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Save Point: Upon Awakening

Khem, Two hundred Years Later

The door appears to be great big mindless mass of stone, but the Dragon recognizes the pattern it is carved in as a Gate To The West, the formal ceremonial original of a Khem valley temple door, and lets go its grip on him. Terrowne slumps to his knees just beyond the stone, on the weather-bleached wooden planks just outside the threshold.

He reaches for the door and it lights up with the image of a circular seal floating an inch or so above the surface, apparently triggered by the proximity of the active technology in his blood and nervous system. There is no pattern of mutual exchange, none of the protocols match, but the door lock still detects him as some sort of unknown device.

Despite its appearance, the material of the door is all but indestructible, at least to the chisels and basic tools of the local people, and however much time may have passed, no-one has succeeded in getting in. The crowd that has gathered round to fearfully watch one of their gods draws back, murmuring amongst themselves and wondering what will happen next.

He could probably hack the door, but that strikes him as being too much like some sort of daft ultimate bonus puzzle from a videogame, where you'd spend several hours trying to unlock the hidden alternate ending. And the people are waiting, they have fish on a string to carry home for dinner and jobs to do, he wouldn't want to deprive them of something worth watching. Subtlety would seem to be the key.

He draws upon the littlest powers he has, the ones that are actually his and not the Dragons; and locates the bars and tumblers of the locking system, then pulls them open whilst gently maintaining a small trickle of current, fed by the blue-black mica of the solar panels inside the building, that should cut off in the event of tampering. The floating display changes color and displays newer and more urgently flashing symbols as it concludes that there has been an error, given that the mechanism returns closed whilst it is already open. After a minute or so the door fails open as the system reboots, splitting down the middle and sliding apart.

He has talked with the local people, and daring young boys have climbed onto the roof of the temple in the past, looking down through the ever-clear panes of self-cleaning glass set into the roof, to see the lioness deity sleeping inside. They could not break the glass and any chips or scratches self-annealed, which scared them off in the long run, although several of the braver ones have drawn quite good pornographic sketches of the goddess they yearned after in their youth. There are two backup arrays of solar cells inside the building itself, attached to either side of the casket, which are safe from being damaged because no-one can get to them from the outside. Although almost certainly somewhat degraded by now, they seem to draw their maximum of power at high noon, which has led to associations of the feline goddess inside with fire and solar light. They have taken to calling her Sekhmet, or sx.mt in the local ideographic system, a name with complex play of meanings including 'she who is powerful of flame' based on its linguistic associations with fire and control.

He just hopes she's still alive in there, after however long it's been.

As the door slides open to reveal a view of the room that hasn't been seen for centuries, he's amazed by just how clean it is inside. There's no accumulation of dust or proliferation of insect carapaces, not even any dust, as the active materials inside the stone that is not really stone continue to perform their intended function and keep the room antiseptically clean and just slightly warm, regardless of the conditions outside.

Inside the tank she is waiting for him. The immersion medium has become deeply and brilliantly green in color with the passing of time, either with accumulated waste or perhaps through the addition of some sort of flame suppressant. There are a number of very average-looking but well preserved wooden tables either side of the door, sethura-style furnishings made with local wood, and one holds a couple of volumetric flasks marked in unfamiliar units. The open one is empty, contents long since evaporated, but the stoppered flask holds a green liquid that might very well be ammonium polycarbonate, perhaps to help check involuntary fire-dreams as she sleeps.

Along with the tables, there are tall slender ceramic vases painted beautifully in a limited palette with wide-winged local birds and a stylized black sethuress, wielding an elaborate hunting bow with many qualifying protrusions. This room must have seemed very tastefully decorated once, perfectly suited to its purpose, with the tables for friends and work-mates of the injured to sit at and wait, and three raised tables in case multiple persons needed medical care at once. It would have been equally suited to examinations, short-term care and repairs, or even investigation of the dead in equal measure. The actual doctors-office and work room, with tools and benches, lies beyond a further sealed door. But now the central table has sunken down to become a life-support tank, and the benches to either side are overlain with backup solar cells that have automatically deployed to provide the power required to run it.

