The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.19

Chapter 2.19: Crucible

“Charlotte!” Xavier dove to catch her on her way down, cradling her head to keep it from the hard cobblestone. The dolt. She was weak, not unconscious. Despite herself a warmth blossomed in Charlotte’s chest, almost enough to make her forget the ache spreading through her entire body. Almost.

“Charlotte?” Caliban stood over her, expression as icy as ever, belied only by the uncertainty in his voice. “Are you alright?”

She bit back a snarl. “Do I look alright?”

“Shhh.” Xavier scrambled up onto his knees at her side, still holding the back of her head off the ground. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

It didn’t take a genius to know those words weren’t meant for her.

“What’s wrong?” Caliban asked. “How do you feel?”

“Muscle aches, weakness, fever,” Charlotte rattled off. “Symptoms progressing unnaturally quickly.”

She watched as Cal’s body stilled, the little motions of breath and maintaining balance and coming to an uncanny halt. Over a year she’d known him now, and still the sight of him cycling sent a chill down Charlotte’s spine.

“Speed of onset and lack of apparent attacker implies either a curse, a toxin, or a pathogen. Start from the beginning.”

Charlotte obeyed, clamping her eyes shut and forcing her breathing to steady. Soreness in her diaphragm kept her lungs from completely filling, imposing a faster, shallower rhythm than she would’ve liked, but a rhythm it was. She sank into her core. The familiar pale yellow orb awaited her, half the size to which would eventually grow before it came time to condense again. She searched it with her mind’s eye, searching for any sign of malignance. She found none.

Next came her meridians, a careful scan along the length of each for any knots of qi or lingering enchantment. She found nothing.

“No curse,” she announced her findings. “Checking for toxins next.”

She’d tried a half-dozen times already over the course of the day as her symptoms had steadily worsened, but for Xavier’s sake more than anyone’s Charlotte repeated the process. Fighting hard to focus through the full-body ache, she ran qi through her stomach, blood, and kidney meridians, forcing her metabolism into overdrive. The effort would’ve purged her body of any mundane poison, or hastened the effects of anything more potent. When nothing changed, she again reported her results.

“Not a toxin.”

“Pathogen then,” Caliban said robotically. “Potentially something the Sil left behind, unsuited to human biology.”

The fever hinted in that direction. Of course, she’d already tried cycling her bone meridian to pump up her white blood cell production, and there was little else a cultivator could actually do to fight off a disease that somehow overcame her natural defense.

Charlotte looked anyway. Any natural pathogen shouldn’t have been able to find purchase in her qi-reinforced body, which meant something spiritually engineered.

This time, as her mind’s eye searched her body, it looked past the bounds of her meridians themselves, analyzing the flesh around it for signs of inflammation or microorganisms steeped in qi. She found inflammation. She found inflammation aplenty. It was everywhere. Dead and dying and burning and swelling tissue made up almost her entire body as the invader devoured her alive.

But there was no qi, no enchantment, no magic, not even a hint of life beyond her own to the infection. If anything, the amount of qi seemed to be diminishing as the pathogen reproduced, as if converting her qi-infused cells into something absent life entirely.

That left two possibilities. Either someone had somehow engineered a bioweapon that used Cal’s invisible qi, or the far more likely and far more terrifying truth.

She was a dead woman.

“Shit. Shit shit shit.” Even as she uttered the curse, a strange calm fell upon her. She didn’t have to worry anymore. She didn’t have to fight and struggle and plot and scheme. The die had been cast. It was out of her hands.

It was over.

“You found it.” The tone in Caliban’s voice washed over her like an ice bath. He didn’t care. Of course he didn’t. She knew what his meridians did to him. She’d have to make him care. They had to get out.

“It’s not a pathogen,” she told him, “not a normal one, anyway. It’s nanites. I’m sure of it.”

“That explains the Gardener’s interest in this place,” Cal said as if they hadn’t just stumbled into a cache of dark tech. “She probably seeks to avert another Siskon incident. Curious the swarm hasn’t spread beyond these ruins. Something must be reining them in.”

Nanotechnology was one of a handful of pieces of dark tech that remained common knowledge. An entire planet and its people turned to gray goo was too much to hide. However much his response seemed to completely ignore the gravity of the situation, Cal was right. The Gardener was here for the nanites, or at least whatever was keeping them from devouring all of Ilirian—whatever had failed to keep them from devouring her.

“Listen. It’s not too late for you. Get out of here. The nanites are in the enchantments. That’s what stung me. The Gardener has to know. Ilirian has to know. They have to evacuate, get as many people off-world as—fuck. They can’t evacuate. They have to quarantine.”

Cal nodded. “Understood.” He turned to leave without so much as a farewell.

“Wait.” Xavier practically whispered the word, yet still it carried through the silent street. Charlotte could hear the tension in his voice. She looked up to meet his gaze.

Fear felt foreign to Xavier’s eyes, an intruder to those azure orbs that’d only ever known confidence and courage. It was wrong.

