Missing Pieces

Maria

As Icey turned to go he glanced back. Maria's black queen had slipped through the ranks of pawns, capturing a bishop. He raised an eyebrow. The black queen had essentially devastated the entire white rank.

He left the back room, passed through the airlock, sighing as he considered his impending climb. He looked around the other room, his eyes falling on the other chessboard.

The queen was behind the white rank.

Icey frowned, approached the board, and reached out to touch the black queen.

An instant before his fingers made contact he froze, drew his hand back a bit, then reached out again to touch it.

His fingers closed around it and he picked it up, cursing his jumping nerves. There was no danger in a chess piece.

He studied it. The queen was carved from a single piece of black basalt. He turned it over in his hands, puzzled. He could not find any scratch marks or burn marks. Yet the piece was rough stone, not polished. What had carved it?

Movement out of the corner of his eye startled him. He fumbled the chess piece, dropped it, and watched in horror as it smashed into tiny fragments on the stone floor. He looked around.

Nothing.

He bent to scoop up the pieces of stone. Perhaps he could repair it.

He glanced at the board again.

A black queen rested in the eighth white row, behind a pair of rooks.

He blinked, looked down at the broken queen in his hands.

He turned and entered the airlock leading to the back room, passed through it.

The chessboard was in the exact same configuration as its twin in the other room, down to the queen in the eighth row.

But Maria was gone.

-----

"Ko'ah to Icey," rang through his communicator, awash with static. Icey had dropped a waveguide fiber down the tunnel to the sanctum on his way down, so radio signals could penetrate despite the depth of rock above it.

"Yeah?"

"The traitor tried again. He's in the garden level. The Ghosts have been alerted."

"Gotcha. On my way." He dropped the pieces of stone on the chessboard as he passed through the outer room, and began to climb the tunnel.

-----

"Robert Marron knew his life was measured in minutes, even as the computer terminal suddenly shut down under his fingers and the doors to the garden area sealed themselves. "Fools," he whispered, his voice trembling with rage, wild eyes searching for a hiding place. "Fools! You'll die anyway!" he cried, images of Cybrid tortures flashing though his mind. How dare the Ghosts stand against the Cybrids? How dare the Colony even exist? The Cybrids had taken Mercury. It belonged to them now.

He ran to the nearest door and began banging on it. "Let me out! Let me out!" He had to fulfill his mission.

The door slid open. Maria stood there, fury in her eyes. He took a step back. Too late. She lifted him, took a step, and hurled him into the garden, to bounce off Del's oak tree and fall in a swearing heap at the base.

He shot to his feet, ran to the door on the opposite side of the level. He was unable to open it, until it opened for him, to reveal Ko'ah with a broadsword held over his head. Terror in his eyes, Marron ran toward the sixty-degree door, but before he had even reached it, Xenogears and Razorback entered, Xeno with slicestars in throwing position, Razorback looking murderous and ready to tear the man apart barehanded.

"Damn you!" Marron cried, as the rest of the Ghosts filed in through various doors: Icey, squared off with his pistol, Altas with his blaster, Del with a massive metal glove in one hand and a short sword in the other.

"You betrayed us," Icey growled. "Why?"

"Stupid humans, how dare you defy your destiny? You will die!"

"Our destiny is beyond your imagining," Maria said softly. "And you cannot be allowed to risk the lives of the people of this colony."

"Kill him," Del snarled, and stepped forward. The order they all wanted had been given, and the Ghosts fanned out in a deadly arc around the traitor. Xenogears's eyes were blue lasers as she sighted along the slicestar's blade. Icey's pistol flashed in prefire.

Marron saw his death approaching from all sides, and welcomed it. The rest would join him soon. The Cybrids would just find another.

Just before the beam of Icey's pistol flashed out, Marron's rage-clouded eyes met Maria's. She looked infinitely sad, regretful of the necessity. His hands outstretched, he leapt for her, wanting to take her along with him to Hell, but he never made it.

He died before the first weapon touched him, and the last thing he saw was the sadness in Maria's eyes.

-----

The Ghosts stepped back, their anger at the threat to the life of the Colony dissipating as Xenogears stepped forward, pulled her slicestar from his neck, and glanced at the others. "He is dead," she said.

"Get him out of here," Icey said. "While I try to think of how to explain this to the rest of the Colony."

He looked at Maria.

"You were down in the Sanctum! How did you get here before I did?"

She merely raised an eyebrow and left.

"Maria!" Icey stepped over the body, crossed the level, and followed her into the corridor.

He looked around wildly. The nearest door was over two hundred meters away, but Maria was nowhere in sight.

He looked back. Xenogears was standing there. "Yeah?"

She frowned. "The first shot to hit him was your pistol. Then my star. Then Del's sword. The trauma of these impacts would have killed him in about two seconds, based on where they had struck. There would still be residual brain function even now. But it seems he was brain dead before we had even fired."

"Too bad," Del said angrily. "What killed him then?"

Icey looked back down the empty corridor.

-----

Deep. The shallows of the world, covered only by a thin crust of basalt and conglomerates, slipped away. She smiled, her awareness swirling around the chess piece, a beautiful interplay of crystalline rock, scintillating energy binding it together, supporting it on a cushion of flashing electrons on the board. Warmth shimmered through the piece, infrared, radio, wave-particles flashing from atom to atom.

Slowly, the patterns changed. The electrons bent, lighting up the base of the piece with new photons. She drank in the photons, spinning them around between the pulsing rhythms of her thoughts, pushed them gently back out of her mind, back to the piece.

The piece slipped over the rough board as smoothly as a laser through space, photon pressure pushing it into its next position.

It exploded into light and flying dust, and she smiled wryly. Oops. Better luck next time.

/ < / << /