Gods and The City

by Steve Statham

  It was not difficult to locate the coordinates of Tower's self-destruction, A residual energy signature still colored that sector of space.

  As the Hightower moved closer to the remnants of the vast explosion, the ship's sensors detected the surviving micro sentinel swarm, now considerably smaller than its original size. The fleet of tiny weaponized drones responded to his hails instantly as the ship relayed the communication codes that Tower had embedded in the Hightower's memory. They formed into a loose globe and vectored toward the ship, reaching it quickly and falling into a tight formation that matched the Hightower's moves seamlessly.

  Mik piloted the Hightower in a wide arc around the site of Tower's last fight. As the ship scanned and analyzed the debris, Mik dove deeper into Talia's report. The news was even worse than he thought, although he marveled once more at the depth and detail of Talia's account, wondering how she could possibly have gathered this information.

  The Otrid. Gods preserve us. They were the ones chasing me using those jump portals through space. And all to capture the secret of Divine Space.

  He was absorbed in this report when the ship prioritized an alert. The Hightower's sensors had located an unidentified artifact amongst the wreckage of Tower's sentry ships and the Otrid fleet.

  Mik activated shields and weapons and set a course for the mystery object. The information gathering quickly stalled quickly, however, as the sensors could not penetrate the surface. It was almost as if the object was floating in a null zone in space. The artifact appeared to be comprised of four small spheres joined together, although the ship could gather no detailed information about their composition.

  He opened a channel to the god. "Um, Maelstrom? Does this look like something Tower might have created?"

  Immediately, the Hightower picked up a sensor sweep from Maelstrom as the god turned its attention to the region. Then the great swirling cloud of magnetic energy disappeared, reappearing in seconds between the ship and the unidentified object. Mik whistled under his breath. The god had ducked in and out of Divine Space in the span of a heartbeat, covering the distance between the Hightower and The City as easily as a man might walk across a room.

  The layered magnetic fields of the bodiless god rotated in a cylindrical pattern, shifting colors as the strange deity enveloped the space around the artifact. The hazy aurora of Maelstrom expanded, almost doubling in size in seconds. Mik could only guess at the purpose, but assumed that Maelstrom was marshalling fundamental forces in an attempt to penetrate the dead zone around the object.

  Mik backed the Hightower away from the expanding magnetic fields. Through his multiple connections to the ship he could perceive energetic spikes across several spectrums.

  He narrowcast a message to the god. "Maelstrom? Is that you whipping up a subspace frenzy, or is it that thing?"

  The response, as usual, was as subtle as a solar flare. IT WILL RESPOND TO MY COMMANDS OR BE REDUCED TO COMPONENT ATOMS...

  Mik watched in horror as Otrid portals opened across the sector like burning holes punched in the blackness of space.

  Ships poured from three of the portals beyond Maelstrom's boundaries.

  But the others....

  Six gaping wounds in the fabric of space opened simultaneously deep within the cloudy mass of Maelstrom. Swirling waves of exotic particles blasted forth from the openings. A convulsion like a great wave rippled through the nebula that was Maelstrom's body. But no ships emerged; instead, the portals began to draw energy and matter inward.

  The effect on Maelstrom was immediate. The Hightower's sensors left no doubt as to the disruptive aftermath, as the tunnels through space were simply siphoning away entire segments of Maelstrom's substance, distorting his magnetic fields. The orderly patterns within the cloud dissolved into a soup of roiling energies.

  Mik recovered his wits and decided his course of action: the god would have to fend for himself. The other ships were streaking toward Skyra. And he commanded the only ship in the system that could defend it.

  He worked up an intercept course for the Otrid ships with a cold feeling in his gut that this might very well be the last day he would draw breath.

  Or the last day for everyone in The City if he failed.

  The last day for Talia—an intolerable thought.

  Even without a ship mind to guide it, the Hightower was the most advanced starship Tower had ever created and Mik used all of its abilities now.

