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Save Point: The Fish His Brother

Somewhere On Sethuramandraki

No sooner have they made it out onto the encircling walkway, walled in on the outside by a surprisingly flimsy looking series of flat transparent panels, by walking along one of the raised transparent walkways built of the same material (now encrusted with thousands of years of sea life) revealed by the water spilling away, than Terrowne spots something coming toward them.

Crunching through a layer of dead oyster shells layered in their thousands beneath peculiar corals, the approaching object does not require the eyes of a cat or the perceptions of a dragon to make out. It's leaving a substantial vapor trail behind it and seems to be heading straight for them.

"That was quick," observes Cleo, when he points it out. "I can't believe that the mad bastards actually left a missile pointed at their own launch platform for this long just in case."

"It's not a missile," says Terrowne, shading his eyes against the peculiarly bright sun of the sethura homeworld, which doesn't actually seem to be any more intense than that of the world they just left, only shifted far further into the ultraviolet. He pulls out a pair of high-tech binoculars from his own lighter pack (they would live in Cleo's gear, since she normally chooses to go heavy and bring not just a knife but all sorts of stuff to a gunfight, yet precision lenses are not very compatible with raw fish fillets and he always ends up being the one using them anyway).

The optics confirm his guess, shading to compensate for the brightness and then picking out the moving object against the sky, tracking it in a series of adaptive zooms and tracking alignments after highlighting it with a focal target. "See? It has no exhaust, just a condensate vapor trail. That's a ballistic launch of some kind."

"Which may still have, oh I don't know, explosives attached to it?" notes Cleo sarcastically. "I got nuked enough for several lifetimes the first time around. I'm going with my original position, which is that we hustle around the far side of this thing and hope that even obsolete sethura engineering really is that good."

They grab Sethkill, who is gawping weirdly at the falling object, with an arm hooked under each of his and make the best possible time for the far side of the curve dragging him between them like two particularly agile security guards hastily removing a free-thinking malcontent from some sort of executive meeting. Sethkill seems rather baffled by this turn and keeps looking back. "Don't worry, it's not dangerous," he keeps repeating owlishly.

The island having a considerable circumference, their positioning is more luck than skill and they seem to have used a walkway approximately halfway around the edge. It seems unlikely that they'll be able to get out of the way completely without doing something serious, and Terrowne is just readying himself to go full Dragon and hustle them out of there when the arc of the descending shell continues almost directly overhead, then suddenly comes to a direct halt as it deploys some sort of high tech equivalent of a parachute from its rear end and then, dangling, starts to descend at a much more sedate pace.

"It's like a satellite dish got crossed with one of those collapsible metal colanders you use to steam vegetables," exclaims Cleo in confusion (she doesn't need the binoculars). "Seriously, a parachute made of metal?" They crouch down to make the most of the available cover provided by the rim of the island and the railing as the object drifts serenely down.

Through the binoculars, Terrowne watches as the descending object, still above them, starts to unfold a range of utilitarian appendages from a main body that seems to comprise a bullet-shaped silvery-dark metal shell at the back, and a sort of transparent pilots nacelle at the front like an aircraft cockpit, only completely transparent. He'd guess that it might be some sort of solid state highly pressure resistant material, perhaps a thick ovoid of diamond or layered boron carbide. There is a dark shape somewhere inside.

Two structures like legs or landing gear extract themselves and make an orderly unfolding from the metallish underside of the shell. The limbs appear to fold backwards from the knee, like some sort of walking machine or assault mecha from an overly driven anime. They even have splay-padded extensions at the end to grab stuff.

More worryingly, two shorter, stubbier and considerably thicker blunt extensions slide out from either side of the shell, unmistakably hard-points for weapons mounting. They look like they can swivel independently and be drawn back inside the main body for reloading.

"... and they've sent a mecha to kill us. Classy. These guys really know how to go all-out," Cleo drawls cheerfully, adopting the style of the sort of all-action bitch you'd find in the movie this thing clearly belongs in. "Weapons hot, boys."

