Between you and me.
Who's stronger?
Xiaoke Zhuanzi, once the Bright Sword of the Mount Hua Sect, asked that question to her counterpart a lot. The Dark Sword of Mount Hua, Shenjia Youjian, never responded. As if he, heir of a sect of sword swinging maniacs, was too good to answer the basic question underpinning their existence.
That scholar. That reader of scrolls. Locked up in a cell with the texts of the Dao, content to remain that way, until the sun burned its last and the world ended.
She didn't mean to kill him. Really. But Shenjia Youjian had an off day or something, and now his blood was mopped up by weeping bitches on sanitation detail.
So she's stronger.
That was a week ago. A week since she was crippled. The old ghouls in the Sect Board of Directors knew a thing or two about their bloody business. Her dominant arm was cut off, just for starters. Her spiritual meridians were poisoned, gangrenous, and these spiritual organs transformed her material ones to match. Her world, once far reaching, once as easy to pass through as unsheathing a sword and throwing down, became hemmed in. Xiaoke Zhuanzi's world was a three meter by three meter iso cube. Connected to the main body of the orbital by a single boom.
Xiaoke Zhuanzi had twelve hours between the moment she struck off Shenjia Youjian's head (it rolled through the air so slow, and she thought, I'm screwed), and she spent it well. The word was- get ready, polish your knives, hide and bide your time for the correct moment. If you free me, I will teach you everything I know. Everything. No more waiting for promotion to Inner Circle.
All that was left was the waiting. In isolation, time drew out like a knife. Nothing to do but sit, wait, and feel the poison crawl from your extremities to your brain. Meditate and put yourself in a state of cryptobiosis, unaware of the world. If they threw her out into deep space she wouldn't even have noticed. To her, it was hell. A specific, tailor made hell, harsher than the Naraka, cooked up just for her, for all eternity. Waveless. Soundless. Devoid of motion, of change, a stagnating stillness that would drown her. It would be better, a part of her waking mind noted, to open her throat right now if her plan failed, if no one came and saved her.
Until at some point someone threw a bucket of water at her and jarred her back awake. Xiaoke Zhuanzi shook water out of her hair, wiping it from her eyes with an offered towel. "Lu Xiao." And nothing after Xiao, because it kept changing and people stopped keeping track. "How many days?"
"A week." He was Xiaoke Zhuanzi's second in the Third Pansolarium, and never threw in the towel even when the manager was howling in his ear to give up, give in, this isn't a match, this is a fight to the death. Good times. She came second after Mount Tai's Master Yi. "Here's your clothes."
Brocade jacket. Boots. Suit pants. And a half cape that covered her missing arm, all in black and outlined with gold, the plum flowers of the sect curling over her broad shoulders and falling down her arrow straight back. "I look good." It's the small things that make life bearable. "How many do we have?" She didn't remember tying up her hair being this hard, but then again. Only one hand.
"One hundred and fifty nine. Mostly Martial Arm," Lu Xiao replied. Xiaoke Zhuanzi tried again but gave up with a muttered curse. "Not a lot of academics. Most of them are mad that you killed their guy." 'The nerds', went unsaid. "It's not all bad. More than a few Biomed disciples packed up, one post-doc. A couple ritual techs. That Ge Qibing guy, remember him?"
"That'll do." She straightened her spine and squared her shoulders, ignoring the sudden sour pain. The way her spine was unrooted, secured only by inertia. The growling, chewing feeling in her gut. One thing at a time, Xiao. Then you'll handle the next thousand for sure. She brushed past him and into the crowd of waiting, eager faces in the corridor.
Faces fell the moment she walked through. This is who we chose? This cripple? We'll be led to our deaths.
Her organs were black and rotting. She could taste bile crawling up her throat and her muscles were soft as clay.
"Well? Let's get a move on."
One problem at a time. She shouldered her way through the crowd, stepped over two of the guards with slashed throats and empty eyes, and walked down to the orbital proper. And all the rest followed, chasing after her. Problem solved. A hundred and sixty boots clicked down all the way to the hangar bay. "Brother Ge." Fever sweat beaded on her forehead, and Xiaoke Zhuanzi saw double for a second. Another courtyard, filled with status holograms and view ports to the hangar, interposed itself on the first. She rubbed her eyes. "Good. Open the door."
Ge Qibing was a short, squat man, with a jutting brow and bulging eyes. His beard bristled as he stroked it, having lept from the security chief's desk in a showman's tumble. "Why, I suppose I was charged to open it for Xiaoke Zhuanzi, who is notable for having two arms and is as strong as a planetary bird. Excepting, my eye-" he made a ring with his fingers around one of his frankly terrifying eye- "only sees a one armed cripple."
Crap. "That's big words coming from a fucking midget. Open the door or I'll open it over your rotting corpse." That was… Lu Xiao, charging forward, zhanmadao almost unsheathed. Friendship was such a nice thing to have, but the mood now is electric. Her fate- back to isolation, or glorious piratical freedom, will be decided in the next few minutes.
