10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights

by Ryu Mitsuse

  “You may decide that for yourself. The place you choose is my origin.” Her enemy’s response bored through Asura’s mind, scattering sparks in its wake. She wondered where exactly in the space-time continuum that enveloped her home world a presence like this had found entry. These beings had revealed themselves several times on Earth in the past, and doubtless had done the same on other planets and in other galaxies. Where did they come from, and why?

  “It appears you have questions concerning my existence, yet you know that I exist to the same degree that you exist. You seem secure in your knowledge that your solar system and the spiral galaxy you call the Milky Way, and all the hundred billion other galaxies in this universe, occupy the same space-time continuum on the same time axis. Asura, it appears you think of your universe as being on the inside of the sphere which extends to infinity, and that is well. But have you considered what lies beyond the borders of that sphere? What lies beyond the limits of your universe?”

  “It is meaningless to consider that which lies beyond infinity,” Asura responded.

  The god looked down with pity. “You understand that infinity is nothing more than an abstract concept, do you not? Or do you believe that there exists true infinity in this universe?”

  The being’s words sent a shadowy coil across Asura’s mind that threatened to paralyze all thought. Yet she understood instinctively that now was no time to consider the structure of the universe—not with her own destruction looming.

  “Maitreya!”

  A shooting star streaked above the shadow in the darkness, leaving a long fiery tail between the scant stars.

  “What possible purpose could you have to make a wasteland of this world? What reason could you have for doing everything in your power to drive humanity to extinction?”

  An aurora the color of blood flickered on the distant horizon, spreading like a thin curtain as it shifted from red to blue, then back to red, its light ebbing. The dark sky was visible behind its thin red veil, looking deeper and vaster than ever she had seen it.

  Asura’s mind went blank as she faced its light. Then she noticed the giant Maitreya moving soundlessly, the distant aurora reflected in his face and across his chest. His face was visible now beneath his boat-shaped crown. She saw long slitted eyes, set deep under long eyebrows, that held the calm glimmer of a bottomless lake. The giant’s chest was full and rolling beneath the lines of the garment he wore, and she noticed a necklace around his neck that radiated an unusual energy; its emanations struck the sensor on Asura’s chest, causing it to glow a bright orange.

  “Asura. There is something I would ask you.”

  Asura smiled, revealing a glimmer of white teeth. “You have quite the nerve to say that when it is I who have come such a great distance with so many questions.”

  “Answer me, and I will have no reason to destroy you. I will send you wherever you wish.” There was a tone of peaceful kindness in Maitreya’s voice that might have been interpreted as curiosity.

  “But not before reducing me to a husk of my former self, devoid of memory.” Asura laughed as though she were talking about someone else’s fate entirely.

  “Don’t be greedy.”

  Asura felt the tension between her and Maitreya quietly increase. “Fine,” she said, breathing out a long sigh. “What’s your question?”

  “You are here with two others. Who is it that gave you your mission? What organization maintained your sleeping webs for some five thousand years?”

  The instant Maitreya’s words rang in Asura’s mind, she switched off the circuit that connected her brain to her supplementary processor’s neural memory web. Asura became empty, filled only with the darkness of night. A feeling of release spread from her emergency circuitry, making her feel lighter than the wind itself.

  “Speak, Asura! Who gave you your mission? What is the name of your organization?” Maitreya’s voice grew increasingly irritated.

  By the time the first blast hit, Asura had already become one with the night around her. The fear in her heart fled into the darkness, leaving nothing in its place but an empty hollow.

  “Well? Asura? You cannot escape. I will give you another ten seconds.”

  In the unmoving silence that followed, even the wind died. It lasted for exactly ten seconds, during which Asura stood, quiet, her mind frozen and unchanging.

  The second blast hit.

  Asura felt herself plummeting at a terrifying speed through endless space in which there was no up or down, left or right. No stars shone in the monotone darkness around her.