He walks across a section of the floor that is also a drainage grille, to which three channels runs from each of the tables, facilitating the easy cleanup of spilled fluids if it all goes horribly wrong. There's no evidence of any leakage from the tank, which is probably a good sign.

On the second set of tables near the tank, where the peculiar sethura chairs to accommodate two sets of knees lean against the wall, he sees Cleos own personal compound bow, next to the solidly organic and chitinous quiver matching it which holds only seven remaining black steel arrows from the original set. This would be why Sekhmet is spoken of as having seven arrows, he assumes, and why they are considered bringers of biological death, after what has surely happened to the arrow-case that has merely held them all this time.

On the opposite table are the remains of the set of Azatlani armor she was wearing when she disappeared in flames, and this is much less promising. There's old, old blood on the broken ceramic plates of the cuirass from the multiple stabbings, and the shin-mounted blades set nearby are all smashed up and disaligned, although the modified helm with the ear-guards is mostly intact. It's pretty much a write-off, although it might be repaired, with enough time and dedication. Half a roll of the local linen bandages has been casually discarded nearby.

He steels himself and looks straight at the tank.

Where the liquid must once have covered her entirely, the level is down a little, exposing her breasts but not quite the tip of her muzzle, giving a most unusual pattern of tan around her aureolae, while the rest of her is looking thinner and paler than he'd expect. In the submerged depths, he can't quite see her crotch or the slightly ribbed tubes that still run into her, but there's no sign of any other connectors except for a few slender tendrils to neck and temples, presumably to monitor vital signs and provide a more general external output as distinct to the metrics the tank uses within itself. Most importantly of all, there are no wounds or injuries of any kind to be seen, whether from the battle itself or from her long stewing in the tank.

Her chest still rises and falls, he realizes, but incredibly slowly. Resources are limited and so the tank has economized to heartbeats per hour or day, rather than minute, trying to conserve the available mass feed and keep her from awakening in the most efficient possible manner. Now all he has to do is figure out how to wake her up without killing her.

In the end, it isn't really that hard. Some past designer with a pragmatic approach to medical matters has built a concealed panel into the base of each table, which covers two manually-actuated and mutually exclusive buttons, to which all of the equipment that could possibly be attached is ultimately enslaved. The sethura have different visual conventions to Azatlan and the Rama Empire for representing concepts such as safe, neutral and dangerous, but this is pretty much impossible to screw up. He takes a deep breath, then pushes carefully on the one protruding button, causing it to sink down and lock, whilst the adjacent one pops out and then disengages. He waits anxiously to see what will happen.

After a few worrying minutes, she starts to make small movements inside the tank, at first stretching her arms and legs as though waking up, then more urgent movements as she struggles to free herself of something unseen which is intruding on her. When her abdomen starts to flex as she tries to sit up, and her eyes snap open with a look of panic in them, he puts his arm around her shoulders and tries to help her up.

She grabs him with both arms and retches green oxygenating liquid all over both of them and the floor, but she mostly hits the drainage grille, which is what it's there for, after all. He doesn't let go, he keeps holding her and rubbing her back to help her cough the stuff out from the very bottom of her lungs, and only after several minutes of coughing and choking is she finally able to breathe consistently again, admittedly rather weakly and with a hint of strain. She clings to him like a small child and they're both absolutely covered in the stuff.

He props one feline eyelid open wide to check her pupils, making a wild white-eyed snarl out the corner of her mouth, and then gives her a brief slimy kiss on the forehead. It's either the most or the least romantic moment he could possibly think of, depending on his point of view.

"Oh gods. Oh fuck. What the hell happened?" Cleo manages to demand in a choked whisper once she has enough of her composure back to try speaking again. "What the hell happened? The last thing I remember was... was..."

He's about to try and reassure her when she suddenly looks terrified and clutches at her chest. A moment before everything was fine, but now blood vessels are visibly breaking open in her eyes around the periphery of her pupils and her vision must surely be tinged with red. "They killed me. I died. Holy fuck I died. Oh gods, my heart. This can't be right!"

