First Angels Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the Author

  First Angels

  Digitesque, Vol. 2

  Guerric Haché

  For Mimi

  & for my mother, father, and sister

  Foreword

  I know that growing up, you heard stories that sound a lot like this. Somebody young, unassuming, usually not as wise to the ways of the world as they should be. Some strange power or inheritance, some tragedy to set them on their way. Somehow, in all our stories, the power to change things for the better usually flowed into a single pair of hands, to be used for good, in the triumphs, or for ill, in the tragedies. It helped us believe we matter, I suppose.

  At this point, you all know these stories usually don’t happen the way they’re told. More often the stories that built the world we live in are stories of a thousand people and a million days, stories that advance and retreat in fits and starts, stories that live in intermittent conversations, hard toil, a convergence of circumstances and decisions. Indeed, I could be telling you one such story, if I wanted to, for this world was not built entirely on the backs of two young women. You could even say their part in the story was inevitable, in the grand scheme of things. If they hadn’t come along to do it, somebody else would have.

  But they matter to me. Their story matters to me, personally. The old fog of mystery and silence that enveloped the Earth has mostly been burned away now, the kindling laid in place over ages, but I saw with my own eyes the spark that lit the wildfire. For all that it was just a spark, it’s the part of the story I care to tell.

  I said that in these older, simpler kinds of stories, power and opportunity flow into a single pair of hands. Some of us knew that that pair of hands belonged to Isavel - kind, brave, divine. Others knew it belonged to Ada - fierce, cunning, dangerous. But back then, in the beginning, none of us knew power was flowing towards both of them. If we had known these two were both pushing and pulling at the world in their own ways, as often against one another as anything, we might have been wiser. Indeed, we might have been afraid.

  Chapter 1

  Ada had seen taxidermied creatures before, and the results inevitably rang hollow. So too, it seemed, with cities. She couldn’t look at Campus without seeing the knobbly ridges of the city’s old bones, the life it had lived before the alien outers had made it their home. Though Zhilik’s people had done much in their thousand-year stranding on Earth, taxidermy could only go so far - the gods had watched them closely, until recently, and had meted out terrible punishment if they strayed too close to changing the world itself. And so the thin layer of life they draped atop the ruins of the city couldn’t hide the truth. This was all Earth was anymore - legacies slowly crumbling to dust. Decay was the way of the world.

  She curled her nose, running her hands down the cool material of her starship’s hull - not metal, not glass, but maybe something cousin to both. Ada had never liked like the way of the world. There was a new world waiting to be born, to take the place of what had been lost, and she saw that new world in the matte black and bright red streaks of the ship’s hull. Cherry’s sleek fins and glassy cockpit thrummed with energy, light, and the promise that ruin was not all that humanity was. It also had guns - Ada figured the birth of a new world came with a risk of violence.

  She looked out beyond Campus towards the mainland. The outers sent scouts out every now and then to see what was going on, and word from the mainland had been war. War would only accelerate the world’s decay, and had to be stopped, so Ada had spent weeks hungrily devouring ancient archives, the outers’ and Cherry’s as well, for answers and paths forwards. But what good was knowledge if it didn’t allow her to affect change?

  Ada stepped away from Cherry and climbed down from the ziggurat. Furry faces and pointed ears turned towards her. Here, in the sole enclave of this alien people for thousands of klicks, she was known. Not only was she the only human who lived among them, but they all knew how she had convinced the gods to embrace them as equals to humans, high above the Earth. She had sparked new dreams, dreams that one day they might reconnect with their ancestral homeworld out beyond the stars. They knew her for that. Mostly.

  Zhilik also knew her because she was sleeping in his apartment, on something he called a couch.

  “Ada.”

  She smirked at him as he opened the door. It was unfair, perhaps, to expect him to use her gods-given title of Arbiter. His people didn’t seem to care much for titles. “Surprise, it’s me.”

  His tall alien frame stood on par with her height, and his toothy face and triangular ears seemed an endless well of amusement, amusement she was fast learning to recognize on that inhuman face. “What a pleasant surprise, Ada. Dinner? I can put a bowl on the floor, just like for the other stray cats.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Stray? There’s only one of us that can carry fleas, Zhilik, and it’s not me.”

  His cackling and slightly hissing laugh was no longer very alien to her ears. He let her in, grumbling academic pedantries about Earth fleas under his breath.

  He lived in a small collection of rooms in an ancient building - though thinking of it as ancient felt wrong, given that it was fairly well-maintained. The ceilings were a bit low for her taste, but at least the tall outers knocked out the doorframes so nobody needed to stoop. Zhilik returned to tend to a pan of sizzling fish and vegetables, and she sat down at his small wooden table. “How’s that communication device going?”

  “I am not sure anymore.” As best she could tell, he sounded a bit exasperated. “Kseresh does not want me dampening the mood on the comm team.”

  Ada frowned as she watched him tend to the food. “Why, because you think the homeworld was destroyed?”

