A typical candle emits light at a luminous intensity of about one candela, in every direction except down.
One can leave oneself a trail in wax, if one tilts the candle, or detect the presence and vector of microcurrents in the air. (It could also effect euthanasia, were one trapped and suffocating.) Ptarmigan is grateful for the candle: it serves as both canary and guardian.
These passages look all alike to her, but the wax trail wouldn’t lie. There are grues in here, somewhere very close. They’re playing a game with exactly one rule.
A typical candle can last for hours.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The California Civil War isn’t nearly as organized as the other one, but does have the advantage of nice weather and cell phone coverage. The Battle of Los Angeles isn’t as big as everyone sort of wants it to be; Nora’s squad spends most of the week doing mopup.
Which is why the ambush outside the big theater hits them so hard. Nora leaves bloody handprints on the sidewalk, but the med squad is snappy.
“Fucking idiotic,” she curses herself.
“Relax,” says one of them, “don’t you get a Purple Heart for this?”
“It sucks,” she winces, “just to be nominated.”
“So where am I in the initiative order now?” asks Bronwen, frowning, doing arithmetic.
“You pulled out the quorum call last round, so you moved down to fourth,” says Daffyd. “That means Knox has the floor.”
“Oh, okay,” says Knox. “I’m using an encounter power… uh, Force Recess.” Dice clatter on the board. “Hit! Seven votes!”
“Reduced to two,” smirks Daffyd from behind his screen, “they’ve got defection resist 5.”
“Aren’t you at least going to roll a morale check yet?” says Bronwen. “We outnumber them now, and–”
“No morale check.”
“Why not?”
“These guys,” says Daffyd, “fight to the death.”
They’re deep in the Uncanny Valley, deeper than any manned survey has plumbed, and the walls of their bathysphere are three feet thick and groaning. The spotlamp is low. Things that aren’t quite human flicker by, curious, providing their own illumination.
It is very cold.
“Are we even sure this thing has a bottom?” mutters Iger, glancing again and again at the pressure gauge on his dash.
“I keep telling you,” says Noam, “its depth is subjective.”
“I can’t breathe.” Iger struggles with straps. “If I just–”
“Don’t take off the mask!”
Iger stops, swallowing. Surely he still has a face.
“He’s going to offer you a last chance to make good on your debt,” the less burly of the guards mutters into Yael’s ear as, once again behooded and bedonkeyed, they jounce off to certain doom in the desert.
“What?” she snaps. It takes her a second to realize which language he’s speaking.
“Up to you if you want to take it. He’s planning on killing you even if you succeed, but it’ll be some time before I can get an extraction team out here, so–”
“Unfortunate plover?” says Yael, astonished, starting to catch up.
“It’s ‘sturdy protuberance’ now,” he grimaces.
Had Zach completed the training Hidebound claimed to have given him, he would have known that the impact of a bullet while wearing a vest is like a kick to the breadbasket by a medium-sized ungulate with smallish hooves. Had Hidebound been trying to show off, he might have used his favorite example, the okapi.
This would not have helped Zach, who believes that okapis are total nerds from Japan.
“Whough,” he says, falling gracelessly, denied any useful point of comparison. The Vulpine Phalanger has already vanished. Hidebound curses himself for aiming at the center of mass: training, you know.
“We thought they’d just want a little graft and service off the top–protection, you know, not unusual in these parts–but they won’t leave us alone.” Jay shakes his head. “They want more. They want too much, and the things they want to do with my boys ain’t right. So I get to thinking that for less than what they’re skimming–”
“You could just hire a gun hand,” Pimal nods.
“We can pay,” says Jay.
“Well, I have to say,” she says, split by a crooked smile, “that’s the first time I’ve ever had a whore say that to me.”
While Silhouine and their captor conduct an increasingly far-fetched conversation, Yael looks around. They’re still in the city: she can make out Grandfather Gate through a glassless window. No passersby–the second floor, then? Or higher? Her hands are bound. The guards are burly but few.
She can get out of here, but she probably can’t take Silhouine with her.
Sigh.
“Inexpensive melon?” she tries, in her native language, in case he knows any of the old code words. “Unfortunate plover?”
The man in the red cassock freezes, alarmed. “Did she just cast foreign magic on me?”
“Yes!” says Silhouine.
Thursday, February 25, 2010