by Shay Zana
Boone hefts the man up and shoves him onward, giving him a headstart as he turns and brings his Genesis to bear on the next incoming Gladiator.
A whirr of energy and the bright lights of the Blackray emerge from beneath the edge of the metallic ridge. The Blackray is slow moving but steady as it lines up its two cannons to lock on to the approaching Gladiators. Just before the Gladiators can open fire, the Blackray lets loose a salvo of electric missiles, successfully conflicting against the shields of the two vessels. This forces them to disengage.
The marines whoop and cheer as they clamour back to their feet, but the Paragons cut short their party by ordering them to run for the Blackray. As if to back up their orders, the Gladiators skulk around for another try.
"Move it!" Boone shouts as he returns fire with his Genesis.
Natheus' encouragement is more physical as he grabs one of the injured men and carries him over his shoulder, shutting out his cries of pain through the comms channel.
The Blackray hovers toward them and angles around, allowing them to leap in through the cargo doors, wide open in invitation. The marines all jump the distance and scuttle themselves aboard. The two Paragons do not join them.
"Get aboard!" Neal yells anxiously, taking the injured man from Natheus.
Natheus shakes his head. "We must go back for our men. Tell your pilot to get you as far away from Kronos as possible and rally any who will listen.”
Before Neal can either accept this or protest against it, a familiar voice calls from the cockpit. "We’re not leaving! Get Mazayus!"
Natheus stands rigid, but Boone's body shoots with elation as he springs forward. "Deo? Where the flying fuck did you come from!?"
The reverberations of battered armour plating pepper the vessel, and the Blackray lurches across a few metres as Deo attempts to steady her. This nearly squashes the two Paragons as they dive under the Blackray's hull just in time, merely clipped by its wing.
"Get Mazayus!" Deo repeats hoarsely, keeping the Blackray low as the Gladiators pass overhead. Rapidly, Boone and Natheus bounce back to their feet and sprint for the tunnel entrance ahead.
"Mazayus, do you read?" Natheus tries over the short-range comms link. He reaches the sealed door before Boone and keys in the unlock command, but the door seems to be completely inoperable. He now shoulder-charges it with as much power as his augmented body can muster. His shoulder slams into the dense nikita without so much as a stutter from the morphing material. Boone joins shortly after and tries the same thing, but with a slightly more elaborate method as he throws himself bodily at the door, bashing shoulder-first but with no more success.
“Fuck it," Boone eventually growls and morphs his Genesis to fire acidic rounds, preparing to burn apart the nikita material.
Before his weapon can muster its power to transform, a blue light blinds them momentarily, followed by a rush of flickering energy. A prolonged hush and the hazy mist of entity bathe their surroundings. All is still and motionless for what seems like an eternity, stretching on in a world of slowed time. The luminosity lingers, but finally, as it begins to fade, bringing back the sense of realism and perception, the two strain their visions through the entity dust to catch the last slanting twist of a Gladiator disappearing back through the hull breach, leaving the Blackray in one piece as it hovers with erratic difficulty. It is heavily damaged, but the entity emerging seamlessly across the air is seeping into the Blackray’s biological armour plating and providing it with absorbed star energy, healing the armour.
Altair?
Boone's aim is knocked forcefully as the entire station shudders and seems to ignite in flames. The two Paragons turn just in time to shield themselves from a holocaust of flames reaching out toward them. They are thrown into disorientation by the force of an explosion, their entities the only thing between them and a searing death under a plethora of flames.
The hull surrounding them is ripped and dragged away by some hulking mass that blurs past, gouging a path through the station. Did a ship make impact? Has Altair crashed through the guardian station's hull? Has that nebula cloud engulfed the entire station?
Their questions are answered when a silent roar rattles their insides. The fire clears around them just enough to catch a glimpse of the torn and charred hull of an Olympian warship scrape through the inside of the station and pass through with relentless violence, generating thick streams of searing heat. But this fiery and weightless heat seems to be contained by a gentle sway of energy. Altair, it has to be.
