Destiny: The Complete Saga: Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, and Lost Souls

by David Mack

  Pazlar pointed out some details on the screen. “Tapping into the soliton pulse will mean matching its frequencies and resonance harmonics.”

  Ra-Havreii interjected, “The hard part is putting that much power into the sensors without blowing them to pieces. They’re just not made for that. We’d have to rebuild the grid to handle the stress.”

  “And rewrite the software,” Pazlar added. “If we don’t, one feedback surge could cripple the ship—or worse.”

  Riker had heard enough caveats. “Yes or no,” he said to Ra-Havreii. “Can we do it?”

  The chief engineer shrugged. “In theory, yes.”

  “Then it’s time to put the theory into practice,” Riker said. “I want those soliton pulses tapped in twenty-four hours.”

  Pazlar threw a wide-eyed glance at Ra-Havreii, who looked at Riker and asked, “Do you care whether we blow up Titan?”

  “I’d prefer we didn’t.”

  “Then I’ll need at least forty-eight hours. Sir.”

  He gave Ra-Havreii an encouraging slap on the shoulder. “Clock’s ticking,” he said. “Get started.”

  * * *

  Vale stood behind Dr. Ree as he examined Troi with a medical tricorder. The counselor sat on the edge of the bed in her private room, and Ree was crouched in front of her. Beneath the tricorder’s high-pitched whine, Vale heard the reptilian physician’s rumbling growl of dissatisfaction.

  “Forgive me, Counselor,” he said. “The news is not good.” The tricorder went silent as he switched it to standby mode. “Your body has rejected the targeted sythetase inhibitor,” he said. “As a result, your fetus has resumed growing. This new scan suggests that it will rupture your uterine wall in less than forty-eight hours.”

  Troi leaned forward and planted her face in her palms. It was painful for Vale to watch her friend crumple under the weight of such a tragedy. She wanted very much to say something comforting, something not trite, but she couldn’t think of anything. It’s not fair, she lamented. After all Deanna and Will went through, why did this have to happen to them?

  Ree reached forward, and with what looked like a surprisingly delicate touch, took Troi’s hand. “Deanna,” he said, his voice a deep whisper, like a breath through an oboe. “We need to operate, soon.”

  The counselor lifted her head, and Vale saw tears streaming from Troi’s eyes. “No,” she said to Ree. “Not here. Not yet. I’m not ready.… Please.”

  The doctor turned his long head so that one side faced Vale. “Operating here would not be my choice, either,” he said, revealing chunks of fresh red animal tissue caught between his fangs. “Not unless the Caeliar have a sterile facility.”

  “I’m sure they can make one if we ask,” Vale said.

  “No,” Troi said. She continued with uncharacteristic ferocity, “I want to be with my Imzadi when it’s time. We’re doing this on Titan.”

  Vale folded her arms and said, “Our hosts might have other plans, Deanna. And if you’re counting on me to get you back to the ship, you’re not leaving me much time to do it.”

  “Call this an incentive to work more quickly,” Troi said.

  A derisive noise—like a cross between a laugh and a cough—issued from Vale’s throat. “No pressure,” she said. “What about not ticking off the Caeliar?”

  “To hell with them,” Troi said, grimacing as she pulled her hand away from Ree and stood up. “I’m not ending this without Will, and I don’t want him coming down here and winding up a prisoner.” She walked with halting steps to her bedroom window and glowered at the sunny, pristine cityscape outside. “Get me home, Chris. Before it’s too late.”

  Vale stepped past Ree on her way to the door. “Let me know if her condition changes.”

  “I will,” Ree said with a dip of his scaly snout.

  She contemplated the task ahead of her as she went in search of the rest of the away team. I’ve got less than two days to outsmart an enemy that sees everything we do and hears every word we say. Two days to outmaneuver a foe that can be anywhere, lurking in thin air. She shook her head. Why do I get all the fun jobs?

  1574–2095

  15

  Sleep was the first casualty of Hernandez’s former life.

