Turn 14

Joel Rosemann, PR rep for The League, hated this part of the job. Roberto had phoned with the bad news regarding Terry some time back. After the shock wore off for him he set about the task of being the bearer of bad tidings to the populace of New Philidelphia.

Joel stared blankly at the text in front of him. A white glare from the monitor responded in kind. He'd already written and re-written more drafts of the announcement then any other in recent memory.

It certainly didn't help that Terry's condition was a bit ...vague. How do you say "the Lion of Mars is dead ...maybe? And if Zevon is able to bring him back he might be damaged anyway?" How the hell are the kids in the L'il League of Liberty suppsed to react to that? What about the adults in The Liberty Legion FanClub for that matter?

If Zach is the brains of the team then Terry was in a lot of ways the heart. Everybody loved him.

He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. After that he stood up and paced a bit. Minutes later he rummaged through the top drawer of his desk before saying aloud, "Aha" as he found the last packet of Advil.

He looked at the press release one last time. Shaking his head, he pressed the send button. The message eeking its way through the ether of the internet to all of the news outlets on Mars.

* * *

Pacing relentlessly outside the lab as hours pass by - the others having long since left her in awkward silence - the Silver Dragon slowly becomes aware of something nagging at her attention: hunger. Not her own, but Rajni has been firmly ensconced on her shoulder since their return from the other world.

"Of course you're hungry. Been a long day for you, hasn't it?" she says with a hint of a quiver in her voice, scratching the Martian reptile's chin. "You can go off and hunt something if you want to." Rajni's grip tightens slightly; there are needs that take precedence over a mere preference for live food."Okay, then." She unhooks the tin from her belt and fishes out a cricket." Want one?" The night-colored coils slide free, wings catch the air, and she hovers a short distance away, darting to catch the thrown insects. It doesn't take long to finish them all; she must have been famished.

And then there's nothing to do again but wait. And despite herself, to remember, and as soon as she does that the tears start, and she winds up hunched on the floor with her back to the wall, curled around the hurt and sobbing like she hasn't done since she was small and found out that research animals die, the universe turned traitor again and the words that could well have been humankind's first filling a throat that cannot speak for pain.

It's not fair.

Storms pass; this one leaves her exhausted, vaguely aware of Rajni's worry, scales gleaming where she has stroked her dark head against the tears in attempted comfort. Dee wonders for a moment what everyone else is doing, but decides she doesn't really care right now. She doesn't want to hear anything sarcastic Mancer might have to say, doesn't know the psychic woman really, and Dr. Z is busy. As for Gaslight... her hands curl tightly as anger floods in with renewed grief. She'd just as soon never see that cold-blooded son of a bitch again.

* * *

The Norrises move like the long-standing team they are. Their professionalism is pulled over their concern for their adoptive son, though anyone that knows them can see the panic, grief and trepidation etched in their eyes. They take in the reports of how Terry sacrificed himself to give everyone a chance of beating their adversary. They try to work out what happened to give them a better chance of putting it right.

"So humpty dumpty has fallin' tae pieces and we're supposed tae put it back?" Ronan Norris says. He looks at the psychics that claim they are carrying his son's soul and the various lumps of silicon pieces that are supposed to host that soul.

He looks at Audrey, his wife and the mother of his children. Her eyes communicate with him on a deeper level than words, more intimate than the telepathy some of their super-powered associates display, they see their daughter doing her best to let them do what they need to, not to interfere with well-meaning but probably unhelpful suggestions. They see their other associates hover round looking for something to which they might put their prodigious talents. Shame they couldn't have done that earlier he thinks spitefully, maybe they wouldn't be so useless now. There was the smartest man on Mars: now with not very much to say.

He finds it impossible to understand how this could have happened. "There's the bloody problem right there," he thought, "We've no idea how he came to us and if we dinnae work out more about that we might never know how we lost him."