He places his ear to her chest, feels at her wrist with two outstretched fingers, and is horrified to hear the same sound that is pulsing in Cleos own ears, not the usual resilient double-thump of a healthy heart-beat that he has listened to so many times late at night, but an irregular, tricrotic pattern of three surges that can't possibly be normal. He's heard of this before, it's the diagnosis for a form of heart failure, but the extra pulse is just as strong as all the others, not weaker or delayed, and the additional blood pressure and circulation must be wreaking havoc on her already weakened body as it tries desperately to adapt to the overload.

"Good gods, a triple bypass. They bypassed my fucking death! Hell! Hell and damn!" she gasps with increasing panic, starting to verge on the hysterical. Her suddenly blood-stained sclera flick randomly about the room, and she clutches desperately at his hand, but then her vision suddenly alights on something and stops dead. "Reflexidrine! In my combat armour! I still had one left!"

He doesn't need instructions, because he also knows all about reflexidrine. It was the ADF's combat drug of choice, with truly bizarre side-effects, and more importantly it was designed for exactly this sort of situation, to keep someone alive whether they liked it or not until their body could heal enough to recover. Cleo had been terribly excited when they managed to get her not just the Azatlani armour but also the gear that went with it, including the medical kit, and she'd gone on and on about it.

He dashes over to the remains of the armour as she sags and clutches at the edge of the tank, trying not to sink back under the used-up liquid. Under the mesh strapping of plates designed to cover down the outside of the upper thigh he finds it, a one-off single-shot 'osteo-injector' designed to operate by simple manual brute force and punch through anything that might get in the way, even bone if necessary. The whole injector is made entirely of an aluminium-light but bronze-patinated metal, with a flat upper surface on the plunger, and the brightly-dyed liquid inside sloshes around as he pulls the cap off the bottom end, seemingly unaffected by the passage of time.

This device was designed to work under any conditions, no matter what, even in the complete absence of any sort of technology. He dashes back to the tank, braces himself, and then stabs her through the heart with it. It scrapes off one of her platinum-titanium reinforced ribs, at least he thinks it's a rib, then slides straight into its target.

After he's pulled the needle out and placed his thumb over the tiny puncture that it made, he holds her for several more minutes. She is silent and unresponsive, slightly clammy with the cooling suspension liquid all over her, the blood-flow thumping horribly in her veins and every major blood-vessel visible near the surface of her skin distended by the excess pressure.

After a time, her strange triple heart-beat begins to slow, not towards failure but to a normal rhythm, or at least as much as it is possible for such a sequence to be a normal rhythm. He props open her eyelid again, and the blood in her sclera seems to be being reabsorbed, as the surface damage starts to repair itself. Soon, she is able to move again, and gets her breathing back under control, and is able to focus her vision enough to watch him again through a slowly fading veil of red. She licks the slime off her bruised-feeling lips and addresses him.

"Could you maybe help me get out of this tank? I seem to have some tubes shoved up my ass where there really shouldn't be any."

Terrowne can't help but laugh and hug her, carefully of course, because she's still weak from everything that has happened over the last century or two.

The tubing seems to have operated on a principle sort of like a dogs mating-knot, able to swell up across several of the ridges in the surface to form an irregularly spherical shape, acting as a punctal occluder for her wounds to prevent further blood-loss, and also to seal the end of her digestive tract and urethra. The mechanism was never designed to be used for this long and so remains partially distended even after the system has been disengaged, which is how they can guess the intended mode of operation.

He supports her from behind under the shoulders, while she pushes weakly with her legs against the front wall of the tank, as though they were engaged in some sort of sex act. After the first attempt fails, he has to remove the narrower catheter tube first, and she pisses hotly all over his hand when it finally comes out. It's totally inadvertent, but oddly enough she feels no particular shame.

When the second try succeeds, a truly remarkable length of tubing slithers out of her and he's greatly relieved that it retains enough flexibility to be removed without pulling at her insides. "Uck," says Cleo, when he finally gets her all the way to her feet, and the final few inches come loose and splash into the now visibly deteriorating tank medium. "I think that's quite enough anal play for one day. I feel like my asshole's never going to close up properly ever again."