It was wrong it was wrong it was wrong.

He swallowed back a knot in his throat, his next words coming out colored with terror and resignation both. “You need to advance.”

Charlotte blinked. “What? My core’s only half full. It’d be suicide.”

“It’s a crucible. You have to treat the nanites like a crucible. Reforge your body. It’s the only way.”

“Xavier, I’m not even close to ready to—”

“Listen to me!” he bellowed at her, tears streaking down his face. “Charlotte, it’s the only way. You have to trust me. I need you to trust me. I need you to… I need you.”

Charlotte’s eyes fell, unable to meet his as she blinked away the moisture in her eyes. “Xave…”

“You can do this. I know you can do this. Charlotte… I know.”

She met his gaze once more, and through the redness and the tears, Charlotte saw something that shook her to her very core, that sent cold terror running down her spine, far beyond what her own looming death or even the nanites’ apocalyptic threat could muster. She looked into Xavier’s eyes as he advised the impossible, and she found not fear nor worry nor desperation.

She found certainty.

And Charlotte knew why the Arcadian Gardener thought they would start a war.

“Okay,” she muttered. “I trust you.”

“Cal!” Xavier shouted even though Cal stood only a few feet away, waiting silently and patiently as he watched the fraught exchange. “She needs qi. As much as you can give her.”

Cal nodded.

Charlotte gulped. This was the plan? She’d seen how much light qi Cal generated when he used his only technique. It was practically nothing, barely a percent of the qi he expended. Anywhere other than deep orbit the ambient qi drowned it beyond notice.

But Cal didn’t just darken. He didn’t just wrap himself in shadows to better camouflage his deathly pale skin against the background of gloom as Charlotte had seen him do a thousand times.

Cal vanished. In his place stood a silhouette, a fuzzy shape of darkness so black it felt to Charlotte like she stared into the abyss, a human-shaped hole in reality that devoured every bit of light and warmth and life in its vicinity, and this abyss stared back with eyes full of stars.

To her mind’s eye, he shone like a beacon.

Qi flooded the air around her, thicker and more intense than even Fyrion’s best focus rooms. With practiced will Charlotte wrestled it under her control, overpowering its inherent desire to move and to spread and to escape as she forced it into herself. Drop by drop she condensed it into her core, asserting her dominance over the power even as she pulled in yet more.

Now it was a race—a race against time, a race against the nanites disassembling her on a molecular level to build more of their own, a race against Caliban’s almost certainly strained meridians.

Charlotte didn’t let herself stop to fathom the sheer quantity of qi he must’ve been channeling. If this beacon, this deluge accounted for but a percent of his expenditure, she could hardly imagine the scale of the power at play, a power she couldn’t even sense.

No wonder it’d driven Nick mad.

She lost track of time in the repetitiveness of the act, in the drip drip drip of qi inflating her steadily growing core. Caliban held strong. Her body didn’t.

Charlotte suppressed the pain behind her spine meridian. She held off the weakness as long as she could with her muscle meridian. She kept her breathing steady with her lung meridian.

One by one those measures failed.

The nanites ate through her muscles, leaving her limp in Xavier’s arms. They ate her nerves, sending first burning agony then chilling numbness through her body. They ate her lungs, collapsing one and then the other until even her labored breathing came to an end.

Charlotte didn’t hesitate. She didn’t look to see if her core had reached the upper boundaries of bronze. She needed every microsecond she had before the lack of oxygen or the nanites or both destroyed her brain.

Charlotte wrapped her will around her bronze core, swollen and unstable from recklessly fast growth, and she pushed.

She pushed with every ounce of horror at the day’s twin revelations. She pushed with every ounce of awe at Cal’s power on display. She pushed with every ounce of love pouring off the man who clutched her dying body. She pushed with rage and red defiance, against her father who’d set her on this path, against Xavier for keeping such a secret from her, against the gray scourge itself, denying this banned technology—this apocalyptic threat with the potential to wipe out entire worlds—its very purpose.

I am my own, she whispered to the father that dared control her.

I am my own, she cried to the lover that dared lie to her.

I am my own, she roared to the plague that dared devour her.

A shockwave burst from Charlotte’s core, racing through her meridians and leeching from them into the tissue beyond. Of her blood and her bones and her meat and her metal it took claim, shattering that which was wrong and remaking that which was broken.

It seeped into her every cell, reinforcing and reinvigorating and instilling the very purpose of her steel clad will into the vessel that hosted it.

I am my own.

The shockwave reverberated against the boundaries of her body, echoing back inward to crash against her transitioning core, serving as the final hammer fall upon the anvil of her will to pound her advancement into reality.

No larger than the size of a golf ball, a brownish-red sphere floated in Charlotte’s center, bright and vibrant with energy that hung about it in a dim corona.

Her iron core was smaller than it should’ve been, but it was whole, it was healthy, and it was there. Still, breath didn’t come. Still, her body lay limp. It mattered not.

With an idle thought, the merest exertion of her will, the nanites—her nanites—got to work.