  “I don’t know what happened to Mir.” Zhilik dribbled something fruity into a pan. “I am equally open to all the possibilities, good or bad. As such, optimists accuse me of pessimism, and pessimists accuse me of optimism. Your chopsticks are -”

  “Right, right, in the drawer.” She stood to fetch them. The outers seemed to mostly eat the same food as humans, barring a powerful dislike of mint, but they didn’t like using utensils, so all the ones in the drawer were for her.

  As she pulled out her chopsticks, she felt a pang of hesitation about broaching the subject she needed to broach. She took a deep breath, and tried to plough through it. “Zhilik, I think it’s time I left Campus. The longer there’s a war going on on the mainland, the worse things will get. If I can fix that shrine now, the ghosts will have an afterlife to go back to, and I can be safe to do more research.”

  He gave her a strange look as he shoveled food into a bowl and handed it to her. “I see. It took you long enough.”

  Ada blinked. “Excuse me?”

  They sat down at the table. The simple chair was comfortable enough for her, but Zhilik’s inhuman shape sat on something a bit odd-looking, their own carpenters’ design. Zhilik’s ears flicked. “When you first arrived at Campus you were all bluster and rage, so when you got back with that ship, I half expected you to fly to Hive right away and raze it to the ground. Yet you sat here for almost three weeks, studying patiently.”

  Ada leaned against the wall. “I guess I’m full of surprises.” She started eating; the pink fish was covered in a
salty-sweet sauce to the outer’s liking, the combination of red ocean seagrass and ripe fruit still strange to her mouth. Zhilik raised the bowl to his face and started eating straight from it as she spoke. “I told you I wanted to learn, and I have, but I still don’t know how the technophage came about, or caused the Fall. All the recordings you have are… well, they bother me, and they don’t explain anything. I mean, what happened to the colonies? All those other planets?”

  Zhilik grunted through a mouthful of food, and swallowed. “The homeworlds were powerful engines of agriculture, science, and war. They were the source of the ecosystems our species evolved to depend on. Without Earth and Mir, I can only assume the colonies died off. If Mir survived… perhaps the colonies did as well.”

  Ada looked up at the ceiling, as though if she looked hard enough she might spot fellow humans looking back from some distance star. “Right. And there’s that enemy the gods talked about.”

  He looked at her. “You have found nothing in your ship’s archives?”

  “Nothing.” Zhilik was quiet as he finished off his salmon, so she pressed him. “Is there anything I’m missing? All I got from the archives is that the technophage came from Earth. Which I assume means spies, traitors, maybe some other kind of infiltration.”

  He coughed. “I believe it was more complicated. The enemy may have manipulated power struggles already occurring on Earth.”

  Ada sighed, swallowed a piece of meat, and looked out the window towards the mainland. “Politics.”

  It was a word she had thought she was familiar with, but the baffling complexity of ancient society - including things called governments and corporations, which had apparently somehow controlled society as a whole - had caught her off-guard, and she still didn’t properly understand it. Zhilik didn’t seem too keen on the subject either, simply nodding. “Possibly.”

  Ada could almost imagine politics being frustrating enough to try to wipe out civilization, but only for someone with an even shorter temper than her. She had seen recordings of the Fall - people locked into bunkers trying to avoid contracting the technophage and going mad in the process. Others, newly infected, who had accidentally activated recording devices to immortalize those moments, scrambling around in terror and incomprehension. Archival footage from watchers and drones and other creations showing rioting, fire, chaos, and death. It certainly felt like the result of external manipulation. “I wish I knew what happened, Zhilik.”

  “The truth is likely unpleasant.”

  “That’s fine. It’s not the truth’s job to be pleasant.”

  Zhilik nodded, picking bits of food from his face-fur. “So you leave for Hive?”

  “Yes. You’re welcome to come along, but I only have one seat in my ship. Take the hauler, if you want to come.”

  Zhilik shook his head, looking nervously out the window, as though he were cold. “I have never flown, and I doubt I would like it. I can meet you in Hive, then.”

  Ada’s face melted into a smile as she thought of the sensation of whipping her ship through the air, dancing along the threads of time between moments, perfecting her every motion. “I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t like flying.”

  After dinner Ada bade Zhilik farewell, and made her way back to the ziggurat at the centre of Campus. She felt like she had climbed and climbed up to the highest peaks she could, but she could go no higher. It was time to fly again. She made her way to Elder Kseresh, finding him in his office stacked with old Earth books pulled from storage. Reading.

  He looked up at her and blinked, standing and flatting his ears when she told him her plans. “You are leaving? Tonight? You have not warned me.”

  “Why do you need to be warned? I’ve waited around long enough, studied enough - the mainland is crawling with ghosts, Kseresh, and sooner or later one group of savages is going to find that facility and ruin it. I can’t let that happen.”

  The elder alien was shaking his head. “We have still not found any records regarding your afterlife’s control centre. We have found no mention of the facility’s location in our records, but we have yet to searched everywhere. Give us time.”

  “Stop apologizing. At this point I don’t think you’re ever going to find that information, and that’s fine - you can’t know everything.” She looked straight into his slit-pupiled eyes. “I’m going to Hive. I’m taking Cherry out tonight.”

