by Paul Anlee
Eager to get back in Alum’s good graces, the new Trillian tried again.
“Is it possible that Gabriel escaped from Tri-Star?”
It never took a new Trillian long to get up to speed, to start thinking and behaving predictably, in the same manner as the previous ones. But it was never fast enough for Alum’s liking.
Rather than answering the Shard’s question directly, Alum stood and paced away from the sitting area. He walked over to an expansive bookcase and examined some titles. He plucked one from the shelf, opened it, and cleared His throat.
“Ah, yes, here we are,” Alum announced, “The Man in the Iron Mask. It’s a classic. Do you know it?”
Trillian searched his memory but found no recollection of the novel. “It’s likely I read it at some point in the past. I don’t remember the story, though.”
“The King of the country had a twin brother he kept imprisoned for quite some time,” Alum explained. “Rebels freed him from prison to fight on their side.”
“Are you saying...,” Trillian shook his head in surprise, “Are you saying that You have a twin brother?”
“Heavens, no!” Alum laughed.
Trillian bowed his head. “I’m sorry. My mind hasn’t fully recovered from being reanimated yet. How does this ancient book relate to our present situation?”
The corners of Alum’s eyes turned upward and He tapped twice, softly, on the cover of the old book.
“I have no twin brother,” He confirmed, “but perhaps Gabriel has one. Perhaps, more than one.”
Alum’s clean, precisely manicured nails tapped out the lively rhythm of a popular hymn as He fleshed out his suspicions.
Yes, that has to be it—He murmured to Himself.
“A core of rebel Angels?” Trillian’s eyes widened at the thought.
Alum turned, shaking His head.
“Not exactly, and most certainly not acting of their own volition. That sort of blasphemy is beyond their design. No, I’m thinking that someone outside the Realm, perhaps some hidden remnant of the defeated Aelu, has captured one of ours and has been studying it. Maybe even replicated it.”
Trillian whistled. An Aelu reproducing Angel technology? What a terrifying thought. They’d be daunting adversaries, for sure, but at least this is something I can fathom. Something we can fight.
“If they do have our technology from the War, that could prove troublesome,” Trillian acknowledged.
“The Aelu were always clever,” Alum replied. “I harbor no delusions that we destroyed all of them. No doubt, if there are some that still elude us, they would have introduced improvements of their own.”
Trillian gasped. “Improvements, my Lord? Our Cybrid scientists were guided by the Living God. By You. How could anyone but God improve upon the technologies they developed?”
Alum tucked the book under His arm. “Incremental changes only, I would think. Minor tweaks like faster processing speed, bigger blasters, and blast absorbers. As Gabriel showed at Tri-Star, minor performance advantages can make a big difference in battle.”
He stopped in front of Trillian, amused by the Shard’s blanched face.
“Close your mouth, John. It may be forbidden for others to speak of our shortcomings but, surely, you and I can be candid.”
Trillian couldn’t recall being addressed as “John” since long before the War. His jaw snapped shut.
“But the design of the Angels is as close to perfect as possible, is it not, my Lord?” he pressed.
“You’ve forgotten the central tenets of engineering, have you?” Alum answered. “All design is a tradeoff between function and cost. The Angel design during the War was exactly what was needed to defeat the Aelu. If our enemy has improved on that design, so must we.”
That was good enough for Trillian. “Yes, my Lord,” he said. “What sort of innovations do You have in mind?”
Alum waved a hand and the two men were suddenly floating in space. The constellations were still recognizably of the Origin system, so Trillian assumed they hadn’t travelled too far from Alum’s Great Hall.
Another wave of His hand and an Angel joined them.
Trillian did a double take. No, that wasn’t an Angel. What was it?
The being was half-again as big as Alum’s celestial warriors. Its skin glowed dull, fluid red, and its wings were closer to the texture of metalicized leather than feathers. The creature’s fingers, capped in fierce claws, clutched a double-edged axe instead of a sword.