  Somewhere off in the distance, the aurora flickered a lonely red. She tried to focus on the color but it slipped away, and her consciousness followed.

  Neural memory web still off-line, Asura’s supplementary processor activated a secondary metabolizer, designed to handle massive expenditures of energy. Her processor began to rapidly analyze her situation. Once all internal systems had been checked and no abnormalities were found, the processor turned its attention outside. With the neural memory net inaccessible, this was an extremely difficult procedure. The processor was forced to pick targets for analysis based on an endless reiteration of basic logic patterns.

  One of her eyes saw only the darkness of a deep night sky with a scattering of stars. No cause for her current state could be found there. The other eye looked out over the cold basin. The faint sound of wind stimulated her auditory nerves, then both of her eyes moved together, focusing on the giant shape that loomed ahead of her. Her processor noted the animosity radiating from that figure like a tidal wave, and all became clear. Only a sliver of time remained.

  Her supplementary processor connected directly to her cerebellum. In a flash, Asura sprang to her feet. Her right hand reached up to pull out the hairpin from the back of her head and fling it forward. The hairpin left a faint trail of light, golden ions scattering into the night behind it. At almost exactly the same time, the god-figure towering in the darkness began to waver like a mirage. The hairpin burst into flame and fell to the ground.

  Asura regained consciousness. She welcomed the ache in her head—though it felt as though her skull had cracked wide open, it was the surest sign yet that at last the advantage had passed to her side. This was a chance she could not afford to waste.

  Bands of pale blue light swept between Maitreya’s form and her own. She could feel her body shivering under the terrifying brunt of her enemy’s psychic attack. If her supplementary processor hadn’t been engaged to run her systems automatically, she would have died without ever waking again. Quickly she cranked her micro-reactor to full and extended the agitator from the magnetic field generator on her bracelet. Its tip touched the next band of blue light as it approached. There was an incredible flash.

  The high-voltage stream generated by her agitator arced between the two gravitationally sealed spaces between her and Maitreya, and both barriers collapsed. Before the sparks had even faded, Asura dived into the remains of the crystal building. The floor was now a sea of flame, but she felt no pain or discomfort. She stood with the sphere of translucent pipes at her back. Supported on short metallic bars, the sphere appeared to be floating over the intense flames that licked along the floor.

  “Maitreya! How can you possibly destroy me, you who have come from another world? To me you are void, like the sea of darkness from which you emerged.”

  There came no answer.

  Moving swiftly, Asura wrapped the sphere inside a dimensional barrier. There it flickered faintly like a failing neon sign. She could sense a violent struggle taking place somewhere nearby in the remains of the building—but though she knew this was likely Siddhārtha and Orionae engaged in a battle to the death against Jesus of Nazareth, it was far too dangerous for her to pay any attention to their combat. If she lost her own engagement, she would have no way of ever knowing the true nature of the being that had turned this world into a wasteland.

  Outside the translucent walls, the sky began to lighten until it was
as bright as day. Its color shifted from yellow to green, from green to blue; then the basin and the sky arcing above it were filled with a shimmering purple radiance. That too faded and was replaced by a faint, pale light suffusing sky and land.

  A grayish curtain of snow hung down from the clouds to touch the ground to the north. Gusts of wind blew flakes down to swirl and sweep across the icy slope. The snow increased in intensity, quickly reducing Asura’s visibility to zero.

  A ceaseless wind screamed in Asura’s ears. In the few moments when the snow let up for a moment, she spotted a vast number of shadows moving across the white glacier in the distance. In between gusts, she saw the shadows multiplying, approaching. Then she spotted an object in the distance, a strange shape like a flattened disk with a complicated protrusion on its top. From its tip a blinding light erupted. The light formed a revolving beam that swept across the snowy plain, transforming snow and ice to scalding steam that drifted up toward the gathered clouds. Off to her left, a cannon mounted atop an igloo-shaped base began to fire. Plumes of snow shot up into the air like trees in a forest, incandescent light flaring between them—cannons on the hills engaging each other across the glacier.