"It's not dangerous!" exclaims Sethkill intently, yanking at her armored flak vest. "You mustn't hurt it. It is the precious cargo!"

"How do you know that?" she demands.

"You must not hurt it!"

"I won't, I won't... not unless it fires at me first. What is it? Can you talk to it, maybe reason with it or something?"

"It is the precious cargo."

"Okay, then you go talk to it."

"We will chat and have tea and scones."

"...and I say again, Sethkill has lost it," she tells Terrowne, ignoring Sethkill completely. "He is messed up."

"Since when did he ever have tea and scones? They didn't even have tea and scones back then! He's pulling vocabulary and context straight out of our heads, which is pretty damn impressive since by his own account the sethura were never more than very weakly telepathic. He still had to learn Azatlani and all the other languages by speaking them the first time around. We should let him talk to it."

Above them, the falling armored nacelle begins to draw in the filiament cables that attach it to the gleaming metal parachute, tacking in various directions to account for the wind and the rate of fall, drifting inward in a manner that clearly suggests it is homing in on their position. The railing around the edge of the island is quite wide by the standards of an individual, large enough for stacking of loading gear and equipment, you could presumably run a vehicle or two around the edge to deliver things with plenty of room to pass, but for this unidentified falling object it's an impressively tricky shot.

It seems for a second that it won't make it, but then a calculated backwards gust pulls it neatly back over the railing and raises the nose a little so the dangling articulations of the leg-like landing gear hit the ground first and catch its weight as it sticks the landing. The graspers on their ends catch at the walkway and make small automated movements for maximum friction, while the weight of the weapon-points helps it balance. The parachute sinks out downward behind the shell and is then drawn in, folding up on itself in an intricate and complex origami of self-adjusting leaves until the cables draw it in its entirety back into the rear section of the shell, which closes up behind it.

The mecha shrugs itself, moving all its component parts slightly to adjust and calibrate its position, then steps forward and speaks to them.

There are structures that look like brutal combat-hardened speakers built into the hard-points, Terrowne notices, acutely black metal meshes drilled full of tiny holes with some sort of solid state driver behind them, and it is these that the mecha uses to boom at them, with sounds in there somewhere like words but too loud and full of base to be readily understood. The mecha takes a step back, seems to make a few adjustments, and then tries again at a much reduced volume that is still reminiscent of a concert speaker, like being punched in the guts with stray song lyrics. It is clearly trying to communicate in sethura, but with equipment that seems to have been designed for something far more aggressive.

"You are very loud!" declares Sethkill, casually walking out into the open and pointing a finger at it accusatively. He seems to feel it is misbehaving.

Presumably by adjusting some settings based on what it just heard, the mecha tries again and addresses them in fluent sethurani, of which they still understand almost nothing. Sethkill has a quick chat with the mecha and then turns to them, smiling broadly.

"This is the Walking Fish," he explains. "It will help us! Please to say hello to the Fish."

~*~

The non-violent credentials of the thing being established, Cleo and Terrowne approach and take in the strangeness.

The shell, it seems, is a vehicle of sorts. The nacelle is filled with some sort of pressurized and presumably oxygenated fluid, possibly under considerable pressure, based on the aggressive indices of refraction where light enters and exits the transparent diamond shell. The lower and back halves of the shell are entirely made of the same darkly silvery metal, and have all manner of complexly baroque patterns over the external surfaces having some unspecified purpose. The remaining upper-front quarter is completely clear and houses the pilot, who is not seated but rests in a forward-leaning position, head raised and looking around.

The pilot of the Walking Fish appears to be, best guess, something descended from a sethura that has taken back to the oceans and descended to a considerable depth, modifying itself as it went along. The vessel seems to be the Walker, whereas the pilot appears to be the Fish.

