The translator built into his exoskeleton stumbled to keep up as the great gusts of sound vented from underneath the carapace of his guide. “You must think beyond starships and space stations, friend human. There are other vessels that will carry your power and your will to distant worlds.”
“No doubt, Crall, but we must learn to walk before we can run.”
“The universe does not care for your preferred learning curve, nor the validity of your folk wisdom, commander,” the enormous creature wheezed. “Challenges will come. You will either be prepared or not.”
Jensen was silent for a moment. It was unusual for a Benefactor to speak so bluntly.
“When you speak of ‘challenges’, you’re referring to your enemies the Otrid, aren’t you?”
“By the very fact of you being here, the Otrid also consider your people an enemy,” Crall wheezed. “They do not distinguish between actual enemies and potential enemies. They do not comprehend any concepts of neutrality.”
Jensen stopped and looked into the eyes of the massive alien next to him. There it was. After all the analysis by the diplomatic corps, all the quiet observation conducted by the military, all the arguments about interpretation of non-terrestrial languages, the blunt truth was laid bare.
We have been noticed by powerful forces. And those forces have named us enemy.
15
The Sundering
And so it ends.
Tower felt another part of himself wither and dissolve into nothingness, another expanding dead zone where once his consciousness had thrived.
His essence was contained inside a tiny sphere that rocketed above the surface of Skyra, racing toward the point of battle near the portal. He had projected a traditional human face to Talia and Mik, the better to put them at ease, but it was now his true form that sailed through the cold vacuum. Inside was a web of physical tissue���the remnants of his ancient, original body���and the connections and power sources that combined to give him the abilities that they called godhood.
As he perceived The City falling away below him, he felt less and less like a god, and more and more like an old man with the cold vulture of eternity perched on his shoulder.
What did you expect? It had to end some time.
Only a small part of him pondered these realities. The greater part of Tower was still energetically engaged in directing the fight against the invaders. Even crippled, his remaining power was formidable.
Yet he grew smaller by the moment. The toxic negative energies the enemy deployed gnawed upon him, relentlessly ripping apart the dual nature of his being. He could feel the cancerous, expanding dead zone within him probing for access to his other side like some aggressive contagion.
He crudely and bluntly detached himself from all connections to Talia, and then, reluctantly, to The City itself. He despaired knowing that the giant god-Aspects that had been physically battling the spidery aliens on the streets of The City would now vanish. But it was no longer safe for any entity to remain connected to him.
His people were on their own.
The thought infuriated him.
Tower analyzed once more the evolving pattern of the attack against him, seeking weakness and finding none. The depressing conclusion was unavoidable.
My foe understands my powers as if they were his own.
The implications of that were horrifying, but could have been even worse.
Tower allowed himself a moment of gratitude that he hadn’t grown complacent during all his long years. He had not spent his time lost in introspection or indulgent pleasures. He had been a warrior at the beginning of his long life, and remained a warrior now. Much of the defensive technology that surrounded The City was new and of his own design. Both the prototype starship in which he had sent Mik on his mission and the micro sentinel swarm that plagued the enemy ships were the result of his most recent review of CitySpace’s defensive vulnerabilities. He had artfully crafted both weapons in hidden outposts cut off from the rest of humanity’s systems.
And in a break from usual protocols, he had shared neither development with his fellow gods.
We’ve grown so far apart in recent centuries, he’d reflected. Do we still share the same mission? Or have our oaths been forgotten?
At the time these had seemed unworthy thoughts. But when it came to defending the last vestiges of humanity, he had to consider all possible threats, even unlikely ones.
Especially unlikely ones.
In the moments after the initial attack on CitySpace, when it became clear that the invaders were targeting the technology that originated from the Benefactors, Tower had quietly strengthened the walls of separation between human and alien technology. That strange marriage of scientific craft was deeply entwined within his own being, however. It was that combination that had elevated himself and his fellow defenders to something resembling godhood. Fortunately, the operations of The City itself relied very little upon the technology of the Benefactors.
And yet all of your power won’t be enough to save you.
The malicious incursions had wormed their way so far into the symbiotic systems that nourished the god that there was no way to untangle them. It was a weakness, he knew, but the price that his fellow gods had happily paid to acquire the power that would save the human race.
The gifts from the Benefactors gave the selected humans the ability to rearrange the physical properties of their bodies, thus allowing them to transform themselves into other physical���or non-physical���shapes. They taught the newly modified humans to simultaneously project and animate multiple aspects of themselves. Most importantly, the Benefactors revealed the secrets of Divine Space, thus opening up a larger universe. Combined with humanity’s talent for nano-scale engineering, biotechnological evolution and an adaptability born of necessity, humanity had raised up these seven “gods” to protect them while the race rebuilt itself and searched for a new home.
The desperation of that time still haunted him a thousand years later, even with all his powers. It had seemed an insane gamble, even to him. With all the centuries to ponder the question, he had never fully understood the Benefactors’ deeper motivations for helping mankind.
