Mother Death

9

Ord roared up through the mantle, up into the mansion and the tiny bedroom, then wove a child’s body, saying with a smooth urgency, “Keep. Your. Hand. There!”

Avram flinched, but his palm remained flush against the mudstone.

He wore a distant, almost embarrassed expression. In the eyes, he was ashamed. For an instant, Ord could almost believe that his brother had done nothing provocative: He must have wandered into this room out of simple curiosity, and curiosity made him place his hand into the ancient imprint of Alice’s hand. This was an accident. An enormous, forgivable miscue. Ord was desperate to say, “You didn’t know. This is my fault, not yours…!”

But then Avram wrestled up his courage, saying, “Surrender.”

The word came out under pressure, wrapped in a white misery. Sliding out after it was the softer, almost mournful:

“Please.”

Ord had seen the trigger embedded in that stone, and when it was tripped, Ord had neatly strangled the explosion beneath Alice’s cell. But in the next microseconds, he watched in a wild astonishment as a second trigger emerged. It was a design that he had never anticipated, made of slippery dark matter materials that he still couldn’t comprehend. Waiting half-evolved until it felt the pressure and heat of a Chamberlain’s hand, it had completed itself in an instant, its complex workings obvious. Blatant. Mirroring the first booby trap, this trigger was linked to globules of molten anti-iron suspended inside magnetic fields. But the waiting bombs didn’t come by the handful. Ord began counting them while Alice was whispering into his ear, and he was counting them now, and it seemed as though there was no end to them, tens of millions of them scattered through the Earth’s upper mantle, waiting patiently for the chance to be set loose.

Again, with a grim resolve, Avram said, “Surrender.”

He didn’t offer, “Please,” this time.

The booby trap would injure him. Badly, perhaps. But in the milliseconds it would take a detonation signal to cross the world, triggering the weapons in a rippling inferno, most of Ord could retreat to space and its relative safety.

But he wasn’t the target, was he?

Avram stared at Ord, his expression changing, an easy disgust making him flinch and shake his head slightly. Then for the final time, he said, “Surrender.” And he breathed. Then because he hoped it would help, he smiled, aiming for a hopefulness, asking his little brother, “Really, what choice do you have…?”

The tiny bedroom was suffocating. Even as portions of Ord spun out estimates of how many would die and how much Earth’s loss would cost humanity, the rest of him—the center of his soul—felt trapped, helpless and worse than half-dead.

With a quiet, mournful voice, he muttered, “Brother,” and began to cry. A woman’s voice asked, “What’s happening here?”

Buteo had arrived, Ravleen still wrapped up in her strong arms, still twisting in her grip. Materializing in the hallway, the Papago stared in through the transparent wall, understanding nothing when she added the second question:

“What’s wrong with you, Chamberlain?”

Ord explained on a private channel, in an instant.

Buteo’s eyes became enormous, and vacant, and she squeezed Ravleen as if trying to crush her.

Ord reached deep and yanked Xo from the jail. Then, ignoring his brother, he directed his rage at the convenient Nuyen. “What were you thinking? The Earth on a precipice… just so you could catch me… what were you assholes thinking—?”

“I don’t understand,” Xo replied. Then as he saw things for himself, with his own senses, he began to shake his head numbly and pull at his hair, screaming, “I didn’t know! I didn’t!”

Avram flexed his right wrist.

Ord reached for him, then hesitated. The trigger was clever in the worst ways, and it was proud of its cleverness. “Touch your brother,” it warned, “and I’ll detonate. Touch me, and I’ll definitely detonate. These are my specifications, and my redundant systems, and every field test result. Look at them. Look at me! You’ve never seen anything like me, and you can’t beat me on your first try.”

Ord winced, then looked straight at Avram’s eyes.

“You were waiting for me,” he remarked. “On the night of your execution… you knew that I would come and save you…”

The pale hand moved inside the fossil print, just slightly.

Then Avram gave a little nod, saying, “Honestly? I’d given up on you. The Nuyens had come long ago and made their offer. If I got my chance, I was supposed to take it. They didn’t explain what this thing was… but I could guess. They told me, ‘He’s not evil, this brother of yours. But he’s sadly misguided. And when the circumstance arises, we promise, Ord will make the sane, decent choice.’ ”

“If I hadn’t come for you?” Ord inquired.

“I would have been killed. Of course. If the execution was theater, you wouldn’t have trusted me.” He sighed, then said, “Honestly, I expected to die. I didn’t want this. Not to save my life, I didn’t. Or even if I was doing some incredible good.” He sighed again, then said, “That’s why I was scared when I saw you… I knew that you’d come to save me at the last possible moment… and I was sick of heroics….”

Ord closed his corporeal eyes, his fatigue genuine.

When he opened them again, Avram was starting to say, “Surrender,” once more.

“I’m doing it,” Ord interrupted. “I’m doing it now.”

With a graceless crash of systems, he began setting his talents into a deep sleep. By the dozens, by the hundreds. He stripped away his camouflage first, letting the world watch him. Then put his weapons to sleep, and every talent with deadly applications. After thirty seconds of hard work, he had almost dismantled himself. Another few moments would have left him astonishingly ordinary. But then his surviving eyes saw something, and his head turned as Ravleen screamed, “No!”

Too late, Ord understood.

The Sanchex was wrestling with Buteo, distracting her with her strongest limbs, while a weak arm composed of the thinnest materials reached through the wall and across the tiny bedroom. Ravleen ignored Ord; she couldn’t have harmed him if she tried. What she grabbed was Avram’s sturdy wrist, and with all of the strength in that secret limb, she gave him a hard swift calculated jerk, barely lifting the hand off the cool mudstone.

But it had lifted. Just enough.

With a cool desperation, Avram pressed his palm back against Alice’s fossil palm. Even as the world began to tear apart, and as the gods screamed in rage and in grief, he kept his hand exactly where it belonged. And with the ancient mansion evaporating around him, he used his other hands to help in his sacred duty… thinking this wasn’t what it seemed to be… telling himself that he mattered, and he was noble, and he was doing, as always, something good…