Mik nodded and turned toward the makeshift cockpit. He didn’t want the god to see the look on his face as he contemplated the astonishing confession of The City’s deity. The confirmation of the destruction of the sentry ships hit him like a physical blow. He had spent his youth constructing models and designing imaginary holo battles of the great ships that defended Cityspace. The trip on Mercury Eclipse was a highlight of his life. They were extensions of the god himself. For them to be gone….
“My candle of a human mind is about as crammed full of ship’s information as it ever will be,” Mik said. “If my job is to run from enemies, there’s no sense waiting.”
He crouched down and scooted his way onto “the bridge.” It was a cramped and confined space, clearly designed for a sole occupant. He could see the evidence of the hasty construction by the servitor robots, which had quickly fabricated this command center to keep him alive in a ship that had not originally been designed to be piloted by a human.
He squeezed into the command chair and settled back. Articulated arms and guide cables hung closely overhead, like carnivores preparing to pounce. The engineer in him understood the function of each, but actually being hooked up to these systems would be another thing altogether.
I’ll find out soon enough.
“Okay. Load me up,” he said, knowing the god was listening.
The space above him instantly came alive with the motion of ship’s systems descending upon him. He sat unmoving while information interfaces were calibrated with his vision, sensors were affixed to his skin, and cabin pressure stabilized. The air smelled of industrial materials with which even he was unfamiliar.
Mik closed his eyes and could feel the ship coming to life around him, slowly at first, and then in a rush.
His concentration was shredded as the sensorium of the ship enveloped him, seeking connections, flooding him with information, prodding his body and mind to conform to the requirements of the ship. An unruly queue of command sequences all fought for his attention.
The assault on his senses was overwhelming. His breathing quickened and for a moment Mik felt primal fear rise within him like a shadow from the depths. “Tower, I….”
He was certain he could articulate no more words without screaming.
Immediately the soothing voice of the god washed over him, a presence as comforting as the night sounds inside the dome as The City slept. Tower spoke calmly, not acknowledging Mik’s rising panic. There was instruction and encouragement behind every word, every sentence a rhythmic reassurance.
Mik was vaguely aware that Tower must be exercising some of his divine powers to help him regain his composure, but he found he didn’t care. Mik reached out for The City’s guardian like a drowning man, his mind latching onto whatever lifeline was offered.
At last order began to coalesce from the chaos.
Tower guided Mik through each of the systems, configuring the interfaces until they seemed like comfortable, or at least not painful, pathways for action. Mik realized with relief that the secret was in the sequencing and prioritizing of the information, and he dove into the process eagerly now, shoving aside the panic that had gripped him earlier.
He discovered how to interpret all the views of the physical universe the ship was feeding him. Mik organized the viewing fields into lenses that responded to his gaze, shuffling into and out of his field of vision in patterns he found intuitive.
The god’s voice faded into the background as Mik tackled the system interfaces one after the other, feeling how the ship responded to his physical cues. He regained his focus with a single-minded intensity, similar to the clarity of concentration he enjoyed when tackling one of The City’s rare subterranean malfunctions.
As on those occasions, his sense of time drifted away, no match for his almost compulsive desire to solve the puzzle, to understand the fundamental workings of complex systems.
Mik only returned to the present when he sensed, vaguely, higher systems that were unavailable to him. The links to those systems were bypassed, fused, impenetrable. The starship had had been designed with capabilities that could only be directed by a ship mind, those vast intelligences that were linked directly to the god. He briefly felt ashamed that such a magnificent ship had to shed so much of its capability in order to be controlled by him.
And yet, here you are, the best option, he told himself. No one can ever say the gods don’t have a sense of humor.
Mik turned to his right, feeling the slight resistance of the ship’s sensors that cradled his head, so that Tower was back within his field of vision. He searched the eyes of the god, wondering just how much of the actual deity was invested in this projection of itself. He looked like a normal man, although almost exotic in his clothing and features. Was this how the god saw himself, or was this just the puppet he conjured up to interact with flesh-and-blood people?
“I think I figured out a name for this ship,” Mik said.
“Yes?”
“Beyond Hope.”
The god gave him a reproving look. “Keep working on it.”
Mik looked away, again wondering where these impulsive outbursts were coming from. Nice going, tunnel rat. That’s twice today you’ve blurted out an insult to the god that’s trying to save your bloated carcass.
“I’m kidding, of course. When I make it back from my mission, she’ll have earned a name. But what is my message for Maelstrom?”
The god gave him a look that reminded him very much of the looks Talia would give him when something was obvious to everyone but Mik.
“Help,” Tower said, in a tone that dripped with divine patience.
“Ah. Yes. Of course,” Mik said, breaking into a light sweat, which was even more embarrassing. He knew that both the ship and the god would be able to read his reaction as easily as Mik could see the storms roil the clouds on Lodias. “Well, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, Tower. But I think I missed one key piece of information. How do we get this ship out from this underground cavern?”