The Benefactors had known what was coming, the inevitable war with the Otrid, and were telling Earthmen in as plain a language as they could muster. But it had taken humanity, so recently freed from the confines of its own solar system, a long time to untangle the motives and politics of all the local alien societies. When mankind did figure it out, it had been too late to change course.
The two most powerful alien species in this sector of the galaxy had been locked in an escalating cold war. The central issue was the rate of advancement of the younger races. The Benefactors were known for uplifting the technological abilities of other species in the galaxy, freely sharing advanced technology to all who possessed the ability to traverse the gulf between the stars to their planet. The Benefactors always maintained they did this to create a more unified sphere where intelligent life, being so rare, could prosper and move together toward a shared higher destiny.
Theories abounded on why they would really do this, but humanity eagerly accepted these gifts with scarcely a dissenting voice.
Unfortunately, the Otrid opposed this policy with a ferocity bordering on madness.
When the war came, it was swift and brutal. Earth and her colonies had been but one front in a wide-ranging conflict, targeted by the Otrids because of mankind’s close alliance with the Benefactors. The Otrids were not seeking simply the subjugation or domination of mankind, but its extermination.
In the end, the Otrid were pushed back to the fringes of the known galaxy, with the Benefactors the apparent victors. But the giant beings’ society had never been quite the same afterwards.
And then, two hundred years later, the Benefactors had simply disappeared.
Humanity had its own problems and did not possess the will nor strength to investigate the disappearance
, but Tower often thought back to that conversation with Crall. He suspected the Benefactors had moved on to some other galaxy or even a higher plane of existence, using “other vessels that will carry your power and your will,” as Crall had said. In later years Tower had even devoted some small part of his abilities to searching for clues, but he could find no trace.
Searing white pain ripped him from the past.
Another one of Tower’s ships had been destroyed. The Battle of Sedna. The shards of the great craft expanded in a glittering cloud, its mind silenced forever.
If Tower still possessed a fully human body he would have doubled over in agony and cried out. The artificial mind that directed that ship was one of his finest creations, the culmination of all his efforts. He had invested much of himself in the vessel. The ship’s destruction left a vast dead zone in his perceptions.
As if yanking back a hand from a flame, he pulled the essence of his being inward. The reach of his influence was fading, his extremities growing numb.
The remnants of the Benefactors’ technological gifts burned away.
For the first time in a thousand years he felt the cold winds of mortality cut through the chambers of his mind. All the long years twisted together into a blur, and for an instant he lost himself.
And then, as a millennium of artifice peeled away, at the center of his being was simply the man he had once been.
An unexpected sense of relief swept through him.
I am Jensen again. I will leave this existence as my true self.
He directed the sphere that carried him to his last remaining ship, The 4,000. The ship’s shielding dissolved to allow him entry, and the sphere settled into a cargo bay. Immediately, tendrils from the sphere snaked their way to the ship’s interfaces, and the former god’s consciousness slid into the cool confines of the ship’s mind.
Even diminished as he was, he felt a surge of power as he inhabited the ship’s systems. The energy hummed within him, and he perceived the extremities of the ship as if they were his own limbs.
The ship mind reached out to him at once. “Welcome, god essence. How may I serve?”
“Thank you, great ship. We join for the final confrontation with our enemy. But I fear our new union will be brief.”
“I comprehend. Nothingness approaches, a return to base elements. The gift of awareness is returned.”
“You will live another way. Not forgotten. The people will sing of you in years to come.”
The ship did not reply, but seemed to be examining the idea. Tower had created the starship minds, but as unique intelligences he knew they had developed their own philosophies and imperatives. Even he did not know what they truly thought of the concept of mortality.
Now in control, Jensen seamlessly absorbed the ship mind’s tactical plan and found it to be sound. The 4,000 still fought, releasing furious blasts of exotic energies. But it was vastly outnumbered and received more hits than it dispensed. The shields burned away and reformed almost instantaneously, but each time slightly weaker and slower than before.
Only moments remained, but there was now a new weapon in the arsenal. The small sphere that sustained him and carried him to The 4,000 contained energy enough to shred the very fabric of local space, if properly directed.
The ship’s systems drank deeply from this cauldron of power, but even so fearsome a warship as The 4,000 could not contain it for long. It was a power surge that could only move in one direction, with only one possible ending.
They will see this in the night sky above The City for years, Jensen reflected.
As the purifying moment of his destruction approached, Jensen detected an abrupt shift in the patterns of communication between the enemy ships. They had clearly spotted the buildup of roiling energy within The 4,000.
He sensed a guiding force that had not been present among the ships previously, a new voice. He focused all his attention on it, parsing it, cutting it away from the other chatter. It held a familiar essence, the whisper of a particular language structure that only emanated from one corner of the dead Earth….