Grabbing Boone's arm, Natheus pulls his fellow Paragon away from the door as it buckles and tears apart under the intense strain. They are both dominated by a wild sense of vertigo as the sector’s gravity fluctuates, pushing a wave of nausea over them.
As the door heaves, ripped from its foundations, Boone and Natheus find themselves propelled outward by the force of venting atmosphere and its craving immersion with fire, generating a glistening explosion of liquid magma. Mazayus is dragged outward, clipped by a slab of debris and flung mercilessly out of reach.
Deo watches in horror as three tagged objects diminish into the distance of space, pulled in by Kronos’ gravity. Along with his Paragons, the sector’s orbital cannons fall in the Olympian’s wake.
Objective complete.
DARK RIFT
I feel myself swimming in pools of dark matter, spinning, twisting, tumbling. The spinning stops, I am floating, shallow water rifting around my senses. The Sun warms my shivers with smooth radiance...
My senses open, nostalgic vision desiring the star. There is no star. The source of the light evades existence. A welling crevice undulates in its place, smoking rivulets of liquid ice. The ice shatters, falling down like needles obeying gravity, and I can only watch, frozen.
I see them slice through the air in a herd of motion above, nearing. They pierce my eyes, tearing through rubbery flesh as my sight explodes.
The water evaporates, and Kitera is thrust into consciousness. A cool sensation lingers over her absent senses, lending her an impulse of heightened motivation and a fiery determination to move. But she cannot feel her body. Only the fresh chill of Altair's entity and the gentle encouragement it is sweeping across her nervous system is registering in her numb mind.
Must move.
Where did the water go? Was she hallucinating? Why can she not move? She begins to panic, not paying much attention to the sharpness of reality.
Now, the desert rules the lands, but the Sun is still lost. I crawl through the sand, hands and knees blistering against the scorch, searching in every sky through day and night...
Again, the cold chill and the rush of encouragement. Is it Altair that is urging her, or the Zodiacs? In this very moment, she is too depleted of energy to tell. For Altair's entity to place thoughts or sensations in her mind, she would need to have an entity to be able to receive them, and even then, even as a Cipher, the ship’s entity would overpower hers, overload her nervous system, and kill her.
I must move.
No, it must be the Zodiacs, sending her soft remedies to soothe the throbbing pain at the back of her head. Pain? She can feel pain. Her senses are returning to her.
Crawling through the sand, the wind picks up and the air becomes cold, biting at my bare skin. I try to stand, but only manage to balance on my knees. The wind is chilling, forcing me to wrap my arms around myself and huddle my limbs together.
Strange place. A cold desert in bright Sunlight, yet the Sun is not visible in the pale grey sky. The sand is almost white, making me wonder if it is actually fine snow, shattered to icy dust.
As the wind laces its way through the icy desert surrounding me, I tentatively reach my hand down to the dust beneath me and run my fingertips through it, letting it fall through the cracks, the sensation odd against my skin. It is smooth, like silk, but crisp and frozen.
A twitch of her index fingertip alerts her concentration to reality again, and all of her focus is reined in as her next attempt is to move her entir
e hand. Another twitch of her finger soon leads to the movement of all fingers in that one hand, but as she attempts to flex her wrist, she fails, and a mild stab of punishment choruses through her transcendent mind. Her gods are angered, and urge her to try again, this time, with a whispering inspiration that aids her holy mind.
Healing the spirit and enlightening the soul...
But it hurts so much. Every fibre of her is aching and her sense of direction is ruined in a revolving sea of nausea.
Again, and with the support of the Zodiacs, she bites back the pain of movement and forces the sharpness away in the back of her mind, locking it there and sealing it firmly. With the new enlivenment, her hand moves, a flowing motion that seems to awaken the rest of her body. Fresh air tingles in her lungs as she gasps in a breath, and her skin is suddenly washed with heat, rejuvenating her muscles.
Move!