  After her rejuvenation, she had returned with Inyx to Axion. He’d left her at her residence while he went alone to face the censure of the Quorum. Daylight had faded, night had fallen, and she had waited for a tide of fatigue and exhaustion that never came. Then the sun rose again, and the previous day bled into the next. As did every day that followed.

  Days lost their meaning for her. Light and darkness were no more than ephemeral conditions in what she quickly began to perceive as a steady continuity of experience. Time flowed as it ever had, but she no longer felt caught up in its currents. The past seemed deeper. The present was sharper. The future was closer at hand than it had ever been.

  The second casualty of her humanity was her appetite.

  “Your catoms manufacture your body’s needs now,” Inyx had explained one evening, while watching the sunset with her. “They fuel your cells and stabilize your neurochemistry. You will never hunger again.”

  She stared directly at the descending sun and was amazed to find that it wasn’t painful. The fiery orb looked as bright as it ever had, but its fire was no longer blinding. “You haven’t told me everything about my transformation, have you, Inyx?” Turning her head toward him, she asked, “What else can I do?”

  “A great deal,” he said. “But it would be best if you learned it in stages.”

  Gazing back at the orange blaze on the horizon, she smiled. “In other words,” she said, “you’re not going to tell me.”

  “No,” Inyx said. “I’m not. Not yet.”

  Hernandez didn’t mind waiting. She had time.

  * * *

  As her routine became a rhythm, Hernandez expected she would eventually lose count of the number of sunrises and sunsets that she witnessed from the ramparts of Axion. Instead, she found that she could remember every one in exquisite detail. In fact, all her memories since the Change were clear and immediately at hand. She could compare them, contrast them, and replay them in her mind’s theater without losing focus on the present moment.

  On the occasion of her seven-hundred-eighty-first sunset since the Change, she emerged from a newly composed concert in the city’s main amphitheater, looked to the horizon, and realized that the city was moving.

  Reaching out with her thoughts, she located Inyx. He was on a widow’s walk, on the edge of the city, facing in the direction of its movement. She summoned a quicksilver disk and sped over the boulevards and between the towers until she hovered above him. He glanced upward. “You’re just in time,” he said. “The sun’s going down.”

  She lowered her disk to within a few meters of the widow’s walk and stepped off. Envisioning herself as a feather, she drifted gently down to his side. The landscape blurred as it disappeared beneath the edge of the city, which raced westward in pursuit of the falling sun.

  “We’re on the move,” she said. “Is there a reason?”

  “I thought it was time,” Inyx said.

  The city gained altitude as it cruised toward a range of mountain peaks whose caps burned with the dying light of day.

  Hernandez was silent while she admired the beauty of the passing moment. Then she asked, “Time for what?”

  “For you to stop staring at the three-tree hill,” he said.

  Dusk smothered the shallow degrees of the sky. “A clean break, then,” she said.

  “A new horizon,” Inyx said.

  Darkness loomed over Axion and sparkled with stars—except for one widening strip of the sky, which was blank and black, as if someone had erased the heavens with malice aforethought. Hernandez sighed. “Fine,” she said. “No more sunsets, then. From now on … all I want to see are sunrises.”

  “I think that sounds like an excellent idea,” Inyx said.

  * * *

  The
city roamed New Erigol like a nomad. Hernandez and Inyx continued to time their meetings to coincide with the sunrise, which dimmed by slow degrees as the decades passed.

  Over lush jungles and glaciated alpine slopes, above the deep deserts or the fathomless seas, every new dawn made Hernandez feel as she had at the moment of her rebirth, breaking free of the storm into the blue sky and sunlight. It reminded her to focus on beginnings instead of endings.

  “Clear your mind and listen,” Inyx said.

  Hernandez closed her eyes. “I’ll try.”

  “Focus,” he said, guiding her through an exercise they had practiced many thousands of times since her Change. It had become part of their daily ritual, a catechism meant to improve her control over the gifts granted to her by the Caeliar. “You should hear the voices of the Quorum, guiding the gestalt.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t hear anything.”