“I brought you and Talia here through one of the gateways I created in the city. This cavern is also a gateway, a portal to Divine Space. Talia and I will leave this chamber and then I will give you the final instructions to send you on your mission.”
Mik nodded. He was aware that suddenly his throat was very dry. What had been up until now theoretical was rapidly turning into the actual.
Mik watched the god, following his course through the ship and outside into the cavern, using internal and then external sensors. Tower walked over to where Talia was studying the exterior of the unnamed starship. He touched her lightly on the shoulder and they headed toward the curving walls of the cavern and then disappeared from his view. Mik did not see the moment where they passed through any kind of doorway, or perhaps just vanished. Either way, they were gone.
A new command sequence ran across his primary display screen. It portrayed a twisted, multi-dimensional course away from Lodias, a broken path between unseen objects and rifts in space. It looked impossible.
He initiated the sequence.
The walls of the cavern began to glow.
As reality folded in on itself and the stone vanished, Mik’s final thought was a stab of regret that he had forgotten to thank Tower, the dying god, and wish him godspeed to whatever fate awaited him.
10
The State of Things
They had���somehow���departed the cavern that contained the starship, and were now walking through another cavern, although one not so grandiose in scale. Talia was still not quite sure how she has passed from one to the other.
She shivered, only partly because of the transition. It was dark here, and cool, and the ceiling of stone was almost low enough to touch, a crushing weight hanging over her like the judgment of the gods themselves.
Worse, Tower appeared to be diminishing in some way. As she followed him, there were times when she thought she could see through him, when this Aspect that she was interacting with app
eared more apparition than man. The god she had served all her life had never had trouble maintaining convincing multiple personas. The emotional effect of the stone pressing in around her and the god literally fading from view had her nerves stretched taut.
And now Mik is gone too….
When she spoke her voice sounded very small. “Mik will be alright, won’t he?”
The god did not reply, which sent more goosebumps racing across Talia’s flesh. She followed him silently for a while, wrapping her arms around herself for warmth.
At last the cramped tunnel began to widen and they came to a somewhat larger central chamber. Talia stopped at the entrance. The room was practically alive, a vibrant nest of semi-living organic and mechanical systems. The entire room seemed to respond to Tower’s presence, like plants turning toward a light source.
As her eyes adjusted, she saw that branches of the machinery stretched out into barely visible caverns beyond and reached up through cracks in the stone ceiling. Talia could sense the energy pouring through the electrical and biomechanical systems, like blood rushing through the heart of a world.
But one section of the chamber, she noticed, was dark and lifeless. Servitor robots swarmed around the machinery, frantically amputating the dying segments, quarantining whatever disease or malfunction stirred within.
The god stopped, at last noticing that Talia was no longer following. He turned toward her, an impassive expression on his face.
“Tower, where are we?”
“A place that you will know intimately, and for a very long time. But you will also know this place as a refuge, as I have.”
“What…”
“It’s alright, Talia,” the god said. A sad smile crossed his face. “This is the closest thing to a home that I have. And you, faithful acolyte, are the first person to ever see it.” He held out a hand to her. “Come to me.”
Talia followed him into the center of the cavern. She could identify none of the machinery that throbbed around them, but it seemed to be a nexus of all the systems that ran through the chamber, a place where the power was gathered, stored and concentrated.
She glanced around. There were no obvious seating areas or even anything that indicated a flesh-and-blood body had ever visited this place.
So she sat on the floor, and the god sat down in front of her in one fluid motion.
He leaned close to her and his stare bored into her eyes with an intensity that made her draw back. It was as if Tower was no longer restraining himself, like the full focus of the god’s attention was raining on her like light from the sun. It was the most frightening part of a very frightening day.
“Quiet now,” he said. “We haven’t much time. There is only one way to explain everything to you quickly enough.”
Even as he said the words, appendages from the god-machinery enveloped her, gliding from above and attaching to her skin, crawling across her hair, clutching her in a cool yet living embrace.
Almost at once Talia lost command of her own thoughts. Mental images from another perspective crowded in, and behind the images she could perceive a feverish insistence that she comprehend what she was being shown. The god was moving inside her, and the immensity of his being chased her own consciousness aside like a shadow fleeing the light.
She tamped down the flare of panic that screamed in the back of her skull, trusting the god she had served her entire life.
Visions crashed, shattered, and reformed. But behind it all was Tower’s voice, steady and deep like the engine of the universe itself.
Slowly, slowly, Talia began to make sense of the images racing through her mind.
She was witnessing the full extent of the god’s power, the range of his influence over Cityspace. His power extended like liquid starlight through the veins of The City and out into the larger solar system. The web extended deep beneath the surface of the moon to the cavern in which she sat, and out to orbital power generation units that drew energy from Lodias’ stormy atmosphere. She could sense the connections that linked Tower to the great ships that defended Cityspace, and allowed him to control the swarm of micro sentinels.
But she also noticed gaps in the network that made no sense.