With a final boost from her deities, Kitera pushes out of the deep recesses of her mind and returns to her physical form, racked in agony, but alive and able to have motion. Her eyes yield to her command to open, and she is greeted with a visual of the comforting insides of Altair. Her surroundings of the organic ship appear cracked and dry, the harrowing pressure of whatever the creature did with its entity seeming to have torn its insides. But even now, as her limbs work hard to support her weight in an upright position, she can see the ikamanu’s insides healing. The cracks in the nikita flooring are smoothing over as it feeds itself with its stored light energy, the waves of vibrant blue hues spreading delicately.
Kitera winces as her senses rush back to her in a whirl of dizziness. “Altair...” Her elbows falter a moment, catching herself shakily. “Where are we?”
Although the vessel cannot understand her primitive verbal communication, it can sense her worry and curiosity, two simple emotions commonly experienced by the little creatures. In response to her, Altair enlightens her with the visual sense of the holographic stellarium in its observatory. Unlike the stargrid, which was installed by the humans and mapped from their perspective of the universe, an ikamanu’s stellarium is constructed by the vessels themselves, displaying animated images that have been captured from their memories and stored within their cyber-organic hybrid minds.
Kitera dashes her eyes across the stellarium around her, mapping her way through their translucent pathways, each speck or large sphere meaning something to her. With a flick of her hand, her datakey flashes to life and is suspended above her palm. She absorbs the information within the stellarium, and now makes her way back to navigation, swiftly throwing the data to suspend in the air beside the stargrid. She examines the two side by side, comparing the current data of the stellarium to the stargrid. According to the stargrid, they should be somewhere near Kronos, but she had not seen the planet or the battlefield through the view of the observatory. But according to Altair’s stellarium, Kronos does not exist!
"Kronos is gone," she says aloud, more to herself than to Altair. She can feel panic, rage, and an overwhelming sense of failure build up inside of her.
She has failed her Paragons, and now they may be lost to the void.
Expanding the layout of Scattered Planet, Kitera searches endlessly through the stars, trying to locate anything familiar. Blue supergiants glaze her vision with brightness, vibrant gas planets and icy moons circulate stars that she cannot name, dwelling within clusters and nebulae that she has no knowledge of. What is this place? This cannot be Scattered Planet. It is not Scattered Planet.
Unexpectedly, the stellarium shifts and journeys through the distance of space, taking her through pathways that totally enwrap her mind in a dizzying sense of vertigo. Her pupils shrink, and just when she thinks she will fall forward within the display, the erratic speed of interstellar travel comes to a halt, and the only thing displaying now is a plethora of glistening objects orbiting a septuple star system, but to what the objects are, she cannot tell. The stellarium is simply not detailed enough, and the objects are too distant. Maybe they are planets, but they seem too... she cannot explain it, but she senses something odd about them. This entire galaxy feels odd to her, like it is missing something.
Altair has taken her to this particular location, overriding the stellarium to show her their current location. They are near the galactic centre, where only a super massive black hole and exploding stars should exist. But why? Why are they here?
A wisp of soft air rinses through her, and a misting haze of cyan entity journeys around her body. She spins, the activity earning her attention. The entity sweeps out of navigation and rolls gently down the hall. Kitera follows curiously, knowing Altair is up to something.
The Cipher follows the entity down the hall, its shimmering figure like a mini wind-tornado picking up stray leaves on an autumn morning. Her eyes focus on its beauty, finding herself arriving at the portside airlock, the entity vanishing as it reaches the hatch.
"Altair?" Kitera hesitates, unsure about the vessel’s motives. Does it want her to open the airlock while in the vacuum of the galactic core?
A firm, yet subtle air generates behind her, pushing her forward toward the airlock hatch. Tentatively, and encouraged by Altair, Kitera unlocks the interior hatch with her datakey, stepping inside and sealing the hatch again behind her. But now she stops and stands aimlessly, expecting anything to happen. Although she trusts Altair, she does not particularly want to die of exposure.
Again, Altair gives her a gentle shove from behind, but Kitera stands her ground, shaking her head. “Stop it!”
The ikamanu lets out a disgruntled moan, and much to Kitera's horror, the clicking of the exterior airlock hatch invades her mind.