But it was the being’s face that chilled Trillian.
The beauty of Angels was legendary for the cruelty it masked, but in this creature there was no hiding. The threat of painful, hideous death was written clearly for all to see. Three horns dominated the forehead: two short, curved ones from either side of the hairline and a longer, straight horn twisted upward from above the brows. Bony ridges protruded from the bridge of the wide nose. The eyes were fresh-blood red except for two black slits for pupils, and its lips were pulled back in a permanent scowl punctuated by a pair of elongated incisors.
Trillian was reminded of ancient images of demons, and the Lord of Demons, himself, the demi-God once called Satan.
Is Alum not the pinnacle of everything Good in the universe? How could the Living God have conceived of such a nightmare to represent Him in battle?—he wondered.
“Well, what do you think?” Alum asked, a boyish grin forming on his lips.
What do I think of this abomination?—Trillian echoed silently.
“It’s an…unusual configuration, my Lord,” he answered aloud.
Alum laughed. “Indeed! But will it instill terror in the hearts of those who oppose Me? That’s what I want to know.”
Trillian examined the Angel-Demon a second time.
“I’m certain it will. Who would not be terrified of such a creature?”
“Imagine a whole Wing of them, a newly-configured Wing, twice the size of the standard Wing,” Alum added.
Trillian’s pulse raced. “Twenty thousand? That would be terrifying!”
“Aelu soldiers would never be outwardly intimidated by something so superficial as size and appearance,” Alum said. “But, have no doubt, these creatures possess ferocious fighting capabilities, as well.”
“Design innovations?”
“Several. The nano-electro-muscles are twenty percent stronger and faster than a normal Angel’s, and the larger body houses a faster CPPU. Fifty percent faster. They can jump circles around a regular Angel. They easily exceed the maneuverability Gabriel demonstrated at Tri-Star.
“Their weapons and defenses will deliver and absorb blasts at twice the strength of the regular Angels. I’ve incorporated more refined energy beams into their eyes that will significantly improve targeting efficiency.”
“That will be most useful in close combat, my Lord,” Trillian nodded. “And the axe? If you’ll pardon me saying so, it seems a little…cumbersome and imprecise.”
“It’s every bit as effective as the sword in direct hand-to-hand battle but it also carries out commands independently from whoever wields it.”
“The axe has an autonomous role?” Trillian’s enthusiasm returned.
“Indeed. It has its own MAM drive and complex navigation processor. It can act as an independent kinetic weapon as well as discharging its own energy blasts.”
“So a Wing of twenty thousand will have the force of twice that number?”
Alum smiled. “Even better. Twenty thousand of these new Archangels are worth millions of the older model. Maybe more”
Trillian’s eyes widened. “Formidable! Where will You station them?”
“It doesn’t really matter. I’ll station the older models as sentries to alert Me should any of our bases be attacked. I’m also surrounding the Deplosion Array with entangled microdust so any jump-blockers they deploy against us will be rendered useless this time, and our sentries and Archangels will be able to shift anywhere within a few million klicks of each station.”
<
br /> “If our only concern is to protect the array, why not simply station them as guards there?”
“The array is in the heart of the Realm, John. I prefer the Archangels to deal with any trouble before it reaches the heart. In any case, that’s not the best part.”
“What’s the best part?”
Alum beamed. “A new weapon. One that would have ended the Aelu Wars in an instant if I’d thought of it back then.”
Trillian frowned, but only inwardly, at the notion of his Lord’s thoughts ever falling short of perfection; he knew better than to draw attention to the Living God’s failings.
“What kind of new weapon, my Lord?” he asked, genuinely interested.
“A variation on the one we used to end that war,” Alum replied. “I’ve dropped half an entangled particle pair inside M-87’s central black hole with the Archangels’ weapons. The entangled partners are in each axe. That allows them to funnel matter from the interior of that massive black hole in a tight beam.”
