His awareness that something was amiss having been stimulated by the arrival and subsequent actions of his half sister, Flinx had little by little grown dimly aware of the confrontation that had now given way to out-and-out combat onboard his ship. While a small part of him continued to agonize over the conflict that was physically out of his reach, the bulk of his concentration remained focused on sustaining the bonds that were beginning to stir the incomprehensibly vast forces swirling around him.
With Flinx and Pip at its core, the triangle of concentration held firm and continued to function.
On board the Teacher, an enraged Mahnahmi let loose the full fury that was herself. The uncontrolled ferocity picked up Tse-Mallory and tossed him aside as if he had been flicked away by a giant invisible hand. Reaching out with her misshapen mind, she came down hard on Sylzenzuzex with the mental equivalent of a blow from a hammer. Dropping her weapons, the padre fell to the deck unconscious. A force akin to that which had pitched first Truzenzuzex and then Tse-Mallory into the far wall slammed Scrap straight up into the ceiling. When it drew back, the minidrag fell to the floor insensible.
Surrounded by the dead and injured, Mahnahmi stepped over moaning or motionless bodies as she advanced on the entrance to the control room. Seeing her coming, Clarity swung the muzzle of her weapon around to fire at the malevolent, commanding figure. Before she could depress the trigger, something set fire to her optic nerves. Crying out, she dropped the thranx pistol and fell backward, clutching at her burning eyes. As she lay on the floor, sobbing and moaning from the pain, Mahnahmi halted between her and the comatose Sylzenzuzex.
“Two females.” Flinx's half sister sniffed contemptuously. “Two different species. Two fools. The only question remaining is, do I kill you slowly for the damage you've inflicted on my pitiful but still occasionally useful associates, or do I not waste the time and dispatch you with alacrity?” Kneeling, she picked up the weapon the now helpless Clarity had dropped. Handling it as if it were a jewel-encrusted necklace, she turned it slowly in her fingers as she admired the typically fine thranx workmanship.
“A toy from Evoria. I like toys. Let's see what this one does.” Straightening, she aimed it at the back of Clarity's skull as her forefinger felt for the trigger.
Within the increasingly active sphere whose periphery was now blowing off scarlet sparks like a miniature red sun, Flinx found that he was gradually able to recognize more clearly what was happening on board the Teacher. He perceived Clarity's terror, fended off Mahnahmi's hatred, touched upon the pain of friend and foe alike whose bodies were scattered throughout the control chamber. They all needed his help, but Clarity's immediate situation took precedence over everything else.
Everything—except what he was doing. Everything except what he had come for. The future of civilization and the fate of the galaxy was at stake.
So—was—his—future.
STAY WITH YOURSELF, the cetacea of Cachalot counseled him uneasily.
BE WHAT YOU ARE, the Krang on Booster ordered him.
insisted the green pervasiveness of Midworld.
Clarity! He felt himself drowning in anguish. What good to save everything and everyone else if he lost the only thing in the cosmos that really mattered to him?
STAY—BE—!!!^ the tripartite power resounded inside his head.
Something was on the verge of igniting. Not igniting, he told himself restlessly. It was on the cusp of exploding. No, it would not be an explosion either, he realized. Something magnificent, something unprecedented, something on a scale so vast it could only be even faintly comprehended within the realm of mathematics humanxkind had yet to discover.
HOLD ON, the cetacea exhorted him as they embraced him tighter in the depths of their warmth.
HOLD ON, the Krang commanded with the cold authority of eons.
, somehow elucidated the Midworld world-mind.
On board the Teacher, keeping the recovered thranx pistol pointed at Clarity's forehead, Mahnahmi pulled her communit and addressed it with serene iciness.
This child's play has gone on long enough, she decided brusquely.
“Caron, proceed as we discussed and obliterate that ball of blushing energy, or whatever it is. Use whatever means you think necessary. I'll be returning shortly.” She glanced around the control chamber before returning her attention to the hurt, quietly moaning woman lying on the floor. “Just a little cleaning to finish up here.” She started to slide the pistol's trigger.
