For the first time in his life, Raohan La embraced his anger and as yet unexpressed, unconscious hate for the human species. Keeping his lone eye upon the bubble, Raohan La drew his head back somewhat, cocking at a slight angle, then drove it forward with an open-mouthed roar. There was a flash and an impossibly loud boom which seemed to hang in the air for minutes after it had occurred, but the bubble and its contents were gone.
• • •
Jav halted in the air abruptly at the sound of the boom. The TK, for the moment, had been withdrawn, but his entire left side flared with sudden and extreme heat. Something had nearly struck him, something moving at an incomprehensible velocity. He stared dumbly for a moment at the giant reptile before crying aloud, “Nils!”
Light flashed from behind, reaching over and around Jav. He turned to look back, realizing what the light was even before he saw the Palace Lightning Gun batteries laying more lighting lashes upon the blue sky. He returned his attention to the dyna sore and saw that the guns were proving their worth. One had scored a hit, leaving an impressive scorch mark upon the monster’s breast, but subsequent shots were turned away by its telekinesis or some other means. It took three lumbering steps backwards with one paw raised defensively, lightning strikes making ninety degree turns to seek the surrounding trees, then it simply disappeared.
Jav had not moved. The batteries had ceased, but several fires had resulted from their fusillade. Black smoke rose in ominous billows from all around the clearing the dyna sore had occupied as the trees roared with flames. Something still within the clearing caught Jav’s eye.
“Scanlan, tell me you’re still with us,” Jav said through his Artifact.
“I am,” came the reply, “but I don’t understand whatever it is you may be suggesting.”
“Nils and Hilene are gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“I mean gone. And so’s the dyna sore. At least for now.”
“What’s a dyna sore?”
“I don’t know. Whatever attacked us. I’m sure the Lightning Gun techs have images. There’s some machinery leftover, though, that’s about to be consumed by fire. Do you think it’s worth recovering, that it might provide a clue as to why this planet appears to be populated with a single giant reptile instead of the human civilization we were expecting?”
“Yes, by all means, collect what you can. The Gran Bay doors are nearly serviceable, but it might be faster if I came in a jump ship.”
“Right. Have them send the Grans out when they’re able.
“Vays,” Jav continued through his Artifact, “you and Raus ride with Scanlan.
“Icsain, Gran Bay doors or no, you and your troops should be mobile. Create a line around the Palace. Send runners every twenty degrees to scout as far as you can reach.
“Brin, get to the main Lightning Gun battery. You’ll be able to see everything in every direction for kilometers there. Wire into the external PA and be prepared to shout. Also, keep the techs alert for any movement that isn’t ours.”
With everyone’s assent, Jav started forward again, cautiously at first, then with an AI boost that brought him instantly to the clearing. The fire was thick all around, but he descended into its midst. Most of the ground here had been trampled flat with little fuel left to lure the flames into the circle. He could see now that there were shattered and smoldering machines at the perimeter, but felt that they’d been brought to that state before the use of the Lightning Guns. What had initially drawn his attention still stood unscathed within the clearing, though. It was a ring of what looked like heavy bronze, two meters in diameter, standing on edge. Jav approached it, his AI sense, alert and acute, extending. Flames were encroaching from several sides now. They weren’t dangerous, but would become so if left unchecked. He took a moment to stamp them out before proceeding once again to the ring.
When he put his hand to it, Jav felt the hum of unimaginable power coursing just beyond the metal surface. He guessed, and not wrongly, that the entire planet was powering the ring. But what was it for? He tried to move it and found that it wouldn’t budge, not with all his prodigious strength, both natural and unnatural. He could probably unloose it with the application of AI, but somehow didn’t think that that would be a good idea.
He patiently waited the few minutes it took for the sleek, triangular jump ship to arrive. Vays stepped down from the hatch first. He was followed by Scanlan, then by Raus, both making the ship bob.
“I don’t think we’re going to be taking anything back to the Palace,” Jav said.
“What do you mean?” Scanlan said.
“See for yourself.”
“Jav, what happened to the rest of my team?” Vays said.
Jav shook his head. “I don’t know. Hilene was gone when I came out. I think Nils was hit with the same force that struck the Palace just prior to planetfall.”
Vays cocked his head. Raus made a sour face, pursed his lips, and hissed air out through them.
Scanlan, however, had approached the ring and was doing what Jav had suggested. He was examining it with the all the scrutiny the Creation Cogs could afford him. After a moment he mimicked Raus’s expression of pained awe.
“This is extraordinary,” Scanlan said. He shot a look up the length of the Vine, to where it bent sharply, and noted with a start, that beyond that point, there was no more Vine.
“If I may direct your attention upwards, gentlemen?” Scanlan said.
Everyone looked and gawked.
“How can that be possible?” Raus said.
“It’s all a matter of time, Mr. Kapler.”
“What?”
“Time,” Scanlan said simply. “More detail will require quite a bit more investigation, I’m afraid.”
“Was I right, Scanlan?” Jav said.
“Indeed you were, General Holson. It wouldn’t do to move this, not unless we want to dig up a good third of the planet in the process.”