  He screamed a war cry that came from some hidden place within him as he fired a spread of the Gravitic Compression Point implosion bombs in the path of the invaders. Three of the enemy ships were ripped apart as they spiraled into the gravitational singularities, alien bodies cartwheeling into the gloom.

  The others broke formation to avoid the pull of inrushing gravity and altered courses in looping parabolas. Mik turned the Hightower inward as they scattered and fired more of the implosion bombs into the pulsing mouths of the portals. The Hightower raced away as the competing forces collided. Behind him, the portals shrank and then flared brightly, disgorging miles-long streams of ionized gas like great dragons of legend breathing plasmic flames into space.

  He smiled grimly, and then with a recklessness he had never known before, Mik set an intercept course to cut off the remaining ships. There was still a cold core of rationality within him, however, and, knowing the Hightower must never fall into Otrid hands lest they uncover the secrets of Divine Space buried inside her, Mik issued a command to initiate a self-destruct overload if the ship were crippled, or himself killed.

  The Otrid vessels ahead of him had closed within range of The City's automated defenses, and Mik watched the energy beams from the ground-based weapons slice the sky. The Otrid shields held, but whatever power guided The City's defenses—Mik honestly didn't know, following the death of Tower—altered tactics and concentrated all beams on a single ship.

  The lead Otrid warship disappeared from sight as its defensive shields turned opaque, struggling to absorb and then throw off the energy from the concentrated beams. It altered course and withdrew, shakily navigating its new course like some wounded animal.

  The Hightower drew within range of the scattering Otrid ships. They had begun their own bombardment of The City. The space between the attacking ships and the dome of The City was ablaze as the forces clashed, like a continent-size electrical storm.

  Mik, plugged into the Hightower's bridge, targeted all remaining Otrid ships at once and unleashed every weapon in his arsenal—particle beams, focused plasma lasers, strong-force pulses, nuclear missiles and other weapons based on physics principles that Mik didn't even understand. In the back of his mind he knew this was a stupid and careless tactic, but a kind of blood-lust had overtaken him, a conviction that in this righteous war for survival, all actions were permitted and no advantages should be left unused.

  With his consciousness spread throughout the ship, Mik could almost feel the Otrid weapons raking across the Hightower's shields. But the sensation was brief. Between the combined fire of the Hightower and The City's defenses, the Otrid ships fell one by one, shields pierced, hulls scorched. The dead hulks drifted into orbit around Lodias, soon to be pulled into the gas giant's gravity well.

  Mik scanned the Otrid vessels for signs of life and, finding none, set course to the coordinates where Maelstrom was enduring his own struggle. He wasn't sure precisely what he could do to aid the struggling god, but that uncertainty had been true from the very moment Tower had first plucked him from obscurity and set him on the bridge of the most advanced starship humanity had ever created.

  No sense slowing down now, tunnel rat, he told himself.

  He found a few spare moments to examine the larger picture as the Hightower streaked across CitySpace. This attack was odd for many reasons. For one, fending off the Otrid ships had just seemed too easy. According to Talia's summary, the first wave that Tower had faced included substantially more ships. Was it a feint, or had the Otrid been reduced to their last few v
essels?

  Another detail that bothered him was the precision and timing with which the portals had opened. As he understood it, the Otrid's blunt-force portals took years to construct and travel through. They allowed the Otrid to travel at nearly the speed of light, avoiding the slog through regular space, but they weren't like the almost magical shortcut of Divine Space. For the portals to open so precisely within the body of Maelstrom and only a few hundred kilometers above the dome of The City, Mik figured the Otrid must be staging their attacks from somewhere very close to the Lodias system.

  Which made a lot of sense if your main priority was to trap a human god....

  These thoughts had barely organized themselves when a new portal opened with a massive gravitational surge.

  This rip in space was not like the others he had witnessed. It was vastly larger, and at first Mik thought the portal was giving birth to an actual planet. It quickly became apparent, however, that whatever it was that was emerging, it was nothing found in nature.