Something yanked her off her feet.
Landing hard on her back, she found herself being dragged down the corridor between the unconscious female thranx and the weeping woman. Raising her head to look down at her feet she saw that several strong vines had wrapped themselves around her ankles. One was a striking cyan while the others were mostly dark green striped with yellow. The vines stretched all the way around the far end of the corridor.
How absurd, she thought as she was pulled along. Another futile, time-wasting interruption. Would the thranx weapon have an effect on the inexplicably aggressive vegetation? Raising the pistol and aiming it at the tugging green creepers just below her feet, she was impatient to find out.
On board the other ship, crew and members of the Order of Null prepared to fulfill their superior's directive. Potent armaments that did not belong on a commercial transport, that should not even have been in private hands, were activated. As these were brought to bear on the shimmering, fiery red orb that floated between them and the captured vessel, one of the innumerable crimson sparks that were being cast off from the side of the sphere came scintillating and spinning toward the visitor. Caron saw it coming. He frowned, then shrugged. While dazzlingly bright, the spark was no bigger than his little finger. Lifting his communit to his lips, he prepared to give the order to fire.
The spark touched the ship.
From Caplis generator to living quarters, from bridge to shuttlebay, the sturdy, ample craft was engulfed in primordial flame. In the space of several seconds—during which those aboard did not even have time to scream—it was reduced to a handful of blackened cinders floating in emptiness.
There's something else I have to do, Flinx thought forcefully.
This time no objection was flung back to him. Not from ocean-dwelling deliberators, not from calculating alien machine, not from convergently coherent alien flora.
Maybe it was too late for everything already, he told himself. Maybe his fractional loss of focus had weakened the trilateral nexus to such an extent that carrying on was impractical. He decided it did not matter. He had made his decision. He would try to do the impossible. He would try to concentrate on two things at once.
The triangle—held. He could not tell if its continuing coherence was for real or only an illusion he generated in his own mind to lend encouragement to what he was about to do.
He reached out one more time. Not to presences distant and alien but to something that was very close at hand. Close to him in more ways than he would have wished or could have explained.
Mahnahmi. Sister-half.
Having cut the vines holding her and once again standing over the increasingly feeble Clarity, the other surviving progeny of the Meliorares suddenly blinked and swayed slightly. The muzzle of the weapon she gripped wavered and her finger did not depress the trigger.
Get out of my head, brother!
I won't let you hurt anyone else.
Try and stop me. Go ahead—kill me if you can. I know that you can't. You couldn't aboard the alien artifact at Pyrassis. I don't think you can now.
The raw fury within her threatened to overwhelm him. It was primal, uncontrolled, and rife with feral intelligence. He fought back. It was if he was fighting himself.
Don't do this, Mahnahmi. Kill me if you must, but do it later. When I am finished with what I came to do here. Kill me, but let the galaxy live.
The emotional underpinnings of her reply were those of a soul ragged and torn. Lying against Flinx, a distraught Pip t
ried to filter that acid and agony.
Die now, die later; everything dies. Galaxies collide, suns go out. The universe is a cruel, dark, uncaring place. What do I care, what does it matter, if a little death arrives a little sooner for one insignificant pin-wheel of stars? Let chaos and disorder sort out the consequences between them, I say, and damn the collusion of apathetic elements that brought me into being!
Her declamation was accompanied by the emotive equivalent of an all-encompassing sneer.
I'm going to kill this woman lying here before me, she continued remorselessly, and next, the female bug lying next to her, and then your senile friends, and then I am going to kill you, brother. I'm going to do it because, unlike you, I can. What are you going to do about it?
This, he told her. I'm going to do it because, unlike you, I can.