Since Terry came into their lives four years ago they have learned lots about the use of the base silicate units that they originally designed but which have long since evolved under the sentient intelligence of the colony life form. They know how the physical units change and how they can be utilised to mimic forms of life and generate energy from ambient sources. What they are still uncertain about is how that interfaces with Terry's intelligence and how it all holds together. They don't know where Terry came from, they suspected spontaneous sentience through increased complexity but recent events have clouded that. Perhaps all that they thought they knew was wrong. If that is so then they have almost no chance here.

Zach and Audrey are trying to put their laboratories back into some kind of working order. There seems to be sand everywhere and some of those mounds may provide them with the basis for saving their youngest child, the base silicate units within those mounds might be put together and generate a silico-ferric framework that will support the energy field that is apparently all that remains of their son.

With an urgency only exacerbated by the strain in Psyche's eyes they begin filling the sand buckets (the name Dee had given to the silicate unit containers when she was just a child). The buckets were specially designed charged chambers which would produce a potential across the base silicate units and hopefully provide the "electric soup" across which the units would begin to communicate with each other. Each of the buckets would then be connected and the communication between the buckets could be monitored. This was the critical signal. If the units were communicating then the base connections would be established that should provide a cradle for their son's soul.

Ronan, Audrey and Zach worked furiously. Charging the buckets, monitoring each individually through a bank of computer screens and then checking interconnectivity on the main viewscreen.

After an hour of preparations the buckets seemed ready. They had all been primed and calibrated to the same exacting standards. Within the buckets the silicate units had begun to clump and, through computer signalling, taking on crude shapes. The shapes, to Ronan's concern, were not exactly those that the computer indicated but they seemed close enough. He shared his concern with Zach but Audrey seemed to be highly optimistic, he needed to manage her expectations.

"Audrey doll? I don't want ye tae get yir hopes up. Things here urnae quite right. If we go ahead wi' this then there's a chance it wullnae be a complete success, it might no' support the complexity Terry hud developed. He might be damaged."

Looking at the hurt in his wife's eyes he realised that this wasn't a problem, she just wanted her son back, even if he was less than he had been. He knew that would be her response but he had to prepare her for less than complete success. The more he found out about how the silicate structure worked the more he realised how much complexity he was missing. What he wanted was enough time to manufacture custom built silicate base units. Zach had been trying to modify the units they had but there were too many unknowns, too many small details that might turn out to be crucial.

Eventually there was no putting off the inevitable. Dee had brought the small manikin Terry had given her before he went to face Bfmaat that last time. It remained coherent, another sign that Terry remained alive somewhere somehow. If only there were enough of those units available to support Terry or that they could afford to utilise them in generating new units. They were needed though as a conduit for Terry's soul into the new body they were fashioning in the lab.

"Now Ronan." Audrey's voice was chiding him. She knew he was beginning to procrastinate, trying vainly to put off the time when they had to gamble everything and roll the dice for his son's last chance at life.

Ronan looked at his colleagues. "OK?" he asked knowing they were just waiting for his word. They would be responsible for keeping each of the buckets calibrated while he tried to integrate Terry's soul with the energy field within the matrix. When they had first engineered Terry as a terraforming machine it had taken many attempts before they finally got this to work. Since then they had managed to create simple small robotic creatures, never the same level of success as they'd had with Terry.

He saw Zach and Audrey get to work and glanced over to Psyche. "I don't know how ye do this but I want ye tae focus his essence at the small mannikin. I've linked it to the matrix and it should gi'e us the best chance of integration."

"Ready?" When Psyche signalled he pulled the lever and the matrix charged as the lights dimmed. "Real Frankenstein stuff." he thought before the task at hand made frivolous thoughts impossible. For the next twenty minutes he barked commands at both his wife and the smartest man on Mars while he struggled to co-ordinate what seemed like two lively snakes on the screen. The whole time the sands within the buckets writhed and swirled with colour. A whole range of shapes were formed but all of them different. It wasn't working. They couldn't get the buckets to communicate smoothly, couldn't get the matrix to form correctly and coherently and the chaos they saw only made this more obvious. They increased the power load to try and force order in the system without success, then Zach tried to force a pattern across all of the buckets, also without success.