  Inyx seemed to deflate, as usual, at her reported failure. “Perhaps it will take more time,” he said. “I don’t understand how you could master so many of the catom-based powers so quickly, yet not have a conscious link to the gestalt.”

  “Maybe it’s because of a difference in our brain anatomy,” Hernandez said. “Or it could be linked to the fact that you and your people are almost entirely synthetic, while I’m still mostly organic.”

  The Caeliar scientist sounded perplexed. “I thought I had compensated for those differences,” he said. “It’s possible, I suppose, that when the catoms altered your genetic structure, they shielded you from the gestalt in response to your own subconscious desire for privacy.”

  “Who knows?” She shrugged. “We can try again tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” Inyx said. “These things don’t always work right away. We should give it a little time.”

  The absurdity was almost too rich for her to bear. A little time, she mused. It had been 14,387 sunrises. Thirty-nine years, five months, and two days. And he wants to give it more time.

  “Whatever you say,” Hernandez replied. “You’re back to the Great Work, now?”

  Levitating from the widow’s walk, Inyx replied, “Yes, it’s time. Will you be continuing to work on your mural today?”

  “As I do every day,” Hernandez said.

  “Until the next sunrise, then,” Inyx said, conjuring a disk under his feet. It shot away, carrying him back toward the city.

  Hernandez watched him go, and she kept her preternaturally keen eyes fixed on him until he vanished inside one of the platinum towers. Then she quieted her inner voice and opened her mind to the conversation that was all around her.

  Brighter and clearer than the muddled rumble of the masses of Axion, the Quorum’s debate was like a beacon. She picked out dozens of individual voices, including the tanwa-seynorral himself, Ordemo Nordal. It was a day of mundane details, as the tedium of the Great Work was engaged with unflagging attention and passion.

  The numbers and details were difficult for her to follow; though she had learned the Caeliar’s written language during her years working in the Star Chamber with Inyx, until the Change she had never had unfettered access to their native tongue. She suspected that she could translate it easily if she used her body’s catoms to filter the discussion, but she worried that doing so would draw the attention of the gestalt.

  She didn’t know how long she could continue lying to Inyx, or how long she could keep this ability hidden from the gestalt at large or the Quorum in particular.

  For the moment, however, it was her secret, and she intended to keep it that way.

  * * *

  No sooner had the sun crested the horizon than it was swallowed by the black edge of the planet’s dome, which now encompassed more than fifty percent of New Erigol’s sky.

  “This is unacceptable,” Hernandez said. “I won’t live in the dark again, Inyx. I can’t.”

  Her companion gazed to the horizon, arms folded in front of him. “You will not live in the dark, Erika. None of us will.”

  “How do you figure? Is that dome of yours going to turn invisible from the inside?”

  “No,” he said. “But we are taking steps to replicate the illumination and beneficial radiation effects of this planet’s star, using a traveling artificial solar generator on the interior surface of the shell.”

  Hernandez deadpanned, “The sun will rotate around the planet. How Ptolemaic of you.” Looking back at the masked sky, she said, “How long until it’s finished?”

  “Soon,” Inyx said, without elaborating.

  By her own estimations—including information she had gleaned by eavesdropping periodically on the Quorum—the shells around New Erigol and its star would be complete in less than another thirty years. The Caeliar had dismantled scores of worlds, harvested entire Oort clouds and asteroid belts, and even stolen superdense strange matter from distant neutron stars to construct these monstrous cocoons. Whenever she looked at the one above New Erigol, she thought of it as the lid of a coffin, slamming shut forever above her head.

  Even as she contemplated the possibilities of eternal youth, she found that the wonders of an endless galaxy still held less appeal for her than the dream of her long-lost home.

  In the deep watches of the night, perched alone like a bird of prey atop the city’s highest spire, Hernandez often dreamed of infiltrating the apparatus that the Caeliar employed for their Great Work, and using it to send a desperate SOS to Earth. Then she would remember that her dreams of escape and rescue were ultimately futile: there was no one on Earth who could hear her cry for help. On the world of her birth, the current year, according to the Gregorian calendar, was only 1645.