~*~

The Fish... it? she? ...looks like the Dragon in full aquatic mode, but more celestial, more lunar... the muzzle is more snub, and there are a pair of incongruous sabre-fangs in her muzzle that are not really teeth at all but the strangely translucent equivalent of something that hunts with a lighted lure in the abyssal depths. An array of slender tendrils and feelers radiate outward from around her muzzle like a catfish, detecting subtle movements in the current. Her tail is thicker and heavier, more developed than the Dragons, and culminates in the lure itself, a symmetrical pair of curved, fin-like extensions horizontally surrounding a white earth-light orb that glows and radiates without ever being touched.

The Fish still has legs, but they're not very long and are slenderly narrow, barely the length of a human limb although they still have the two primary joints of the sethura. They're like the legs of a salamander or an axolotl, neglected by evolution as they graduate toward short range grabbers rather than serving as actual support. The real arms, however, are full size and look strong, still fulfilling their purpose. Just call her an exolotl.

The suggestion that the Fish was and still is quite female comes from a pursed pussy-slit that protrudes outward between the reduced legs, vulval lips protruding several inches to a tight fold that looks like it can be clamped shut to keep out the water. There are fine patterns on the Fish's body that uncannily mimic the baroquing on the hull, the majority of the skin surface being a deep black that is also green, with gold traceries and hints of color like a tropical fish, patterns like tattoos across her belly and at across the fins at the end of her tail glowing a deep cherenkov blue. Her wide deep-searching eyes, all pupil and no iris, have a hint of the same underlying glow, somewhere deep within.

To operate the controls somewhere down inside the front of the Walker, she leans forward in a sort of attentive flying position, head up and streamlined breasts thrust forward like a more tasteful sort of super-heroine, positively skinny by sethura standards. Why, she only has the single pair of readily sexualized curves, the two lower pairs of her breasts aren't even visible and are barely more than nipples. Now if she was still a sethura, she'd be quite easily mistaken for a healthy female teen just starting to grow some, or even a well-muscled male....

"She looks just like you!" exclaims Cleo.

"The Fish his brother. Well, it was an easy enough mistake to make, I suppose," Sethkill says cheerfully, to no-one in particular.

"She is me," explains Terrowne. "Or at least, she's the mortal host of the version of the Dragon that exists in this timeline. At a guess, I think it most probably missed the Yucatan or whatever passes for it here and hit something else. Maybe the moon, which would explain why there are three of it with roughly the same total mass."

"I thought you were entangled with all the other possible but non-existent versions of you."

"This timeline is so far away from ours that she practically counts as a different person. Like the book said, the Fish his brother... or rather sister. We are one but separate. Things occurring here collapse to a separate main continuity."

"Maybe Sethkill can get something useful out of her. He's kind of out of it but I suppose any information is better than none."

They try to explain to Sethkill what they want to know. What most interests Terrowne is why a host of the Dragon would even need the highly engineered walking machine that the Fish has launched itself in, presumably from nearest oceanic spreading rift. After three instances of poor translation, the results are a little confusing, but...

"..after I saw what happened, I went deep, and I found something, or it found me... nearly died the true death.. we are an imperfect host and not enough time. Rushed as fast as possible but within strict and gripping limits... we must hasten."

Terrowne considers this carefully, and thinks maybe he gets it.

"The Dragon's sense of time is a little vague when its disentangled... if it took even a little while longer to pull itself together after it crashed, or it wasn't really paying attention, it might have only just tried to find a suitable host. Or maybe Kilseth messing about with space and time got its attention, woke it up with a start like a loud noise."

Sethkill translates. The Fish makes difficult to interpret but probably affirmative motions.

