Reclamation(153)

Avir picked an empty chamber and shut herself inside with the ancient books. She wedged the comm terminal on a shelf and stood in front of it. For a moment, she just enjoyed the silence and the familiar intimacy of solid walls.

She could have done this up above, but it was easier to think down here, and she had no idea what the Assembly was going to say to her.

Avir opened a line to the Assembly’s waiting terminals. Every comm line into the chambers was answered by a Witness now that the Reclamation had begun. No word between the teams on the Home Ground and the Assembly would be lost.

“Good Morning and also Good Day, Contractor Avir,” said the Witness when the screen cleared. The image was good, if distant. She could see the glint of her own reflection in his camera eye.

“I have a first level emergency situation,” said Avir. “I must speak to the Assembly immediately.”

The Witness stiffened and relaxed so fast, that for a moment Avir was certain it was her imagination.

No, I startled him.

She had just enough time to see his hand move across his own board before the image shifted.

The Reclamation Assembly looked small and unreal on the flat screen. She had stood before the Assembly hundreds of times, but she had always been surrounded by accurate projections in the Assembly Chamber of the Hundredth Core. Even the Witnesses with their cameras trained on the screen she spoke through looked ridiculously far away.

“You have declared an emergency, Contractor Avir,” said the Moderator. “The Assembly is awaiting the details.”

Avir didn’t even try to compose herself as she gave what could only loosely be called a report. She wanted the assembled representatives up there in the encampment to know about the screams, and the anger of their artifacts, and the Vitae blood that had been spilled. She wanted them to understand the scale of the miracles that they stood on top of.

When she ran out of words, she received nothing but silence from the Assembly. She was glad of it, because it was a signal that she had gotten through to them.

Finally, one representative, a Senior Engineer with smooth mahogany skin and long hair that was the same color as her sepia robes, signaled for time. A red light appeared above her as the Moderator granted her request.

“Does the Contractor have a recommendation for a course of action in the light of these events?” asked the representative.

“I do, Representative,” said Avir slowly, “but it is not a pleasant one.”

“What is it?” the Moderator prompted her.

“Moderator,” said Avir, “we deliberately chose to begin the Reclamation of the human-derived artifacts by mimicking the authority example that their social groupings had created to deal with the lack of the Ancestors’ direction. The authority example they have created, the “Nameless Powers,” is all-encompassing and all-powerful and is recorded in their mutated oral history as forcibly removing sources of rebellion.”

The attention of the Assembly was so focused that Avir could begin to feel it in her spine. It strengthened her, exhausted as she was, and it reminded her who she was. Her voice fell into properly smooth cadences.

“It is, therefore, my thought that if we wish to continue to make use of this authority example, we need to remove the rebellion. All of it.

“We need to remove the city.”

Now there was noise. Representatives muttered into their own intercoms or shuffled keys on their own boards, trying to call up data to support or strike down what she had just suggested. Avir waited for the flurry to pass, just as she had waited all the other times.

A Historian signaled for time and was acknowledged by the Moderator.

“How many artifacts are in the city Narroways?” he asked.

“Approximately four thousand,” Avir said promptly. Despite her knowledge that this was right and the war had to be waged before the Aunorante Sangh gained real power, a cold wind blew through her mind.

“Out of a total population of?”

“Four million.”

Avir knew she had probably just announced the death of Narroways and of four thousand precious artifacts. Part of her wanted to erase her words. For a split second, she thought about telling the Moderator she had reconsidered. Four thousand pieces of the Ancestors’ work was too high a price to pay just to eliminate what might only be a hundred Aunorante Sangh.

It was out of proportion and she knew it. The Reclamation had to continue. They had to secure the majority of the human-derived artifacts quickly so that they could be interfaced once more with the living heart of the Home Ground. That was more important than the safety of a few human-derived constructs milling around with their fearful eyes following her every move, with their distorting anger recreating the Aunorante Sangh, who had risen against the Ancestors and stolen the world away, with the blood and the screams and the stones …