"The gods made me this way," Ge Qibing said with a shrug. "She, on the other hand, did it to herself. Not the first person I would choose to join a mutiny."
She saw red. This was in a figurative sense, and also because Xiaoke Zhuanzi struck off Ge Qibing's nose with her sword, sheathe still on. A rising, hip to head cut. Blood fountained into the air. Any other time Xiaoke Zhuanzi would have had the sheathe off in the cut, but not today. Still, it was a length of hardened carbon fiber, moving at some speed. Ge Qibing crossed his eyes and stared down at his poor nose, hanging by a flap and dripping blood with some regularity.
Black bile was eating its way into her marrow. Her bones were gelatin.
Ge Qibing, Ritual Technician Third Rank, slammed his head into the ground and left a hole there. "I have," he shouted with a theatrical air, "wronged elder sister!"
XIaoke Zhuanzi blinked. There was a play afoot. "How churlish of me," Ge Qibing continued, slamming his head into the floor twice more for good measure, "to doubt elder sister! I am a small man, true, and prudence, rightly called cowardice by some, rules my heart still."
"What the fuck," someone whispered.
"And so! In repayment of this insult, I can only give my head in exchange! If it pleases you, my neck is yours to command!"
Xiaoke Zhuanzi laughed. Her teeth were pearly white, like a shark's. All her followers were looking at her in awe, fear, respect. Even the mutterers gracefully aquicised that their martial sister still could maim a man. So thank you, Ge Qibing. That was a good play. "Get up. We're one from an even hundred and sixty without you, Qibing. Open the door."
"Your wish."
The bay doors were sealed with three Demon-Head locks, three snarling faces, each one on top of the other, mounted on ten meters of plasteel alloy. Ge Qibing drew up the holographic data-map and unlocked them with an imputed code that was half poem and half randomized key. The vault rolled away, revealing the hangar, and Xiaoke Zhuanzi and her followers stormed in.
In ages past, sages erroneously called the planets realms, and measured each's journey to immortality by how many they could leap to. From Earth, to Mars, then to Jupiter and Saturn, and then backwards to Venus and Mercury, and then to the Oort and Hell. On Earth, the mighty that left were deified as gods and as sect ancestors. They left the mundane dirt to carouse with the demons and fairies and gods above, becoming as them in the process. So it was, and so it will be.
Until the invention of the rocket. And after that, the voidcruiser.
And so came the death of mystery and mysticism, as Ancient History 101 went. She didn't bother to know or care. Xiaoke Zhuanzi paid off a nerd to write her papers for her and got the teachers to look the other way by winning a Junior Pansolarium Tournament.
MHV Cinnabar dominated the hangar. It was menace manufactured, four hundred meters of armor and killing-weaponry. She knew the layout like the back of her hand- before everything, it was her's, as the Bright Sword of Mount Hua, General of the Left. At its prow was a Hundunic Entropic Accelerator, with standoff marathon missiles and three tachyon lances arranged like flower petals around it. Plasma-toroid repeaters festooned its sides, offering good coverage at close-to-knife-fight range. Once, hers. Now, still hers. Suck it, o withered fossils of the Board.
A hundred and sixty swords is a very good argument for obedience, and the skeleton crew put their hands on their heads and spread eagled on the floor, assisted by a sword held up to their necks. Ge Qibing opened the top airlock hatch, and they filed into the guts of the cruiser.
The few crew still on the cruiser gave up the ghost or just plain gave up. They made the ship echo with screams and the sound of steel on steel. She, flanked by Ge and Lu, barged into the cockpit. It was a glorified shoe closet, filled with dead lights and unblinking displays, and one very surprised fat man.
"Xiaoke Zhuanzi?" Fu Chen cried, the captain of the Cinnabar Star. Past tense. "Who fuckin' let you out?"
"Me." This time, she drew her sword first. A gleaming length of good metal drew eyes all around. "We're turning pirate. Piss off, die, or join, it's all the same to me."
Fu Chen purpled and drew the crewman's heavy saber at his waist. He's a captain, Xiaoke Zhuanzi thought. Fencing wasn't his speed. He had a supercomputer behind his eyes, locked into his grey matter, the better to calculate vectors and firing solutions, but that's not a replacement for sword-talent.
They prowled around each other for a moment, calculating and thinking. Then-
Xiaoke Zhuanzi cut the timeline into threes. Mount Hua's most esoteric sword art, the rather unimaginatively named Mysterious Sword. In one, she feinted down and cut him at his ankles, but he managed a thin slash across her sleeve. The second, she parried the saber and vomited blood. The saber cut her across the chest and she thought no more- abort. The timeline came back together. For a moment, they were both equally disoriented, piecing together a shattered chronology. Xiaoke Zhuanzi vomited blood and locked her straight sword across his saber and pushed it upwards with screaming, burning muscles. Even sickened, even dying, she was a tiny bit too strong for Fu Chen (weakling, a part of her sneered, never goes to practice, doesn't even lift).