  John Milton’s “L’Allegro” was being published. The English Civil War was tearing Britain to pieces. The Black Death was spreading out of control in Europe. The great Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi was soon to die in his sleep. Humanity was still two centuries away from harnessing electricity and nearly five hundred years shy of inventing subspace communications.

  There was nothing she could do but wait and learn. And she vowed that when the time came to act, she would be ready.

  * * *

  By day the sky was the same. The sun wasn’t real and hadn’t been for centuries, but its light was just as bright and its heat as genuine. Hernandez understood only the slightest fraction of the holographic manipulations that the Caeliar had created to preserve the illusion of a distant star, so that none of the planet’s delicate ecosystems would be disturbed.

  In fact, the surface of New Erigol was safer than it had ever been. It was protected now from such hazards as asteroid impacts or bursts of cosmic radiation. Phenomena that would extinguish all life on an ordinary Minshara-class world posed no danger to New Erigol.

  At night, however, the illusion was revealed. New Erigol had never had a moon, and now its nights were starless. When the last rays of the ersatz sun faded away, the planet’s surface disappeared into an absolute, unnatural darkness. Its purity made Hernandez ache for the light’s return, and when the horizon betrayed so much as the slightest hint of indigo, she made her way to whichever peripheral platform faced the dawn.

  Violet bands crept from the edge of the sea, beginning their slow climb to the midheaven. In the ascending twilight, Hernandez sensed Inyx taking form beside her.

  “I heard part of your opus in rehearsal last night,” Inyx said. “It sounded quite stirring.”

  Hernandez frowned. “It needs more work,” she said. “Your people have a lot of skill as musicians, but not much feeling. And my piece is all about evoking an emotional response.”

  “Are you trying to stir any emotions in particular?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sorrow. And regret.”

  The sky brightened, and pastel colors bathed the misty streaks of cloud that raced past the city. Neither Inyx nor Hernandez had anything else to say that morning, and when the false orb of day breached the horizon, they parted ways.

  She overheard enough conversations through t
he gestalt—after more than five centuries, she understood enough of the Caeliar’s language to make sense of what she heard—to know that Inyx and his colleagues spent their time fine-tuning their new apparatus, which had been moved out of the city and ensconced in the protective shell high above the planet. Much of what she’d heard led her to believe that the machine was ready to resume the Great Work, yet the Caeliar seemed to be procrastinating. Hernandez wanted to ask Inyx why, but she knew there was no way she could pose the question without betraying her ability to eavesdrop on the Caeliar’s communal dialogue.

  Her own days since the Change had been spent in such artistic pursuits as painting murals, sculpting abstract stone forms, and composing instrumental music. Freed of the need for sleep or any sense of time’s limitations, she learned through repetition or trial and error. She remained convinced that she possessed no natural talent for any of her hobbies, but she now had more than five hundred years of experience and skill, which masked her dearth of true inspiration.

  Being able to shape molecules and tint pigments by thought alone also made it a bit easier to master the fundamentals of her visual endeavors.

  Music, on the other hand—she couldn’t force it or coax it into doing her bidding. Drawing the melodies from her mind was like hunting an elusive prey in the dark. It was the single most difficult thing she had ever tried to learn, and her obsession with it was a welcome distraction from her fixation on the slow machinations of the universe.

  Centuries had passed while she was searching for the elegiac tune that she felt inside herself every time she closed her eyes. When she tried to hum it, her voice broke or veered off-key. Trying to produce it on a range of instruments created by the Caeliar had proved equally fruitless. The song was locked inside some vault she didn’t know how to open.

  Another in an endless string of daybreaks brought her back to a place she hadn’t visited since before the Change. At the end of the long rectangular pool of jet-black water, the dead tree stood atop its dusty isle. Gnarled and blackened, it had a peculiar shine to it. Hernandez drew close to it and saw that its bark had the glossy sheen of stone. It had been petrified.