Since it's all getting disgustingly messy anyway, he scoops up a couple of handfuls of least-contaminated suspension medium and slathers it between her legs, using it to get her clean as best he can. The liquid is starting to become gelatinous and chunky, and being switched off suddenly seems to have put an end to it once and for all, as it gradually congeals.

There are showers in the medical area as you would expect, in the corners to either side of the secondary door behind the tables, but it seems unlikely that the water supply system, which was externally sourced through pipes using pumps, is still working after all this time. Certainly pressing the controls does nothing, so he helps her to stagger outside.

They're both dreadfully surprised and embarrassed when it turns out that most of the crowd of local people are still waiting to see what will happen - have, in fact, been seeing what has happened by catching glimpses around the corner of the door - and it's just lucky that none of them know Azatlani, because as soon as they emerge from the threshold, an enormous cheer erupts from everybody on seeing that their sleeping goddess has finally been awoken. It's only been just under half-an-hour, after all, and this is the best entertainment imaginable.

Cleo plays up the moment by returning him the slimy kiss from earlier, only with more tongue and a tired but happy smile. The crowd moves back to let him help her down to the nearby river, where green rushes grow on the banks and it's fairly safe to bathe, thanks to fixed nets that keep out the larger crocodiles.

Later, sitting in the shallows up to their waists, he scrubs her back and listens to her heart, trying to get used to the strange one-two-three beat, in between telling her he knows about what happened after she got stabbed, which isn't really that much. It seems like it'll be a few days before she's fully back to normal, but that's easy enough to live with when, for a just a moment earlier, he thought he'd lost her all over again. The locals hang about intermittently, asking questions and making comments in between going about their day, washing clothes on rocks upstream and so forth, and Cleo does her best to answer with the limited Khemi she picked up on their last visit here. Best comment goes to one of the washer-women, who points out Cleo's irregular tan line and assures her it isn't that bad and will go away in a week or two, unimpressed by a goddess as only another woman could be.

"So the sethura are all gone?"

"Yes, almost all of them. This is mostly reconstruction and guesswork, but it looks like Kilseth killed all the members of the expedition who knew what he'd done and wouldn't subsequently back him, and then left with the others. He didn't take their main base ship out near Lioshan for some reason, he seems to have used all of those smaller wedge-shaped fighters that they brought for surveying purposes - the ones they liked to buzz the Jiargnei Committee in. It can't have been safe, so I think he was trying to sell it as some sort of dramatic tale of disaster with a few heroic survivors. Get rid of all the witnesses and up his political credit at the same time. At least they seem to be done with our world for now."

"What a mess. So the only reason we're not being totally irradiated right now is that he came up with a weapon even worse than a nuclear device?"

"As far as I can tell, yeah. Whatever he deployed overwrote large portions of the timeline with a history where there never actually was an Age of Azatlan. It seems to have been dependent on the presence of qualified observers, so all of the people are still here and so is most of the sethura junk, which wasn't from here anyway, but the Age has pretty much been wiped. There may be some stray bits left lying around in remote places where the effect didn't reconcile, but I doubt it. Mostly it's just us, our stuff and a certain riding cat of your acquaintance."

"Grunter is okay?!"

"Yes, Grunter is fine, and his name is still stupid. I found him near the beach at Kalikshutra, where they revered him as some sort of divine beast and let him hunt whatever he wanted to and left out bowls of milk for him. All the same stuff you'd do, basically. He was so happy to see me that he stood up on his hind legs, tried to give me a hug and nearly crushed me."

"Where is he?"

"He's outside the city hunting where he won't scare the Khemi. They were really messed up by what happened, you know. All their gods were killed in front of them, mostly by each other; their whole religious system now alternates between an obsession with making the most of life while you're still alive, and revering the honoured ancestral dead, who are with the gods in a sort of afterlife mirror-world of this one, which is not of course actually the real original one anymore. That I woke you up today is an incredibly major win for them, because it means one more goddess is still alive for them in the mortal realm."

"Who else made it?"