“Watch,” the god commanded.
The perspective changed abruptly.
Her view rushed several million kilometers away from The City to a point in space that boiled with exotic energies. At the center was a portal, one that instantly reminded her of the portal that had ripped open the administrator’s office. But this one was vastly larger, a wavering circle of blackness that was disgorging starships, autonomous weapons platforms and other things she could not identify.
A furious battle rippled across the vacuum.
From her shared perspective with the god she could identify the remnants of The City’s defense fleet as it engaged the invaders. Talia was shocked at how few of the ships remained.
Her consciousness rode the god’s focus to the ship at the center of the defensive effort, the Battle of Sedna. Lances of energy erupted from its weapons ports, brilliant tentacles of fundamental forces that flared into blinding globes of light when they struck the invading ships. Yet there were more of the others, and even as she watched, the Sedna retreated to within its own defensive energy shell. The incoming enemy fire burned across the surface like raging sunspots.
The god’s attention shifted to the micro sentinels that fought on the far side of the portal. They were focused on a single target, the largest of the alien ships. They attacked in a predatory moving cloud that surrounded the vessel like some sort of enraged insect colony. Hundreds at a time were lost when the invading ship fired into the cloud, but the sentinel swarm dissipated and reformed again and again to assault the enemy ship in new ways.
“Watch,” the god rumbled.
The battle was ripped from her view and Talia’s perspective skewed back to The City. Vertigo invaded her mind, and she felt as if she would pitch over and empty her stomach. But she had only a vague connection to her body, sitting under the surface of Skyra, buried inside the machinery of the god’s lair.
The disorientation passed as Tower pulled her consciousness to the next destination.
She was inside spire eight once again, where she had started her day, so long ago, it seemed. The portal inside the office���a smaller version of the one she had been watching���was still disgorging the long-limbed aliens, but here they did not seem to have the upper hand, as the attackers did in the far reaches of space.
Servitor robots battled the creatures as best they could, slicing through the spidery legs with cutting torches and other maintenance tools. The primary Warrior Aspect of the god, enlarged so that he nearly filled the room, dispatched the creatures with ruthless efficiency. His hands crackled with concentrated energy as he grasped the invaders one by one and tore them asunder. Tower was moving remorselessly toward the portal, marshalling the forces within him to overcome the energies that held the alien doorway open.
Bodies of broken aliens lay in piles around him, but Talia noticed that some were managing to crawl out the blown-out windows, skittering down to the streets below. She knew, through her link with the god, that hundreds of the aliens were loose in The City, and a population that had never before had to fight, or even had weapons to do so, was fleeing in terror.
This time, somehow, she pulled the god’s attention after her, down to the street, where the people ran, or cried, or feebly fought the alien monsters. Bodies lay scattered, limbs twisted in unnatural angles. Small rivers of red radiated from beneath them, trickling out and combining to form larger pools of blood.
She stared in horror at the carnage, and for a moment almost felt herself disconnecting from the god’s vision, so great was her shock and revulsion.
But she felt something else, too, a notion that slid into her soul as quickly and lethally as a blade���a sliver of shame at the helplessness of her people.
Can we do nothing without the gods’ pro
tection?
She had never looked at the relationship between the gods and the people in this way before. All her life, as she served in Tower’s sanctuary, committing herself to becoming a Radiant Acolyte, the wisdom of living under the total protection of the gods in a hostile universe had never really been questioned. It was just the way of things. Some people produced food, others constructed living quarters, and some created entertainments.
The gods protected.
How much has been lost? How much of what we were as a people is gone forever?
She had read the deep histories, the sagas of old, sketchy as they were. Almost all of them involved great wars and heroic battles. Even when the Otrid came, before the creation of the gods, humans fought back ferociously. She had tried to imagine how such conflicts might look, but had never really been able to. Now that she had witnessed the blood of her people spilled so easily, she yearned to revive the heroism of earlier times.
We were a warrior race and did not go down without a fight.
But now?
Again, the voice of the god, deep and resonant, and this time tinged with emotions she could not name.
“Watch.”
She was torn from the vision of the bloodletting on the streets. The vertigo returned, even more violently this time. When it passed, she felt her perceptions widened for a larger view. A new sight emerged. The tapestry of the god’s power over Cityspace, a shining net of energy and connectivity, spread before her. It already seemed smaller than when she had seen it moments���was it only moments?���ago. Giant holes were spreading in the net of Tower’s influence, a creeping rot that darkened the lights of his divinity. Whatever this invading power was, it was destroying the very essence of the god.
“You see the true state of things, Talia,” he said, sadness draping his words. “We are attacked by powerful, unknown forces, both inside The City and further out in space. They are winning, steadily and ruthlessly. They have cut off my communication to the other gods and they have introduced some infection, some poison that destroys the non-human elements that comprise my godhood. It will consume me completely, Talia.”
Gods and The City (Gods and the Starways Book 1) Page 5