  An enormous sphere, lit from within like some living machine, came pouring from the portal into the Lodias system.

  Although Mik had never seen it—no human had for at least two hundred years—he knew at once what it was. The Hightower's archives verified his guess immediately: this sphere was Faraway's massive home, a globe nearly a quarter the size of Skyra itself.

  Once more, Mik found himself astonished at the majesty of the gods of mankind. He had grown cynical over the years, slipping into an easy familiarity with Tower's largely hidden command of The City. The other gods had existed primarily as stories he had learned in childhood, or as images in the temples. Direct manifestations of their power had become rare enough in his time that he had every reason to look askance at the legends told about humanity's deities.

  But after witnessing Maelstrom's disembodied form feeding off the energies of a distant star, and now this....

  Most of the sphere's surface was transparent, and underneath the shell there appeared to be the core of a city of some sort, but with a design and complexity of purpose he could not interpret. This was where the goddess had lived as she sailed the furthest seas of space during her endless vigil against potential enemies of the human race. It was an entire small world built to accommodate a single god, and the sight of it transfixed him.

  But the wonder he experienced faded quickly. As the Hightower's sensors probed the sphere, they detected nothing familiar. There was no trace of Faraway, no human contact codes, no friendly hails.

  All communications and energy patterns indicated Otrid infestation.

  As Mik frantically attempted to interpret the data, an array of missiles burst from the sphere and raced toward the Hightower.

  Mik cursed himself for his slow response.

  A ship mind wouldn't have sat there slack-jawed, captain dimwit.

  He engaged what he hoped were appropriate counter-responses, but each of the incoming missiles altered itself in flight to present a different offensive profile. The Hightower had survived its early clashes with alien foes, but was now engaged in a fight with the weapons of another god.

  Mik changed course and led the missiles on a trajectory away from Skyra. The Hightower's engines strained to outrace Faraway's arsenal. He considered shifting into Divine Space to escape the onslaught, but did not want to use humanity's greatest power with so much Otrid activity nearby. There was no telling what clue would be the final bit of evidence that would allow mankind's enemies to access the secret corridors of space.

  Instead, Mik activated a rotating spread of defensive weapons until the space between his ship and the pursuing missiles resembled a great trailing comet of destruction. But this tactic was less effective than it had been against the Otrid ships. Faraway's adaptive missiles altered their shape, composition and energy signatures as needed, a feat of technological alchemy that even the Hightower could not entirely counter.

  Mik commanded the remnants of Tower's microsentinel swarm to converge on the surviving missiles. The semi-autonomous weapons cloud responded instantly, falling away from the ship, swirling and twisting as it formed a net through which the missiles passed. The swarm probed for weaknesses and relayed its findings to the Hightower and moved on to the next. Each analysis proved lethally accurate, and Mik adjusted the combination of weapons fire to destroy his pursuers one by one, although the last one detonated so close to the Hightower that Mik felt it as a physical blow.

  From Mik's perspective, his thoughts and reflexes enhanced to nearly god-like levels while plugged into the command center of the Hightower, this battle of move-and-counter-move progressed like games of Stackball he had played in his youth. It required quick reactions, sure, but was well within his abilities.

  In reality, only seconds had passed between the emergence of Faraway's sphere and the destruction of the final missile. He felt a wave of momentary dizziness as the ship's combat center released him from the accelerated cognitive routines required to fight at this level.

  Mik ran a systems check and was relieved at how little damage the Hightower had suffered. Any lesser ship would not have survived the assault, but clearly Tower had created a starship beyond even the abilities of the other gods—or in this case, the Otrid invaders who had hijacked Faraway's god-ship.

  Mik set the Hightower on a course back to the massive portal where Faraway's sphere had emerged. The ships sensors revealed a chaotic mess of warring energies, at the center of which was the glowing haze that was Maelstrom.