"It doesn't look good. I haven't done precise calculations yet using the precession of the stars and so forth, but it looks like just under two centuries have elapsed since the battle, which is plenty of time for people to wander off and get lost. Anubisya is dead, along with his wife and young daughter. He tried to save her by wrapping her in bandages, you know, but it was a lost cause and he died defending the door to the medical suite, which is why no-one ever got in. He couldn't save her, so he saved you. Zair Horussien was trying to administer first aid to poor Kebetchet and got stabbed in the back, but the blade snagged on something and that gave Zair time to finish off his attacker with a scalpel. At least, that's what I think happened, assuming I've understood the story right. Haythe is still missing in action, presumed sexy. Who else? The head of social activities, whatever her name was, she's also dead. She was playing music on a sistrum and singing to herself when someone uncloaked right behind her and killed her pretty much instantly with a sword-spear, which especially appalled the locals for some culturally-specific reason I can't quite understand. I mean, surely no-one at all wants to be back-stabbed ever, regardless of what they're doing. Everyone else is officially unaccounted for."

When they go back into the temple to get Cleos stuff, which no-one has been bold enough to try and steal quite yet, they get something of a surprise. The suspension fluid in the tank has crystallized into a dark, solidly bituminous mass that resembles asphalt, losing most of its volume in the process and forming a downward declivity as it shrank just deep enough to completely cover all the trailing leads and pipes. It seems that the vastly over-strained media, upon being shut down, has contracted machine cancer and almost instantly been overtaken by some sort of replication error that was held in check while it was still running.

"Oh well, I really wasn't looking forward to cleaning it up anyway," sighs Terrowne. "It might have been kind of useful to have around, though."

Cleo tries the inside door to the inner office, but it's unresponsive and the control panel won't even light up. It must have much better security than the outer door, which is not surprising given that there's a dispensary in there with samples of all sorts of drugs and medical devices that are both dangerous and theft-worthy. Terrowne tries his little kinesis trick on the door again, but without success as this one seems to be designed to fail closed, rather than open, what with the panel being concealed to deny feedback to intruders. In the end, they decide to shelve it as a puzzle for another day.

As the evening approaches, Terrowne moves rugs and blankets into the temple and makes of it quite a homely little place, placing the tables and chairs around more like home furnishings and bringing in jars for water and food, and a pot for Cleo to piss in so she doesn't have to go too far until she's fully recovered. A quick test of her flames shows they still work just fine, so she can warm the jars of food whenever she starts to get hungry. She has a peculiar look of thin leanness and being half-starved, so she's going to be really ravenous once the habit of eating kicks in again. But for now he lies with her and listens to the new triple-thump of her heart, which has strengthened and seems stable and safe.

Her own internal diagnostics reveal several pieces of sethura-made custom hardware inside her chest, small dynamic spinners that seem to accelerate blood through the major arteries to and from her heart. Since the sethura have about six distributed organs through their vascular system known as pneuma, instead of a heart, it's a reasonable guess that Zair got creative with what was ready to hand and improvised a fix to bypass her destroyed heart with an available set of the things, which was fine until her heart started again when she woke up. The nanotech in her body seems to have fully incorporated the pneuma since then, apparently assuming that they are some sort of custom upgrade or implant and settings should be adjusted accordingly. Even if they were to be somehow torn out or removed, they'd just grow back unless deleted completely from her system, and she really can't see any good reason to do so. The extra cycle in her heart-beat is kind of weird, but the new arrangement is extremely efficient and gives her a great deal of excess capacity to draw on when needed. Once she's fully recovered it isn't likely to be a problem.

"We're going to have to go out into the world and explore, love," she concludes, snuggling her whiskers into the curve of his chin for that confident sense of placement it gives her. "To see where everyone went and find out what happened to them. And there are so many things I still want to see and do!"

"As long as you promise to stay here and rest with me for a while," says Terrowne, half-asleep and holding her around the waist like something precious he doesn't want to let go of.

"Of course I will!" she insists. "But only for a little while."

"That's good enough for me," he agrees, and holds her until she falls asleep.

End: The Battle At Kalikshutra