If she had her other arm she would have caught Fu Chen's wrist and freed her sword hand and gutted him. All she could do now was this-
As Fu Chen was blinking blood and bits of lung out of his eyes she sank her teeth into his throat and chewed out his neck veins. Was she dreaming or was it all a bit less painful? The blood, the meat, it was delicious. The dead woman couldn't tell horrible from supper. Fu Chen's lifeblood dripped from her chin.
She tasted copper on her tongue, and she knew that the rot was reaching her nerves.
"You bloody bastard's bitch," the captain (o captain!) gasped through his ruined throat. He looked so plump, so inviting. Was there ever anything as good? "There isn't a hell cold enough for you."
Chop. "There isn't," Xiaoke Zhuanzi agreed. Fu Chen, Fu Chen. Too loyal to Mount Hua to think of leaving. Hated pirates too much to think of leaving. But a good enough friend while it lasted.
Blood splattered on her shoes. Fu Chen's head had the wrathful expression of dear old departed King Yanluo. She kicked it away and found a box of wet wipes and cleaned her face. "Ge, start up the engines, and warm up the main cannon."
"Hell yes. I've always wanted to test this puppy out."
"When you're finished, meet us in the drop bays. For the ceremony." Xiaoke Zhuanzi sighed. Oratory wasn't her thing, but she had to.
The ceremony involved a giant vat of cheap sorghum wine and a knife. All hundred and sixty gathered in the central drop bay inside the Cinnabar Star while the hum of the engines made the floor vibrate under their boots. They pricked their thumbs and let blood fall into the clear liquor until it turned bright red.
Xiaoke Zhuanzi stood before them on a shoebox, a bowl of the bloody wine in her one hand. It was not dissimilar to staring across a pack of waiting wolves.
And then…
The gate to the station was sealed off with a red siren. The port to empty space was clamped down with a meter thick block of steel. Now we're in it. "Well now! Brothers, sisters. As we have it, we have two options. One. We can go out there, say that we've been naughty boys and girls, and we humbly prostrate before the magnificence of the withered old ghouls on the board. We go out there and beg for mercy. Like cowards. Is that what you want?"
No one did, and they roared it at her, with her, to her question. It was the madness of crowds, the alchemy of the perfect moment. "Then we are agreed! From today on, we ourselves are joined in common fellowhood. Comrades of one mind and one heart!"
How they howled! "Today! Above the red earth of Mars, we annihilate our ties to the old and the tired Mount Hua, too far from its hospice bed. We form a new one in it's place." She stepped off the shoebox and moved amongst the crowd. Not as a faraway lecturer, but as a friend. "We won't follow their didacts any longer. Nobody ever fuckin' liked them. Do you, Li? Hell no. We'll share some wine, good shit, not this sorghum crap when this is over. C'mon, first hit!"
It burned on the way down. Was it companionship or the blood that sweetened the flavour? "If we breach heaven's gates," she continued. The sect still hadn't woken up. They must be having an off day, "we do it together. If we plunge into hell, we do it together. One for all and all for one!
"From now on, we will write history as some men write plays," she declared, walking the breadth of the bay, to the opened wall at the far end, where the sound of running could be heard. A team of a half dozen gunners rounded the corner, headed by some faceless sword hand. Man, she thought she'd rate more. "See those dumbasses? We, by virtue of our essential freedom, are better than them. They're just serfs who exist so the Board can roll around on their tuition money. Right, fella?"
The captain of the gunners purpled. At the same time, the spaceport on the bottom of the hangar irised shut, panels of meter thick steel cutting off the stars. "Fire on that bitch! Now!" Three of them went down on their knees and aimed the heavy DU spike throwing rifles at her. She can do this. She did this a hundred thousand times before, she can do it again.
The whiiir-phut of one release. They found an early starter. Someone's an early starter. On instinct she whirled and grasped the ten centimeter long dart, just inches away from someone's eye, hot and sizzling in her palm (ow fuck she is the queen genius of all the world's geniuses) and threw it back. The one on the far left gasped and clawed at his chest, blood spurting in jets.
Lesions sprouted up and down her arm, setting it alight in white hot pain.
"What's the exit plan? I just realized- how the hell are we gonna get out?" Someone asked.
"Oh ye of little faith. Ge Qibing!" Xiaoke Zhuanzi raised her arm to the ceiling like a conductor.
"Entropic Accelerator primed and ready at your order. Shields're up too. I'm closing the bay door."
"Then FIRE!" she shouted, throwing the words into the small squad like knives. Their faces turned pale and they turned tail as the hangar shook with a terrible unearthly noise to general applause. All around them decohered proto-matter and hot radiation bounced off of the drive bubble shield as the bay door closed on this chapter of their lives.
