky lense forms across the surface of his eyes, the Dragon beginning automatic repair and suppression to embrace what it sees as a flood of information. The intensity drops suddenly, like putting on a pair of dark sunglasses, but then the brightness continues to rise, all in an instant.

He glances across at Cleo and can see the high-intensity photons tunneling through her flesh, a glowing inner light like putting your hand in front of the sun. Ribs and vertebrae show up like a framework inside her, laced around with a fractal network of reddish blue veins, darker where the grafts interlaced into her spine and neck block the radiation, brighter in unobstructed patches at stray locations where there is nothing but skin and muscle in the way. Her eyes look black by contrast where the flash suppression features built into them have turned the outer surfaces a reflective silver and locked down the receptors in the back of her retinas to stop overbleaching.

Suddenly the burst drops off and everything is nighted for a second as the Dragon waits to see if there's anything else interesting happening, then withdraws, his normal vision returning.

Cleo staggers slightly, not from the impact but from sheer disorientation, as the cat-eye silvering drops from her slit pupils. "Massive electromagnetic pulse," she reports, tripping slightly over her own tongue as she tries to speak clearly and staggers back against one of the more complete walls made of those sharply-edged grey basalt blocks. "If I wasn't combat hardened that would've fried most of my nanites." Her hand brushes against a metal edging on her armour and there's a small but audible crack as an enormous static charge earths itself on the metal.

"They just nuked one of the coastal cites." It isn't a question.

"We have about twenty seconds before the blast wave hits," she declares, flicking her fingers at the sting and consulting some sort of unseen heads-up display in her visual field. "Help me find a wall that's facing the right way."

Although he can't see what she sees, he imagines some sort of digital count spinning down in the corner of her vision while the software tries to locate and highlight all suitably aligned walls with shimmering waves, disrupted by static and unfinished repairs. She drags him down and they end up sitting with their backs against up against the shallow base of a wall where dirt has been piled up on the other side by the oncoming coastal winds.

"Cover your ears!" she urges, then slaps her hands over the raised triangular flanges that are part of her customized helmet (they're rated to produce no significant aerodynamic impedance up to around a hundred kilometers per hour, and suddenly he understands why she might care).

The blast wave is actually visible, propagating at the speed of a bullet through the drizzling skies, slapping aside clouds as a perfect expending sphere of compression. It breaks around the ancient wall and there is a sudden moment of intense heat, like being swatted with a gust of tropical wind but sort of burnt, like the smell of scorched dust from putting your face too close to a heater.

Then it swirls out as it mixes with the cooler atmospheres left trapped in pockets behind the terrain. Particles of the fine soil, sand and earth are sucked up into the air as the wave passes over and are blasted past them with a scouring force either end of the broken wall, and overhead just a few ranks of stone above.

"I wonder why the suppression system didn't block it," shouts Terrowne, a man calling out into a storm over the roar of the wind. "I thought it was supposed to stop high-energy outputs."

"Too diffuse, maybe?" coughs Cleo, trying to keep the dust out of her eyes and mouth. "It probably couldn't block the whole volume all at once. It's not like it helps, it just means that we can nuke near them but not actually on them."

"We need to hurry! That probably stunned anyone who didn't see it coming, but if we sit still too long they'll come looking for us instead. I don't know how good their gear is but I'll bet some of them probably have better stuff than ours and that won't distract them for long,"

The dust and stray winds as the normal oceanic climate tries to reinstate itself are an effective cover, as they skulk through the broken-up array of ancient stone walls, once part of some large city plan but now broken down or left standing to random heights at the whim of weather and the storms that must sometimes come in off the sea. There's no way of knowing exactly how many of the sethura they're up against, but so far their distribution has been well thought out and spoiled only by the lack of adequate numbers to secure both the vast underground labyrinth of the depth train terminus, and the surface ruins. It would be a sound wager that at least some of them have positioned themselves strategically at defensible places such as the meeting-points of intersecting walls, or hollows in the ground that would conceal their presence.

Cleo half-draws her compound bow, getting up just enough pull to finish drawing when she aims to put a slim steel arrow through someone at close range, then slips quietly through the low ruins, back to the walls at all times, professionally sweeping the corners. Terrowne follows with blades drawn, ready to throw them as cover or just clean up after she downs her target, should there be more than one of them.

The hot air from all the blasts is mixing with the cold to produce something like a warm spring day....