"It took about fifteen years for it to finish growing the interfaces that link it to me before my first Dragonish rampage, and even then it took about the same again for it to reach anything approaching full capacity. It's been working on them continuously ever since with diminishing returns, because there's only so much that you can do under actual laws of physics... it's bit of a catch twenty-two really, it has to have the interfaces to make the interfaces. And it seems to think I'm an especially suitable host, for some reason only it understands, that I can't readily explain. I think you need to already be mentally unstable in very specific ways, and have some really powerful repressed talents to accommodate its intrinsic uncertainty."

"Looks like Sethkill is an excellent candidate then. Maybe it should borrow him."

"You're being extra... catty today, aren't you?"

"Oh ha, ha, very funny. We've tried to help an old friend who turns out to be off his head and we are now stuck in a different universe courtesy of his desire to indulge his nostalgia. Did I mention that almost everyone here probably wants to kill us?"

"They have an army, we have a Fish?" suggests Terrowne innocently with a contagious grin.

"Movie references now? Seriously?"

"Trust me, even a few percent of a Dragon is not something they will want to mess with. And she has great big guns attached to that thing. Even the speakers are a potential weapon. I bet they started off as acoustic propagation devices for sending low-frequency sonar pings across hundreds of miles of ocean. With a little tuning they could turn your innards to mush."

"How very... visceral," she notes, mocking his earlier witticism.

While they've been trying to sort the implications of the Fish out, Sethkill has been engaging in an extended conversation with it in sethurani, interjected with occasional confusing further translated fragments such as, "we met on the beach once, remember?" and "it's such a shame you had to get rid of that jade cunt-ring." He keeps forgetting to try and provide interpretation for everyone else who doesn't speak the language, and ends up doing only the occasional part-sentence when he remembers. The result is more confusing than nothing at all.

Suddenly the Fish flexes its legs and springs off the railing, plummeting down into the empty air beneath. Cleo races over to the edge as fast as she can and is just in time to see it re-deploy its laminar parachute as it drifts downward toward the base of the tower.

"What the hell did you say to it?" Terrowne asks.

"I asked it to go jump off a cliff," says Sethkill innocently.

"Um, why would you do that?"

"It's far too big to fit in the elevator."

~*~

In the same way that there are walkways leading off the island, there are at regular spacings access points leading down underneath it. To accommodate the shallow curve, they start with stairs, laid out on a peculiar spacing and with sloped risers that are optimized for a sethura walking downward, so they don't bark their second set of shins on the step behind. Because the island is much wider than it is deep, the steps soon occur at wide spaces and most of the route is almost flat.

"They must have built it somewhere else," says Terrowne, who keeps looking down over the edges to the land far below, where the are strangely few buildings and far below, just simple geometric outlines from this height. The Fish is prowling around the largest of them but seems to have found nothing significant. "I mean, this can't have been the assembly structure, it's too skinny and there's no way to deliver significant amounts of material. I think this is more like the gantry around a rocket launch, just a place for the assembled object to sit."

It seems plausible. The scale appears grandiose, but that's just due to the sheer mass of the island, sea-moss and weed encrusted underside resting on the clear material of the cradle that holds it in place. Lights come on, seemingly automatically, along the edges of the underway to mark their path because the island shadows everything underneath, even as the brilliant light shines down on the land far beneath their feet.

"We should hurry. This thing reappearing is going to attract notice," concludes Cleo, breaking his musings.

After the last steps, the pathway changes and becomes motile underfoot, whisking them along at an impressive rate of speed. It seems able shuffle itself around, going either way on either side, or entirely in a single direction when called for. Cleo amuses herself trying to trick it by suddenly walking the other way, or getting them to walk in patterns, but some stringently-coded set of instructions causes it to adapt no matter what she does. It's like a much better version of the flat escalators seen at international airports, and more perfectly safe because everything can move together when it needs to.

At a motivated stroll, they soon find themselves going quite astonishingly fast. Getting to the center takes about fifteen minutes, a little brisk casual exercise.