At last, the identity of the mind that was set against him revealed itself.
Yes. Of course. Always the most distant of us, the most eager to leave the rest behind.
“Faraway. Susanti. Show yourself.”
It was as if his very words ignited a conflagration. The alien ships moved as one, aiming in the direction of The 4,000 like needles of Earthly compasses swinging toward magnetic north. The torrent of communication between the alien ships expanded exponentially. Every antenna, every remote probe, focused on the ship that now housed the remaining spirit of the diminished god.
Power surged from one of the alien vessels and a broadcast beam cut through the void. It washed harmlessly against the ship’s shielding until The 4,000 captured it and diverted it to a secure information cache where it could be safely viewed.
The ship mind whispered in the background. “Beware this poison, City god.”
Jensen studied the captured transmission. It was a semi-autonomous information packet, extraordinarily complex. Opening it would be like interacting with the sender in real-time. “It is poison, true,” he said. “It is also the answer from Susanti we must have.”
Jensen released the packet from its security restraints.
Anger boiled forth as the message came to life. “Do not ever use that primate name in my presence, failed guardian.”
The face that materialized was the familiar visage of Faraway, but altered in a fundamental way. The words were spat out as if from someone who had forgotten���or disregarded���human speech patterns. He examined the structure of the message, the underlying code, and with dismay realized that the thought patterns were not entirely human, not even allowing for the distortions of godhood.
Otrid… She is as much Other as human.
“So it is you, Susanti,” he said, emphasizing the human name she had been born with on old Earth. “You have come all this way to present yourself as a lackey of the Otrids. Why have you betrayed us?”
Her anger was tangible, the figure within the message practically writhing with hatred. He could not detect the cool intellect she once possessed.
So many years alone in the most remote corners of the galaxy, cut off from your own kind entirely. How long did it take to lose your human side entirely? When the Otrids found you, did you even resist?
The insane god that had once been Faraway screamed at him. “Why have you betrayed the natural order of things? Why have you let parasites thrive? You keep primitive life encased in domes like specimens, creatures that should have never been raised so high! It is an abomination that the Beh’neefazor so carelessly selected lower forms to fling to the stars.”
He ignored her insults. Only moments left.
“Who else stands with you?”
“More than enough to complete the task. A thousand years have wept while this good work went undone.”
Press her. “Who stands with you besides your masters, slave? You lack the patience and ability to plan an assault like this on your own.”
“Your wits have atrophied, dutiful soldier, following ancient imperatives like a dog. Can you not puzzle out the source of the striders that even now consume your precious village?”
His heart sank at the implication.
That’s two. Two traitors.
It had to be Triton, Jensen realized. Another of the gods who ranged far and wide, Triton swam the alien atmospheres of the newly discovered worlds, cataloging lower orders of life in its many forms. When last Tower heard, Triton was immersed in the study of an Earth-sized world with a thick methane atmosphere, where a promising new species dwelled.
But no word from Triton had been heard since then.
“It’s Triton, is it not? Speak, traitor, if truth is a virtue that has not left you entirely.”
Faraway cackled in response. “Yes, Triton lends his many talents to your destruction. In his journeys across the
new worlds he has found many young species eager to stand with us. So many enemies you have!”
Faraway, the explorer of the farthest reaches of the galaxy, allied with���or controlled by���the Otrid. Triton, the cataloguer of alien life, supplying the attackers with monstrous foot soldiers.
A war between the gods had begun.
He sent a secure information burst to Talia with a record of this conversation with the twisted shadow of Faraway, along with a file of the last communications from Triton.
May the other gods help you, dear Talia.
“Faraway, the Benefactors disappeared eight hundred years ago. Why are you still fighting the Otrids’ war against them?”
“The Beh’neefazor did not disappear. They ran.” The figure within the message morphed from Faraway’s image into something much more inhuman. “All who stood with them must be exterminated. And they will be. The last Otrid lords have remained hidden, and have had centuries to study the ways of the cowardly Beh’neefazor. The secrets of the unworthy have been laid bare. And now those powers the Beh’neefazor so wickedly dispensed to lesser beings are stripped from you.”
The joyous anger that emanated from the Faraway shadow was obscene to behold. Susanti, the woman Faraway had been, was gone, as thoroughly destroyed as her Indonesian homeland on the desolate Earth. She may not even know what she was anymore, Jensen realized.
“You see your end approaching? All that you have fought for is in vain, the ending inevitable,” the remnant of Faraway hissed.
“I see my end approaching, yes.”
He moved the ship closer to the subspace portal. He focused all the remaining energy of his being into the propulsion and weapons systems of The 4,000. The Otrid vessels commanded by Faraway moved to block him���all but one, which slipped back into the maw of the open portal. As it disappeared, he felt a curious release of the pressure that had been stripping away his powers.
Gods and The City (Gods and the Starways Book 1) Page 8