He reached out with everything that he was, everything that he had become in his too-long twenty-six years of hard existence. Everything that was in him, everything that was of him. He sensed her mind harden as she threw up her defenses.
And felt her recoil from his compassion.
It was the last thing she expected him to send her way.
His effort was not a solitary one. The cetacea were there with him. They draped around her an inescapable cocoon of such warmth, such sympathy, such understanding, that despite her mental howls of protest she could not ignore it. The Krang made itself known as well, saturating her mind with hundreds of thousands of years of lost history It showed her the destruction of entire worlds, the unending war between the Tar-Aiym and their hereditary enemies the Hur'rikku, and the desolation and ultimate futility that was the eventual result of that ghastly colossal conflict. Lastly the group-mind of Midworld weighed in, an all-engulfing greenness that was at once the projection and representation of an entire planet whose globe-girdling organisms were bound together by the universal need simply to survive. Exploiting Flinx as a vector it reached out to enfold her.
The inexorable power of all that collective compassion beat back the interminable rage, smothered the blind fury, suffocated the bitterness that drove and nourished his half sister. She fought back ferociously, striking out blindly at the understanding that threatened to throttle her.
Nothing could withstand the force of that collective empathy. Not all the hate in the galaxy. Not even the embittered, shrunken soul of one as driven and obsessed as Mahnahmi. Her rage finally gave way.
Uttering a last defiant cry of hate she shook her fist at the heavens, and began to tremble. Sitting down slowly on the deck she put the gun carefully to one side, drew her legs up to her chest, wrapped her arms around her knees, and began to whimper. After a moment she started to rock back and forth, side to side. Deep inside her something had been exposed and, once exposed, could not be nonchalantly shoved aside or casually put back the way it had been.
Breathing hard, the pain behind her eyes finally beginning to subside, Clarity found herself staring at the devil-woman. Nearby, a bruised and battered Sylzenzuzex was starting to regain consciousness. After a few moments a hesitant Clarity started forward on hands and knees. Reaching out, she swept the thranx weapon aside. It skittered roughly across the deck. The striking blond woman made no attempt to grab for it.
Jet-black eyes rose to meet Clarity's own. Their gaze was blank, utterly blank. There was no maliciousness in them now, no visceral loathing, no homicidal yearning. There was just—nothing.
The woman leaned toward her. Clarity started to draw back, hesitated, and held her ground. The moans of the injured filled the control chamber. Advancing on hands and knees, the woman came closer, closer. Halting, she dropped her head and lay down on her side. With her head in Clarity's lap she drew her knees all the way up to her chest and lay silently, staring into oblivion. All the hatred within her had been asphyxiated, leaving nothing behind but a riddle.
Within the crimson sphere, where there was no time and no space, Flinx in his near-comatose state recognized that Clarity was safe. A great surge of relief rushed through him, a relief born of the exhaustion that arises out of desperate circumstances. Meanwhile, the cetacea held him together, the Krang held him up, and the greenness became one with him. On his chest, the emotional lens that was Pip convulsed as all that care and concern flooded through that inimitable part of her master's mind that marked him as a unique and unduplicatable accident.
Clarity's okay, he thought. He could refocus, redirect, rededicate himself. He proceeded to do so with everything he had and all that was in him. The result was that for the first time, the triangle opened fully to the key. The composite force of the multiple mind sources was unleashed. The fabrication the Xunca had contrived was activated.
The trigger was pulled on the Great Attractor.
For something that existed in the minds of the most advanced intelligences only as an abstract mathematical concept, the sudden surge of pooled charged gravitons had a decidedly quantifiable effect. So immense was the shaped thrust of forces that they punched a hole in the continuum itself.
In another part of the cosmos the brane that was the known universe split. Pressing forward at a velocity slightly more than incredible, the onrushing intrusion of another reality Flinx had called the Great Evil flowed into the unforeseen fissure. Before it could slow itself, before it could react, before it could even recognize what had happened, each and every iota of its annihilating malevolence spilled into the newly ajar congruent universe. The resulting shock wave was so powerful that it sent a ripple through all of space-time. The path of galaxies was slightly altered, including that of the local group of which the Milky Way was but a part.