For all his systems expertise and computing power, Trillian could barely fathom the results of harnessing such potential.
“The energy output must be enormous!”
He was legitimately impressed this time.
“‘Enormous’ is an understatement, John. The outpouring is so intense I had to incorporate exotic matter in the axes so they wouldn’t be instantly destroyed by its flow.”
“They sound dangerous.”
“Ha!” Alum barked. “Let’s just say, you don’t want to be in the path of that beam. Not in the first hundred thousand klicks or so. It takes a while to dissipate to below planet-shattering strength,” Alum explained.
Trillian pointedly fixed his gaze on a distant star.
“Ah,” Alum responded, “I see. That wasn’t the way you meant it, was it? You’re right. The weapon will be dangerous both to its target and to the black hole itself.”
“I thought as much.”
“Yes. I admit there is a small chance this weapon could be destabilizing to M-87’s central singularity. The physics is complex.”
“In that case, do you think it’s wise to move forward with it, my Lord?”
Alum studied the Shard’s face. Outwardly, He smiled generously but a raging fire burned behind His eyes.
“The universe does not have long to live in its present, imperfect form, John. We must protect the Deplosion Array at all costs—that’s absolutely essential. Do you understand? At all costs.”
The intensity of Alum’s fervor both scared and thrilled Trillian.
As if comforted by the conflicting emotions He’d induced in His Shard, Alum relaxed.
“Don’t worry, My friend, it won’t be much longer now. Soon, I’ll activate the final stage of the Plan and the collapse will be underway. After that, the rebirth of the cosmos in all of its glorious perfection will be inevitable. There will be no way to stop it.”
Content, Alum shifted them back inside His study.
Trillian bowed deeply.
“I shall ensure the new design is put into production as efficiently as possible, my Lord. As always, Your wisdom leaves me in awe.”
And, this time, he sincerely meant it.
8
“So…this isn’t a normal world, then?”
Timothy stared through the viewing port at the verdant plains of the Eso-La ringworld a thousand kilometers below.
To his left and right, the landscape curved upward and inward toward the sun, and discernible features became less and less distinct in the atmospheric haze as the ground arced away.
“That depends. What do you mean by normal?” Mary asked.
She and Darya floated on either side of him. All three were adjusting well to their new, heavily-armed Familiar bodies, even Timothy.
As they hovered at the viewing window inside Secondus’ pressurized chamber, they trained their visual sensors on the terrain far below. Their eyes adjusted automatically, shielding the bright sunlight reflecting off the inner side of the night-shadow curtain that ran along the sunward edge of the ringworld. Pinpoint lights, the stars toward the center of the ESO 461-36 galaxy, twinkled sparsely above them.
Timothy consulted the astronomy database Darya had installed in his lattice when she’d first introduced him into his Cybrid trueself.
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “It’s a ringworld. A somewhat smallish ringworld.”
“Yes,” Darya confirmed. “Not a naturally-formed planet, but normal enough,” she said to Timothy.
“Except for one important detail,” Darak added. He admired the ring and surrounding space for a moment before elaborating.
“In all of my years and all of my travels, I’ve never known the people of any other star system to have broken away from Alum’s Realm and build a ringworld. Never.”
Darak marveled over the elegant structure as if seeing it for the first time. It never failed to impress him.
“Quite an accomplishment for a people entirely cut off from the magic of Alum’s technology, wouldn’t you say? The entire Aelu civilization—with roughly equivalent technology—only managed to build five over the millions of years during which they colonized their galaxy.”
Darak stood next to Brother Stralasi and Crissea. It didn’t bother him that the couple held hands and wore enchanted smiles. They appeared to be equally enthralled with the breathtaking beauty of the annular world below but their appreciation was most likely heightened by romantic hormones.
Life, even millennia of it, is short when you’re in love. All the more so when you know it could soon draw to a sudden close.
