The anchor’s death-scream tore through the command car, a sound of pure mechanical agony that vibrated up through the deck plates and into Irina’s bones. The city-wide alarm klaxon was a frantic, pulsing heartbeat beneath it, a panicked rhythm counting down the seconds to their dissolution. Her world of tangible things, of pressure gauges and power conduits, was coming apart. The core temperature of the Mnemonic Anchor, her anchor, was critical, the strain at 140 percent. The reactor would breach.
Through the armored glass, she saw them descend. They were not creatures of flesh, but holes in the world, man-sized shimmers of fractured light that swallowed the grey sky behind them. Twenty of them. The Mnemonic Vultures, drawn to the feast of a powerful memory tearing itself apart. They were a predator she could not measure, a threat she could not fight. They were the reason her engine was dying.
— Fire! Fire at will! — Pavel’s voice was tight with strain over the comms.
The staccato bark of rifles erupted from the length of the Forge-Crawler ‘Perun’. Irina watched the useless streams of tracer fire pass straight through the shimmering forms. The projectiles found no purchase, no impact. It was like shooting at heat haze. Three hundred rounds of ammunition turned to wasted noise, a final, pointless prayer from the religion of gunpowder. The Vultures did not even seem to notice. They continued their silent, inexorable descent toward the anchor housing.
Her hands flew across the console, sweat stinging her eyes. She worked frantically, trying to vent the catastrophic energy build-up, to bleed the pressure from the overloaded mnemonic field. But the process was too slow. The gauges barely moved. For every percentage point of energy she bled, the resonance with the Scar fed two more back in. It was like trying to bail out a flooding ship with a cracked cup. Less than sixty seconds remained. Her machine, her life’s work, was a beacon for its own executioners.
Then she saw him. The bunker-dweller. The ranger. Sineus. He was a hundred meters out, a still point in the chaos. He was not running. He was not shouting. He sat down. Cross-legged, in the rust-colored dust, as if preparing for a morning meal. His eyes were closed. Irina’s mind recoiled from the sight. The sheer, infuriating calm of it. While her world was ending in a scream of overloaded physics, he had chosen to meditate. The man was a fool, a mystic, a dead man.
She could not see what he was doing, only what he was not. He was not fighting. He was not fixing. He was still. His hands rested on his knees, his back straight. He was a statue of useless serenity. Irina felt a surge of pure, hot rage. This was the Federation’s answer to the end of the world: close your eyes and pretend it was not happening. She turned back to her console, to the world of things that could be touched and measured, even as they failed her.
Then, something changed. A hundred meters from the train, out in the open dust, a new shimmer appeared. It was faint, barely visible, a small locus of thought no bigger than a man’s fist. It had none of the violent, hungry energy of the Vultures. It was a quiet, simple thing. A flicker.
The entire swarm of Mnemonic Vultures stopped. They hung in the air, their descent arrested. For a single, silent second, twenty holes in reality paused. Then, as one, they changed direction. They abandoned the ‘Perun’, abandoning the screaming, all-you-can-eat buffet of its overloaded reactor. They turned from the mountain of memory and fell upon the pebble.
Irina could only stare, her hands frozen over the console. It was impossible. It defied every law of predation, of energy, of common sense. The Vultures swarmed the faint shimmer in the dust. They converged, pecked once at something she could not see, and the shimmer was gone. Sated, the entire swarm dissolved, fading back into the grey texture of the sky until nothing remained.
The death-scream of the anchor died. The klaxon cut out. The sudden, absolute silence was more shocking than the noise had been. The vibration in the deck plates ceased.
Irina stared at the empty sky, then her gaze fell back to Sineus. He was still sitting in the dust, his eyes closed. He swayed once, a slight, almost imperceptible motion, as if a great weight had been lifted from him. Her disbelief, a wall of solid iron forged over a lifetime of hard-won experience, cracked. It did not crumble, but a fissure ran through it, deep and irreparable. Her world of logic had failed. His madness had worked.
The engine was silent. The air smelled of cool metal and dust.