The central tower that supports all this so high above the ground is a fascinating folly, an unsupported spiral staircase like a helical spring with a hollow core, engineered or grown in one enormous solid piece from a pale-grey, almost whitish material that resembles some sort of almost but not-quite translucent ceramic. The diameter of the spiral has to be at least fifty meters across, more likely a hundred, like a spiral staircase set around a central ballroom in the middle of some fancy country mansion catering to the parties of the rich. There's a certain boisterousness to the design, a fantastic and implausible thing made just because they could.

The staircase could have been made a ramp, it's certainly long enough, but there are risers at intervals unavoidably determined by the dimensions of the stair itself. The risers are matched by descenders on the underside, placed precisely in the center of each flat section overhead. It's better understood as an act of sculpture on a monumental scale than anything utilitarian.

Something that looks like a large bird with reptile wings and matching plumage flies past underneath. "Hey, a gannex!" exclaims Sethkill, craning his head.

Because there is no core to the center of the staircase, which seems to act as a spiral spring to support the weight of an entire island and compress accordingly, a matching circular opening in the convex cradle above is where the water transported in its wake has been able to drain out, creating what must initially have been a spectacular waterfall laden with fish and assorted sea life caught by considerable surprise in an unexpected weightless plummet. Some of the water is still draining around the edges, the outflow from the rivers on the island, liquid that was caught up in the fractures of rocks and the convolutions of shell beds, but it's not really that much all told and only enough to form a shimmering curtain around the peripheries of the opening, with a dry space in the middle of the falling column.

That transparent material must have really been in vogue when this lot was built, thinks Cleo, and mentally names it isinglass after the extremely early synthetic used for the windows on some really primitive motor vehicles, the name an ignorant contraction of 'it isn't glass'. If they do find a way to get home, she resolves to nick the nearest available piece and carry it out with her, since she suspects that if she could hit it hard enough it would shatter into a tray of highest-grade diamonds. Here of course the material is common, but the dealers don't need to know that, and the pieces couldn't be traced to any inconvenient source.

What has drawn her attention to it is that, although the spiral appears single and monolithic from a distance, up close it has additional infrastructure put together mostly from the isinglass so as to avoid spoiling the view. There are slender cylindrical lift shafts at multiple locations around the edges, each segment attached to the nearest loop of the spiral with a small gap between itself and the one above to accommodate movement on the spring as it compresses with load, or more routinely with changes in temperature, the brilliant solar light and the cold high altitude winds no doubt playing havoc with the seasons and causing the stairway to flex and bend even in the normal course of events.

It's all very graceful, something put together by a motivated spider as it descends its line in search of food along the outside of a polished industrial suspension spring left carelessly on a wooden table outside in a shed somewhere. Probably everything still works like the day it was built and the material even shrugs off the occasional gannexing whenever it rains.

Once they've slowed down to zero and walked the last couple of feet unaided, it's a relatively short transit across the strange ceramic surface to the nearest descent point, where Sethkill summons a lift by cryptic means, tapping his feet waiting for it to arrive, then quickly dashes inside and places himself precisely in the middle of the platform. Cleo and Terrowne take up positions symmetrically either side of him, and then the platform begins to slide downward with an oddly smooth motion that lacks any obvious driving mechanism.

"You're right," concedes Terrowne, "this is way too small for the Fish. Tourists only, I guess."

As the lift descends, it begins to play some bizarrely tasteful sethura take on elevator muzak in softly swelling strains that only become obtrusive once it is clear that the occupants will be taking a long ride. Since parts of it are in frequencies the human ear was never really designed to hear correctly, it seems to cut in and out oddly, as though it was broken. Sethkill seems to be enjoying himself and gives them both a hug as they descend, as Cleo tries to make out the song and Terrowne refrains from an impulse to find the speaker and belt it one in an attempted fix that isn't actually required. The sethura being all class in their indulgent excess of technology, at least the parts he can hear seem to have a decent bandwidth and aren't the tinny noise he associates with the average elevator back home.

The loops of the spiral flow past as the platform sinks.