  Off on the distant horizon to the west, a river with a name Asura didn’t know undulated slowly, the color of lead. If only she could reach the river, she might awaken from this nightmare.

  She took stock of her surroundings. Her enemy had already advanced onto the icy plains beneath the rise on which she stood. Thin wisps of smoke rose from impact points halfway up the low ridgeline to her right, spreading until the entire side of the mountain was veiled. Her enemy’s armored vehicles were already advancing onto the plains. The dozen or so vehicle-mounted heat-ray cannons that formed Asura’s final line of defense at the base of the rise were already engaged in combat. Pale arrows of light crisscrossed in the sky, and tanks and armored vehicles spit sparks like crucibles between the billowing clouds of steaming snow and ice.

  Asura gathered her infantry amidst the flames and the steam and sounded the retreat. They went around the foot of the ridgeline, making for a snowy valley between two ridges to the west. Missiles skimmed across the tops of the high cliffs, making the air shake around them. An incredible explosion sounded from the entrance to the valley ahead. The blast wave hit the walls of snow and ice like a hammer, echoing like thunder in the distance. The enemy was asserting his control of her escape route.

  Another missile exploded ahead of the infantry, sending shattered chunks of ice and rock up to ricochet off the cliff walls; fragments continued to fall back down into the valley for what seemed like several minutes. Columns of flame rose around her line, blocking their advance.

  Their route into the valley was now piled high with shattered ice and rock. Asura turned the column and led her men up the cliffs on her right, climbing until she reached the top of the ridge where she could look down across the entire battlefield. It appeared that now their only possible route for retreat was via the great river to the west.

  With a start, Asura realized she had no idea where she was, nor how great her own forces were. Was this a small section of a vast battlefront, or was this the only engagement, the struggle on which victory or defeat would hang? The only thing that was clear to her was that the enemy army covering the snowy plains behind them was led by none other than Maitreya.

  There was not much hope to be found here. Surely she would never reach the river with the dozen or so foot soldiers remaining to her now. They stumbled along, ice forming like cold flowers on their chests and limbs. She called for them to move faster, directing them along the ridge toward the west. Yet it was not long before she noticed that her troop was no longer visible—though she guessed that the burning pyres that dotted the ridgeline behind her were their remains.

  “Well, Asura? You know you will never make the river. Join my forces, Asura. It is the only future remaining to you in which you survive.”

  The familiar voice echoed in Asura’s chest. She raised her snow-encrusted face toward the western sky. Not a single living shape moved in that uninterrupted vista of snow and ice. Suddenly, she was reminded of another battlefield from another time, beneath a dark night sky.

  An aurora had rippled in the distance on that battlefield, colors of light crossing through the frozen air. In that bleak place only death had thrived.

  Where was that again?

  When was that again?

  Here, there was only the white landscape as far as she could see in every direction. No night. No aurora.

  What was that?

  What?

  What?

  The image she held in her mind’s eye burst abruptly into flames—this was a nightmare battle from which there was no escape. Everything had begun here. Everything returned here again.

  Memories of bitter fighting for long, long years against the forces of Śakra crawled across her vision, intermingling with the white wasteland before her. The giant statue of the god hidden in the depths of the Pearl Palace was nothing more than a promise of destruction, and yet those she fought believed it to be a symbol of their salvation. The distant memories burned in Asura’s breast. She was trapped in a phantasm of struggles past. Trapped!

  Asura stood.

  Wrapped in its protective barrier, the strange sphere loomed above the sea of flame. Hatred and enmity swirled through the tongues of fire, burning Asura more than the heat that flooded over her.

  This is all part of Maitreya’s psychic assault! I must be strong!

  She held a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes tight. She felt the inside of her skull grow suddenly cool as her supplementary processor employed a secondary circuit to transmit high-frequency waves into the gray matter of her cerebrum. Filters activated, absorbing the hypnotic electrical emissions that were targeting her, reflecting them back at their source.