  Faraway's sphere-ship had moved inside the boundaries of Maelstrom's energy field. Mik could tell immediately that something was wrong—the organized magnetic field patterns that defined the god were losing coherence and the dramatic colors were fading. Odd gravitational waves swept across the region as these colossal forces clashed.

  A shouted thought reverberated throughout the Hightower as it closed with the struggling god. THERE IS SOMETHING NEW ON FARAWAY'S VESSEL, SOME LIFE FORCE THAT DISRUPTS THE VERY INTEGRITY OF MY BEING.

  "Maelstrom! You know what they want. Do not give it to them!"

  The god's words continued in a rush. I CAN FEEL THE TENOR OF OTRID THOUGHTS. THEY ARE DESPERATE, FIGHTING ANOTHER MIND EVEN AS THEY ATTACK US.

  I...

  The energetic aurora that was Maelstrom collapsed. The remaining helical magnetic fields dissipated, the motion of the organized particles was stilled.

  At almost the same instant, Mik perceived waves of information flooding into the Hightower's neural architecture.

  Mik had no doubt what was happening—melded into the ship as he was, he could already discern the markers, the familiar patterns of thought that had accompanied him through the rush through Divine Space. Maelstrom was fleeing his eviscerated form, and like a scared child was seeking refuge inside the Hightower.

  The god's desperate flight into the recesses of the ship might even work, Mik reflected. The Hightower had been designed to house an independent ship mind, a high-level artificial intelligence, although Tower had not completed the process. When the attack of the Otrid began, Tower had determined that a human could pilot the ship more stealthily than an AI.

  But there was no telling if the neural architecture was sufficient to house the mind of a god, even a broken one. There was no sure method to determine if the mind that was now expanding throughout the ship was still even fundamentally human in nature following its apparent defeat.

  Mik ordered five more levels of encryption to the command codes for the Hightower and closed off the expansion routes for the surviving segment of Maelstrom. He left a generous but tightly controlled space within the neural frame for the fallen god.

  The response was not long in coming. Maelstrom's voice was no longer the great shouting cacophony it had been, although there was steel behind it. "I am diminished, yet I am still more than human, Mik. Surrender control of this ship to me so that I may defeat our enemies."

  "Maelstrom," Mik said, trying to keep his voice level. It wasn't every day a
mere Fixer had to tell a god "no." "Tower entrusted this ship to me. It is optimized for human control, and was meant to be a weapon we could wield if the gods should fall. The gods have fallen. I am not relinquishing control of the Hightower."

  Mik was glad he had the power of the ship to separate him from the angry god.

  "You would defy me?"

  "I mean no disrespect, but it would be foolish to hand over our last means of defense to a god who was just defeated by an unknown alien power. Can you be certain you have not been compromised?"

  "I have shed the corrupted segments! I still retain the powers that..."

  "Maelstrom! Quit arguing with me! The Hightower is in my control and I'm not relinquishing her to you. We have to act before that ship slips through another portal, or worse yet, trains its weapons on The City. Give me some options for defeating this threat or shut up!"

  Mik held his breath, half expecting some godly power to reach out and squeeze the life out of his heart, but no such vengeful retribution befell him.

  Instead, the god apparently—for the moment—accepted the arrangement. "Mik, the Otrid are controlling this hidden creature. It is the same alien that Faraway encountered when ambushed by the Otrid. It dissolves the bonds that tie together complex systems, and this is how Faraway, Tower and myself were overcome, and likely Triton as well. This is an ancient being, Mik, and I do not understand the source of its power. Whether it is a natural ability or some dark technology, I cannot say.

  "But I can see the psychic chains that constrain it. Through those cables flow the concentrated will of thousands of Otrid. They are exercising enormous resources to enslave this creature."

  "Can you communicate with it?"

  "I believe so, yes."

  "Can you attack the mental bonds?"

  "Yes, but that will not be sufficient," he said with frustration coating his every word. "I attempted that earlier, but the restraint cables must be physically severed as well. I could not do it."