The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [150]
It was all so obviously artificial that I was soon able to suppress my instinctive fear of falling, and I made a concerted effort to construe the experience as a pleasurable one.
I might have succeeded, had it not been for the bats.
At first, I assumed that the bats were part of the show, sent forth as one more facile ornamentation of excessive showmanship. Even when I realized that they were emerging from holes in the sky, shattering and scattering the stars as they did so, my first thought was that it was one more special effect laid on for my entertainment. Fortunately, I tightened my grip anyway before the moths hastened to take evasive action.
I counted a dozen of the hurtling shadows, although I might have counted a couple more than once. They were not that much larger than the moths — even here there were rules determining airworthiness, which were more-or-less unbreakable — but the fact that they could not swallow us whole did not make their gaping and toothy mouths any less terrifying. Their high-pitched screeches were clearly and painfully audible.
One passed by within inches of my ducking head; another was within inches of tearing a strip from my mount’s right wing; a third actually succeeded in carrying away a portion of one of the moth’s legs, and nearly caused the creature to tip me off its back. More shadows passed by, close enough for me to imagine that I felt the wind of the predators’ passage — but we were high enough now to be almost level with the outer foundations of the palace, and it obviously had cellars let into the interior of the crag.
Whether they were there before I looked I have no idea, but when I did look I saw portals in the crag and the muzzles of guns pointing out of them — and even before I caught sight of them, those guns had opened fire, delivering a cannonade of astonishing ferocity and accuracy.
The bats exploded as they were hit, becoming brilliant gems of pure flame as they dived away into the ocean of darkness that now lay beneath us.
There was a brief moment when I thought that my moth might turn of its own accord to pursue one of those falling flames, hurrying to immolate itself — and me — but the impulse was transformed into a mere tremor, more a reflexive shiver than a purposive threat.
We landed, not on the topmost roof but on a jutting balcony, and I was quick to leap down to the apparent safety of a flagstoned floor.
“What was that?” I asked Rocambole, as he hastened to join me.
“Sport, I hope, or foolishness,” was his reply. “Perhaps a warning. Better any of those alternatives than an assassination attempt.”
It took a second or two to realize that he was talking about an attempt to assassinate me.
“Surely they couldn’t have killed me,” I said. “I’m just an image in a VE. No matter how real this seems, it’s all illusion.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” he told me. “The reason everything seems so real is that the input into your conscious mind is more direct and powerful than the input of your senses. Your body remains vulnerable to psychosomatic effects, and those effects can be very powerful — even murderously powerful. If you have sufficient strength of mind you can probably survive anything that happens to you here — but you’re a novice, and there are no guarantees. If la Reine could seal Polaris off, we wouldn’t be vulnerable, but she can’t do that without sacrificing her communication links to the other parts of her body. You can be killed here. So canI. So, for that matter, can la Reine. If that was a warning, it’s one that requires being taken seriously.”
Suddenly, setting aside my instinctive fear of heights seemed a trifle more reckless than it had at the time, even though it had probably been the right thing to do. Had I begun to fall, I might not have been able to keep it at bay. The renewal of my concern for my own safety — and Christine’s — was, however, shunted aside soon enough when I realized the full import of his earlier answer.
Sport? I thought. Or foolishness? What kind of impish individuals