Suddenly Terry spoke. "Dad? What are you doing in my dream?" Everyone broke into cheers. Ronan could see that there was still some instability in the Matrix but obviously Terry was able to deal with that. It took huge amounts of coordination to get audible and coherent sound. They relaxed just too soon. The words went incoherent, they heard a last despairing "Mom? I love you." Before going silent and then the manikin crumbled into the nearest bucket and the whole energy field in the matrix collapsed into random electrical discharges.

Audrey wailed and ran into Ronan's arms. Zach stepped towards them but was stopped cold by the look in Ronan's eyes and he left the parents to grieve over the remains of their son.

* * *

Once the emotional tide has receded, leaving a steady tension and a slight tendency to nausea, she goes up to her room. Looks at the piles of clothes, the stacks of books, the unmade bed, the demented grin of the Kit-Kat clock on the wall, and realizes that it's almost two in the morning and there's no way in hell she's going to get any sleep, and equally unlikely she'll get anything done that requires thinking.

The rest of the night is therefore spent doing what she can to straighten up the mess the battle made of headquarters. At dawn she does some katas, wonders briefly what became of Elliot, decides it's best for him if she doesn't know, and makes toast for breakfast. As there is still no conclusive word and those on the front line of the quiet battle need some rest, she threads her way through the media camped outside the building -"No.""No comment.""No comment."-- and heads for campus.

The University of New Philadelphia, Mars, is several hundred acres of sprawling facilities and experimental zones where human hands are on the evolutionary fast-forward button. The half-finished stadium bulks a discreet distance from the quad - there was a lot of debate over whether the rules should be adjusted to account for lesser gravity, or there should be artificial gravity imposed on the field, or whether the money should be used for something else entirely (that last a position held by a few humanities professors only). At this hour, other than a few joggers on the footpaths there aren't many people about.

Dee is very familiar with the sense of unreality that descends on the world at about four in the morning; it helps somewhat as she tracks down first Prof. Ellis and then Prof. Kimball, who of course won't hear any apologies for her missed classes, they saw the news, it's all simply terrible, and if she'd like to take some time off....

"No," she says composedly for the second time, brushing a purple fringe of hair out of her eyes. "There's nothing I can do there, and... and we still don't know. So. Um. I'll see you later."

Not knowing is really the worst thing, she reflects later that day. If he was dead, at least people would know what to do. There would be social forms to be followed, instead of a stream of friends with uncertain expressions, clumsy comforts and hopes that they will turn out to be unnecessary. They will, she repeats to herself. She drinks a lot of coffee and makes it through chem lab, molecular biology, and population theory, checking her messages on average every ten minutes to find that there's still no word.

After lunch she heads to the library. The assistant on duty gives Rajni a dubious look as the two approach and opens her mouth, then snaps it shut as the snake hisses and flares her wings slightly.

"Stop that, Rajni. Sorry. She's been like that all day," Dee apologizes mechanically. "Where do I find Egyptian mythology this week?" The university's collection is ever-expanding, and trying to accommodate the books requires some physics tricks that would raise Heisenberg's eyebrows.

"B6."

"Thank you." There's another hiss from Rajni at the thought of going underground, but the wide corridors and fluorescent lighting make it easier to disregard. This is her other world, and it's a lot safer and saner (most of the time) than the League's. Right now, while her phone refuses to ring and release the helpless tension, she'd just as soon stay here and see if there is any sense to be made of yesterday's events as hang about the lab. Once the possibilities of the Egyptian collection have been exhausted, on impulse she browses through the WWII materials - more than any single human being could read in a lifetime. She has no clear purpose, still knowing nothing of the origins of the transmission, but it's something to do

Before she gets the chance to start her investigations in earnest, her secure comms go off. On the other end is Jack. "Dee," his voice wavering uncharacteristically, "I know you wanna be alone right now but I really need to talk to you...."

* * *

Meanwhile, near Old Town, the night has fallen on the recovery efforts. Beams of moonlight fall gracefully upon the spot that was once proudly home to Galileo's Dinner observant eyes might notice movement in the wreckage. Instead, inhuman eyes stare off in the distance toward the Liberty Lair....

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