“Not today,” Jav said. “Will you need anything from the Palace?”
Scanlan shook his head. “Gran Mal should be sufficient.”
• • •
Raohan La cursed himself for his pride and stupidity. A dark sliver of depression had worked its way into his heart as well. Humans. Would they prove to be his bane even after all his grand achievements? Wrapped in a light-bending shell borne of his own mind, he studied the clearing, trying to determine the full threat these humans presented. He didn’t like that he’d had to leave the temporal window unattended, but they’d surprised him, hurt him. He’d burned out the hollow of his eye to stop the bleeding and prevent infection, but the organ was lost. His senses were many and varied, but his sight would never again be the same, not even with the aid his mate could provide.
He didn’t think they’d be able to use the temporal window, not without the other component of its power source, and that he would never give up. He hoped, perhaps in vain, that they wouldn’t even be able to discern its purpose. The window was an acceptable sacrifice, though, especially if he’d succeeded in halting whatever progress the monstrosity-plant was making in collapsing the universe. Stol’s Stolom was safe. Raohan La’s mere existence was proof of that.
There was still work to do, but he needed to recover a bit more, to gather his faculties. The mental and physical resources required to finally eliminate the humans and that hideous Vine would be substantial. He’d intuited that the humans were a secondary threat, that they merely aided the plant, and that the plant’s main power and intelligence had been trapped here in the past. The humans had proven to be exceptionally able, probably due to augmentation of some sort, and there was still the matter of the plant itself. He’d hoped and expected that the temporal amputation would weaken and disorient it, and so far, he was confident that the separation had had the desired effect. That a portion of the plant still remained in the present was irksome due to the threat it represented, even if only potential, but it couldn’t be helped.
A litt
le more rest and he would be ready to—
Pain seared through him like jabbing spear. First there was enormous pressure and then a sickening release. He realized that this latter was his blood pouring out in a thick stream from his midsection. Nausea overwhelmed him and he nearly collapsed. Everything canted, spun. Up and down had no more meaning. He took one heavy step forward and attempted to master himself. In those steadying moments, he was able to make out the glimmering figure just beyond the arcing spill of his own blood.
• • •
For the first time in nearly a hundred years, Hilene Tanser was truly frustrated. She’d approached the giant reptile, which, for some reason, she couldn’t think of as a dragon—no wings? awkward and less than ideal anthropomorphism?—carelessly. That wasn’t a fair assessment exactly, but she was very critical of herself. She had to be. It wasn’t fair to be critical only of others. She’d approached the reptile as she had every other enemy, intangible, but only at the most rudimentary level. Teleportation was very rare to begin with, but to reach beyond the physical and grasp what essentially wasn’t there spoke of vast mental powers. Enough power, she deduced instantly, to knock the Palace off true. She would not make the same mistake twice.
When she found herself buried under kilometers of murky salt water, she snorted and sighed internally. She’d immediately pushed her intangibility to its most advanced level. The environmental conditions posed no danger to her, but she had no reference point. In this state, everything was revealed to her. Through the very planet itself, she could sense the Vine, or at least part of it. She could sense the intellect responsible for sending her here. There was something else, too. There was something between the Vine and the reptile that reached down into the planet’s core, feeding on its energy and exuding some kind of distortion, like a strange and constant echo. She fixed her attention on the reptile and made her best speed towards him. She streaked through rocky layers, through the molten core, then back through countless layers of rock, until, seventy-six minutes later, she popped out from the ground less than a hundred meters from the reptile’s hiding place.
Again she snorted. A light-bending field? Maybe it would fool her colleagues, for a short time anyway, but it was nothing to her. In her current state, she had no fear of detection save visual, and the monster’s back was to her. Normally she didn’t like sneak attacks, but teleporting your opponent from the fight wasn’t exactly sporting either. She couldn’t ignore the positioning advantage he’d provided to her, or, she was less likely to admit to herself, the bruising to her ego.
She straightened, took a deep, purely reflexive and symbolic breath, and shot forward, executing the Ten Deaths inside to bore a straight channel through the reptile.
Her fragments reassembled on exit, but she stopped in midair shortly thereafter. All during her progress through the monster’s torso, she felt something tugging at her, trying to rip her and all her other selves apart. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was something trying to invade her, through every cell, though none should have been accessible to the physical world. She coughed blood into her helmet now and, shocked and outraged for the first time in her life, turned to look at the thing responsible.
She spent no time considering what to do next. She burst forth, back towards the reptile. She would finish it off and that would be the end of it: no more threat to the Vine or to her personally. She didn’t realize it, but it was the latter that had incensed her. She’d never felt such pain or been so close to death as she had while inside the reptile and its very existence drove her reason from her, made her furious. Just as she was about to pierce its hide, though, it moved, or rather, it teleported several meters away. She darted towards its new location, employing the Ten Deaths a fraction of a second after what would have been penetration, but the reptile teleported again just prior, and in fact, teleported multiple times, each time to take it out of reach of one of her charges. It backed away from her as she reassembled, and her eyes succumbed to some kind of trick of perspective. The reptile suddenly appeared to be several kilometers away and was then gone from her sight.