"Altair!?"
ALIEN CITY
Without warning, the hatch slides open and the folds of the ikamanu's skin peel back smoothly, revealing a vast landscape that the Cipher had not expected. They have landed on a sea of pale liquid. The slight grainy texture reminds her of nikita in its faded state.
Altair has taken her to one of the spherical objects orbiting the septuple star system, as large as the moon of earth, and habitable, though without any visible atmosphere clouding her view of space beyond.
In the distant skies, she can see the array of the seven stars orbiting co-operatively together. The very colours of the entity embellish the skies, and every star frequency is displayed. One of each in one system. A freak of nature. Beyond this, she can see the intensity of the centre of the galaxy, wrapping this system in a sea of explosiveness. The sight is breathtaking.
Pulled out by the allure, Kitera approaches the edge of the airlock and steps down, placing her bare toe into the liquid, fully expecting it to sink with a thick consistency. But instead, her toe hits solid pressure, though ripples cascade outward just like water. She stops hesitantly before proceeding with her other foot, and Altair senses her shyness, giving her a caressing warmth with its entity to reassure her.
Plucking up the courage and trusting her vessel, Kitera takes the final step, her bare feet now supported by the liquid, like she is walking on water. It feels strange against her skin, still fluid and with motion, but hard and cool. She kneels, hand washing across the smooth surface to examine it. This is nikita, in a liquid form!
This cannot be human technology, only the ikamanu have the ability to create liquid nikita. Humanity has never yet reached that level of advanced design. This cannot be human. It cannot. The Zodiacs would have informed her if humanity had advanced in technology, especially with nikita, the most important material to mankind. Could this be alien technology?
In the back of her mind, Kitera knows something about this place is wrong. There is no reassuring presence in her mind. No rock to hold her overflowing mind at ease. No gods...
She cannot sense the Zodiacs! The change is so subtle that she had not been fully aware of it at first, maybe because the Zodiacs have been kept distant from her mind due to their war with the Demons.
The Demons.
That horrifying presence she felt
before springs back into her transcendent consciousness. The Demons are here, she can feel their bane. She cannot communicate with them, but she can sense them none-the-less. A mind numbing fear falls upon her.
She is in another dimension.
This means that it was not Kronos that had disappeared, but it was them! Altair and herself had shifted into the Demon Dimension. But how?
Questions spin and spin until she begins to feel faint, breathing increasing to keep up with her pounding heart. Had Altair taken her to another dimension purposefully? Why does it want to show her this sphere of liquid nikita? Why are there multiple spheres of liquid nikita the size of Luna orbiting this impossibly perfect star system? Who had constructed these spheres? Had the ikamanu done it? But that would mean that the ikamanu existed in this dimension too. Unless they could cross over at will. Is that what Altair has just done? Is it trying to tell her this?
Kitera lifts her palm before her, desperate for answers as she scrolls through the stellarium that Altair is streaming to her. The stargrid is useless here, nothing is the same. Only the knowledge and memory of the ikamanu-constructed stellarium can be trusted. The Cipher enlarges the interface, suspending it high above her head as it grows to cover the black skies above her. Space is so hollow here, so lifeless and soulless. Does any life exist in this dimension.
Focusing her mind in the stellarium, Kitera immerses herself deeply into it as she searches for any place recognisable. Scattered Planet exists, the colossal sized galaxy just as large in this parallel dimension, but there are no clusters or nebulae that are similar, no familiar stars, planets, or moons. Nothing is the same, only the existence of the galaxy. It is an alternate Scattered Planet.
Moving on, the skies above her erupt in a shrinking view as she pulls herself out of Scattered Planet and beyond the outer rim, journeying through the dark between stars in search for other galaxies. To her utter shock, no galaxies that she recognises exist here. They are all foreign. There is no Blue Sea Galaxy next to Scattered Planet. There is no Cloud Nine Galaxy. No Star Tide. No Deep Abyss. No Underworld. No Wavelength. No Cradle of Life. No Andromeda... No Milky Way...