Darak’s eyes roamed involuntarily to the cerametallic sphere that housed Darya’s quark-spin lattice, the closest thing to the mind of Kathy Liang in existence. He sighed wistfully.
My first love. It’s been ages since I’ve experienced that human hormone rush. Not sure I still could, anymore.
He gave his head a quick shake. He didn’t need that kind of distraction right now.
“How did your people do it, Crissea?” Darya asked.
“You mean, build our ringworld without Alum’s help?”
Crissea’s voice projected from her own Familiar, who was floating a few meters behind the group at the panoramic window.
“There are few ringworlds in the Realm,” Darya noted. “It took around-the-clock work by hundreds of millions of Cybrids to build them. We couldn’t have done it without them, their access to limitless energy and powerful resource extraction, and Alum’s ability to manipulate matter. I can’t imagine tackling a project like this without access to such resources.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Crissea admitted. “It required millions of years of our own technological development among the planets and asteroids. The construction itself involved a lot of trial and error, a grueling schedule, non-stop troubleshooting and, yes, some loss of life. But we think the end result has been worth it.
“We Esu made the decision early on to develop our science without using Reality Assertion Field technology—Alum’s kind of wizardry—long before building Eso-La. The Aelu refugees that Darak brought safely to us helped enormously with many of our scientific developments. We made special construction harnesses for our Familiars, and enormous ships to mine asteroid and planetary resources for construction material. The Aelu’s fusion energy technology proved more than adequate for the task.”
“A bold choice. Why did you turn your backs on RAF tech?”
“Among other things, it’s a cheat. Too easy. It discourages striving to understand the way things work within the confines of this universe in favor of simply creating whatever physical laws are needed for your desired effect.”
“I think of the RAF as a shortcut, not a cheat,” Darak chimed in. “It opens up worlds—whole universes, really—of possible new technologies.”
“You would think so,” Crissea corrected, “but we believe it makes one lazy. Scientists wouldn’t seek to understand how to best employ local laws of nature if all they had to do
was alter the laws to meet their needs. We were also able to leave behind many of the ethical and moral problems that RAF technology entails in the Realm.”
Unable to withstand the conspicuous silence that followed, Timothy waded in.
“The centrifugal forces on the architectural substrate of the ringworld,” he babbled, “they must be enormous. How did you find a material strong enough to withstand the strain without resorting to exotic matter? Especially without Alum’s type of technology?”
Crissea was happy to drop the debate about Reality Assertion Fields. She smiled gratefully at Timothy and answered through her Familiar.
“The outermost layer of Eso-La is a composite of interleaved, cross-linked layers of graphene and silicene. The molecular bonds actually extend through the sandwiched layers. It has incredibly strong tensile strength and flexibility. There’s a lot of carbon in the dust clouds in this part of the galaxy, and the rocky planetoids we’ve harvested have been rich in silicon. We have lots of resources here to work with.”
Timothy accessed the unfamiliar molecular structures of the materials to make sense of her explanation, and lost himself in the many possibilities within those structures and where they led.
Darya wasn’t so easily dissuaded.
“I’m sorry, Crissea, but I still can’t wrap my brain around the Esu’s refusal to use the Aelu RAF technology. I mean, you already had it. I can’t imagine a whole people, a whole planet, turning its back on RAF capability. Take, for example, the structural layer of Eso-La. I’m guessing it would have to be, what, hundreds of times thicker than that same layer in our Realm ringworlds? That can’t be optimal. You could’ve used the exotic matter available through Alum’s technology to achieve much better results.”
“Undoubtedly,” Crissea answered, this time raising her human voice to be heard across the intervening space. “But it’s ours. And it’s of this universe so it doesn’t require constant tinkering in order to hang together.”
“But Alum could come along and shred all of this with a wave of His hand,” Darya pointed out. “He could weaken these molecular bonds as easily as any others. Your whole world would simply…fall apart. How do you know He isn’t on His way to do just that?”