She bent and held her arms tightly about her middle, trying to stem the pain she felt there. Her head was muzzy. Was she feverish? What was wrong with her? She strained her senses to try to find the reptile once again, but could not and came away only with a dull, throbbing ache behind her eyes to accompany the muzziness in her head. She thought she might vomit. Thankfully the Vine was closer than the reptile had been when she started back from the ocean bottom.
• • •
Four hours later, Hilene awoke to darkness, but recognized her own bed. She immediately called Jav through her Artifact, was relieved to find him in range and able to respond. He showed up in her quarters not ten minutes later. She hadn’t moved from the bed. He sat down on its edge to join her.
“I thought we’d lost you both, Hilene,” Jav said.
“Both? What do you mean?” She sat up on her elbows, her face scrunching up with mild effort to do so.
“Nils. He’s gone.”
She shook her head, not able or not wanting to process the information.
“But Nils. . . Not even you can crack him when he’s Dark.”
Jav pursed his lips, nodded. “I don’t think anything could have survived what hit him.”
She lowered her eyes, frowning. She felt tired, exhausted actually, which was unusual, but maybe not, considering what she’d been feeling before. . . before. . .
“How did I get here? I remember the reptile going away. I started to come back here, but. . .” She met his eyes and shook her head again.
“You made it as far as the clearing. We’ve got quite a set-up out there now with Gran Mal standing guard. Scanlan says he’s hours away from figuring out how to get us back. Which is impressive, considering he figures we’ve arrived a couple hundred million years early.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, and it looked like it hurt her to try.
“Don’t worry. Anyway, you were incoherent and had reverted to a slightly-less-than-impossible-to-reach state. I used AI to tow you back. You finally went solid on your own and I put you to bed.”
He smiled at her. “I’m glad you’re all right.” But as he stared at her, his smile darkened. “You are all right, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “I think so. I hurt it, Jav, but I couldn’t kill it. It sent me away, far away, but I found it again and made it bleed. There’s something really very terrible about it, though. Something,” she shook her head, searching for the right words, “something final about it.”
“Final?”
She sighed. “I don’t have the words. There’s what it did to the Vine, and when I went through it, I think I almost died. I think it left me sick somehow. I feel better now. Just. . . just tired.”
“A medscan crew has already had a look at you. They couldn’t identify anything wrong. You should get some more rest. I’m going to go back out to check on Scanlan’s progress.”
She nodded and smiled. “Thanks.”
He smiled in return.
• • •
Raohan La hurt everywhere, but it was his pride, once again, that suffered most. It had been shattered and abandoned as a result. He rose from the vast stone slab that had served as his sick bed, stood in the darkness of the caverns he’d carved with his mind for his people to use as shelter from what had arrived hours ago. Previously, he’d entertained ideas of stopping the plant on his own, of once more being a hero to two races and perhaps the universe as well. But he knew now that he couldn’t do it alone. He required help. There were others, his mate in particular, who were quite adept at biological manipulation. If he hadn’t come back to seek aid from his fellows, he’d be dead now.
In the entryway, he recognized Chushin La’s silhouette, lit only slightly by the wan firelight from the adjoining chamber. He knew that the rest were there, discussing options and the possibility of a future. She put a paw gently to his chest, careful of the tend
er, rebuilt tissue.
“Nobody judges you, Raohan La,” she whispered into his mind. “We are eager to be of assistance, to stand by you, to ensure Stolom’s survival. No one could have done what you did, not in the way of preparation, not in the way of assault. No one here is your equal, but every one of us is ready to die in support of your vision. After all, what else is there?”
He winced at that. “I could have allowed the present to contend with its own difficulties, spared us additional strife after achieving peace and establishing new lives here in this paradise.”
“How?”
“A simple choice.”
“Not simple,” she said. “Not even a choice, really. No one judges you for any of your actions. Every last one of us owes you everything. Now, you must stop judging yourself or we are all doomed.”
“You are wise, Chushin La. And my vanity disgusts me. I will ask for help, not in shamed defeat, but in the name of proud fellowship.”
They walked together into the next chamber, which opened up incredibly with walls worn smooth for a kilometer around, and where nearly a hundred of their fellows were gathered.
3.3 BACK AGAIN
10,900.085
The clearing from which the giant reptile had wrought such terrible damage on the Vine had been co-opted by the Vine’s occupants. The ground itself was of little worth, but the lens, as Scanlan took to calling it, was to be their salvation. Gran Mal, golden, massive, and looming stood over it, guarding it like fresh prey. Powerful lamps encircled the ring and more spots from the Gran shone down to illuminate Scanlan’s makeshift workspace under the Gran’s own Shadow.
Jav accompanied Scanlan, though Gran Mid, along with Gran Pham and Gran Lej, was stationed back at the Palace.
Witchlan appeared on a holographic screen in the midst of Scanlan’s equipment as he had every hour on the hour since Scanlan had set up.
The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) Page 21