  Kseresh looked at her, ears twitching. “Hm. I hope Zhilik will be following you out.”

  “I told him to take my hauler, yes.”

  Kseresh belatedly gave her a more human nod, glancing aside. “Very well, then. I will ensure that Zhilik is given a comm device so that we may monitor the situation.”

  Ada felt quiet indignation, but only let it tilt her head a little. “You don’t need to monitor me.”

  “I prefer to know what is happening.”

  She frowned at the old alien, but he was already letting his attention flow back towards his books and screens, flicking through sketches and diagrams of ancient communication arrays, so there was no point in pressing him. He seemed to have bigger concerns on his plate. “Fine. We’ll keep in touch.”

  Ada only briefly gave any thought to what the outers were trying to do as she left his office. Sending a message across the stars had sounded like madness a few months ago, but not anymore. Technology’s ability to overcome the vastness of space seemed all the more real now that she had had dipped her toes in the black, had danced her ship through the void in whorls of time and power - a dance she doubted would soon be matched.

  Saint Isavel Valdéz, Herald of the Gods, awoke to a knock on the doorframe. Who was it? She twisted around in bed. She was alone - Sorn had disappeared, no doubt out sparring with the guards again. She made to get up and heard a gentle warble, felt a tug at the bottom of the bed. She raised an eyebrow and slowly sat up to look. The red panda that had recently decided to inhabit her room was there, curled up and staring back at her. She reached out to it with an open palm, and it sniffled at her before laying its head back down. He was in the presence of a divine champion of the gods, but he would rather nap. She found it refreshing, and smiled as she stroked the fur on the top of his head.

  She had always wondered why they were called red pandas, if there weren’t pandas of any other colour.

  “Hey there.” She made the mistake of speaking aloud to the animal, and the knock on the doorframe repeated itself, insistent. The thick canvas hanging in the doorway kept her visitor hidden, but the timing of those knocks, equally spaced and carefully counted, was suspicious. Her smile faded. “Venshi?”

  Being right was about the only pleasure she felt as the faceless steward bowed into the room, and started speaking in her familiar warble. “The Institute’s coders have finally arrived. The army is ready to march to Hive, and word has been sent to the villages along the way to evacuate their children.”

  So their children wouldn’t be overwhelmed by an army of people marching down the coast. It was a grim thing, and she wished it wasn’t necessary to stop the ghosts. Isavel stood up. “Have we heard from Hive’s Mayor yet? Does he understand yet that we really don’t have time for his celebration… thing? I just want his help.”

  “He has not responded on this matter. I believe we must assume his welcoming festivities will occur as planned.”

  Isavel sighed. This so-called Mayor’s messengers had been very insistent that the army be welcomed with some kind of celebration, but Isavel saw it as nothing more than a distraction from her mission. “Fine. I’ll be out soon. Get everyone going, Venshi.”

  “As you will, Herald.”

  Venshi left Isavel alone with the red panda. Isavel looked up out the skylight, her only window here in the temple. She saw the silvery arc of the ring, the brilliant ribbon-like palace of the gods, and breathed a sigh of anticipation. Things would go as planned, as the gods willed - she only hoped she understood, and played her part well.

  The temple priests had given her clean cl
othes from the machines at the weavery, a short white poncho and a set of white pants. She wore a pathfinder’s mottled, forest-toned brace underneath, though, for when she needed something with just enough coverage to hold things in place while exposing as much camouflaging skin as possible. She had a few leaf-wrapped rations for her pockets, a cloak in case it rained, and there was nothing else she needed.

  It would be good to finally be moving again.

  Weeks had passed since Isavel had killed the ghost walker outside of Glass Peaks, and in those weeks she had accomplished little. She practiced fighting, went scouting, occasionally skirmished with a handful of ghosts in the woods, but true progress towards stopping the enemy had stalled under the logistical weight of getting thousands of people ready to march across a populated coastline in search for a lost ghost shrine. Now, though - now it was finally done. She waved at the red panda, and when he sniffed and returned to his nap, she left the room.

  The priests of the temple swept out of her way as she walked, their reverence more than a bit disconcerting. Even so, as priests, at least their reverence of the divine was an easy thing to understand. It was the others who really unsettled her. When she left the temple she shifted her skin to a paler, almost white shade, hoping to look different enough to avoid drawing attention.

  Unfortunately, the supplicants gathered outside the temple were growing wise to her tricks. One of them must have recognized her, because soon there were dozens of people in her wake. At least they were silent - by now they knew she couldn’t answer their pleas for blessing or healing. But they still followed, their eyes and hopes pawing at the back of her neck. She shrugged and rolled her shoulders, as if that might ease the weight.

  At the edge of the city, people were making choices - stay in the city and in the lives they knew, or march off to something unbelievable, something unprecedented since the Ghost War so many centuries ago. Some were still figuring it out, last-minute decisions born between laughs and longing glances, but most already knew. When Isavel arrived at the main gate, she found Marea, the hunter’s familiar olive smile a welcome sight in the crowd.