Though this greatest single burst of energy since the universe formed was highly localized, its aftereffects would still have shredded groups of galaxies for millions of megaparsecs around—if not for the fact that within nanoseconds of its advent it commenced to collapse back upon itself. The fracture in the continuum closed and the impossible-to-measure flow of charged gravitons was sucked back into the very cleft they had created, leaving an improbably straight line of newly forming stars and nebulae in their wake. Upon discovering this singular astronomical phenomenon some time in the future, human physicists with a spiritual turn of mind would dub it God's Ruler, not realizing that its agent was actually a long-dead representative of their own kind.
Subsequent to The Event, several seemingly unrelated occurrences took place simultaneously throughout the length and breadth of the Commonwealth.
On its inner border, a powerful automated distress call suddenly flashed outward through space-minus from a world notorious for winking in and out of reality. Responding to the unexpected call from Quofum, a Commonwealth peaceforcer dispatched to that anomalous world found three scientists who had been marooned there. Two human and one thranx, they had been reported missing four years earlier and had been presumed lost.
In his official report, the commander of the rescuing vessel made a point of emphasizing two anomalies: for individuals who had been deprived of humanx company and resources for such an extended period, the trio were in good, even remarkable health. Additionally, and despite repeated scanning and the carrying-out of a thorough search, he and his crew had been unable to establish the actual source of the mystifying distress signal.
On the world called Comagrave, a xenoarchaeologist named Arleen Mapelle was hard at work at a well-known subterranean site, one of several where the famous technologically advanced preserving mausoleums of Comagrave's inhabitants had been excavated. At that moment she was busily entering information into a sybfile that would later be uploaded to her department's allocated segment of the planetary shell.
It was late and she was nervous. Not because of her striking environs: in the course of her monthlong stay on Comagrave she had grown used to the breathtaking solitude and grand surroundings of the vast underground chamber. No, as a recent graduate embarking on her first field assignment, she feared making a mistake or incorrectly entering data into the relevant sybfile.
The strange feeling that now crept over her caused her to turn from the communit over which she was laboring.
One of the hundreds of thousands of identical transparent cylinders that lined the interior of the immense underground chamber stood nearby. Tinted indigo, swathed in fragile vitreous golden filaments like fossilized baby's breath, it had been carefully removed from its place among its ranked fellows so that it could be studied more easily. The difficult move had entailed stretching and repositioning the dozens of delicate conduits and strands that connected it to the row from which it had been extricated. Held in suspension within the cylinder, or pod, was a slender, long-faced being of somber mien and spindly build.
Searching for the source of the odd sensation that had caused her to interrupt her work, she eventually found herself looking down at her feet. A dark wetness had pooled up beneath her left sandal. When she inclined her foot to one side, the dampness made contact with her bare skin. Frowning, she bent over to examine the liquid. It had not come from the protein drink that still sat upright on the console in front of her: the container was intact. Then what was its source? Raising her gaze, she followed the shadowy trickle. It led sideways to the base of the cylinder. Her eyes suddenly got very, very big.
The cylinder was open. Seeping out the bottom was the rest of the gel it had contained. The elongated horizontal eyes of the slender being inside were wide open and staring straight back at her. As she looked on, too frozen to scream, yell, or say anything, one of the being's two upper limbs started to twitch.
Rising from her chair she stumbled backward, tripped over a storage case, and fell. Dazed, she picked herself up. As she did so, her gaze happened to fall over the side of the walkway that was occupied by the archaeological station. Beyond stretched the immense preservation chamber, one of many buried deep in the bedrock of Comagrave. Like the others, this one held several million of the planet's indigenous inhabitants, each conserved for posterity in individual, highly oxygenated, gel-filled cylinders.
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