  Even under the brunt of the psychic assault, she retained her control over the barrier around the sphere.

  Using the brainwave detector attached to her tertiary semicircular canal, she searched for Maitreya. Unable to pinpoint him, Asura measured the hypnotic wave patterns and fired a hand missile back along their trajectory. She lamented the lack of any form of psychic attack in her own personal arsenal. Compared to Maitreya’s mental assault, even an antimatter proton bomb and an antigravitational barrier were sticks and stones.

  Asura’s missile flew, trailing a long tail of fire behind it, the power of a splitting lithium atom turning one of Maitreya’s radiation shutters into scalding steam. Before the light from the blast had faded, Asura fired another. But the jet of super-hot gas following the second missile struck the metallic fastenings of another shutter and reflected back, sending a wave of molten metal splashing toward Asura’s face fast enough to cross the distance in a few hundredths of a second.

  Asura twisted her body. No time to raise a barrier—her processor went into hyperspeed, rerouting her reflex pulses from her cerebrum down toward her spinal column, shaving milliseconds off her reaction time.

  Danger!

  If only dawn would break. The thought was on the mind of every soldier and general on the field. Their enemy’s attack had begun halfway through the night, growing in intensity as the crescent moon dipped down toward the west. Anticipating the night attack, Asura had placed skirmishers in black camouflage at intervals along the battle lines, but she had not expected an assault of such intensity. Apparently, the enemy was hoping that this battle would be the turning point in the long and grinding war. By the time the reports of failure from the front lines reached her headquarters and Asura was able to send out reserve forces, the enemy had already penetrated deep within her lines.

  Great blades and halberds shimmered in the dark, sending up warm sprays of blood into the wind. Screams of terror and roars of rage overlapped with the shouting of men on both sides, and the soldiers mingled like fighting ants, slashing and grappling, rolling on the ground. In the dark, the psychological pressure on the defenders heightened t
o a fever pitch. For those who tried to flee, the darkness itself became an enemy.

  If only dawn would break. Asura bit her lip and gazed toward the crescent moon, now low in the western sky. It would still be a long while before daybreak, and the tide of battle was rapidly shifting against her. The enemy had already reached the basin in front of the high ground where she now stood. A storm of arrows fell around her headquarters, sounding like a monstrous bird flapping its wings through the trembling night air.

  “General Vajra, go!”

  Vajra, one of her finest generals, defender of the northern banks of the Jinsha, descended from the high ground with his troops, his leather armor creaking. The soldiers moved silently, their footfalls as soft as those of nocturnal beasts drifting through the woods, until there came the sounds of violent hand-to-hand combat from midway down the slope.

  Fire rose up in the deep forest to the north of the high ground, quickly engulfing the trees in a sea of crimson flame. The incessant reports of splintering trunks sounded across the intervening distance; every leaf became an arrowhead of fire, whirling up in the sky only to rain down around Asura’s camp. Soon the grass and the shrubs along the plateau began to burn. The dark silhouettes of Asura’s soldiers as they stomped the fires out looked almost beautiful, as though they had spontaneously abandoned war to engage in a great and graceful dance.

  The fire wrapped around the rise, reaching the plains to the west. Their enemy was cutting off their route of escape.

  Two or three of General Vajra’s men came staggering back, accompanied by a terrible smell of blood. One of them fell like a stone amongst the burning grasses. The stench of scorched flesh stung Asura’s nostrils. Now the enemy’s advance guard came dancing in among the wounded. Their silvery helmets reflected the flames, shining like red jewels. Asura cut down three of them personally with her greatsword while her guard rallied, managing at last to push the enemy back down the slope.

  The white blush of dawn began to creep into the sky in the east and a chill morning wind blew across the battlefield. By now, the front lines were firmly engaged on the slopes. During the time between midnight and early morning, Asura’s ten thousand troops had been reduced to a tenth of that number, the rest killed, captured, or wounded so badly they could no longer fight.