Deity

by deity

  Chapter 6: Conquest of the Astra

  Peta is gleaming, the smile has been fixed to her face for hours and shows no sign of dimming. She rushes around the room, a conglomerate of the latest switches, servers and routers that embarrass the previous set-up.

  Dean, one of the astral masters comes through the door directing a collection of couriers pushing trolleys all containing more of the latest equipment. He signs a form as they empty the last trolley and leave.

  Peta can’t help but be impressed by his business-like manner and can-do attitude. The fact that he must be filthy rich doesn’t hurt either. He is a great connection to have, in only a few hours he has supplied the room, state-of-the-art equipment, the lot. Nothing surprises her anymore, not after the revelations of the last few days. She wishes she could have seen the meeting of the high council. It sounds fantastic, Jason and Billy’s reaction was unbelievable enough in itself. They are usually so aloof but she had them chattering stream after stream of nonsense with a single question. Hours later they still hadn’t calmed down. Oh well, at least she has met a few of the masters such as Dean and, admittedly, she is pretty busy with all these cool new toys.

  All the more reason to make sure this works without even the slightest hitch. She doesn’t want to lose one of the masters before she has a chance to meet them, a repeat of what happened to Stave. Yachi has reassured her there was nothing she could do and she has replayed the scenario hundreds of times in her head. But how could she know for sure?

  She isn’t even entirely sure what happened. She has pieced together all she could with Yachi as they set up the new network. Between them they had concluded that Stave breaking from the cyberspheres put far more strain upon the system than a normal planar. This doubled when Yachi followed his pupil, ultimately leading to a system overload. With the Home-link severed there was no way Peta could help Stave.

  With the new network they now have far greater capability but there are far more planars to support, more factors they can’t control. Peta is confident that, with this new network the technical problems can be controlled but what of all these new users. They are unusual to say the least. What hope is there that they would all control their curiousity. It is clear that Yachi wants them to forge ahead and to do so immediately. Rushing the job made Peta uneasy. She wonders what is so critical that they must take such take risks but she is still coming to grips with the basics here and she doesn’t feel her inquisitiveness would be appreciated

  ‘That’s the last of it, Peta’ Dean says ‘I’m off to join the others, I’ll be in contact soon. Bye’

  Peta can tell he is nervous as he spoke. The network would soon be complete and he, along with the other masters would be off on their first exploration in the new realm.