by Chad Huskins
Showers of sparks fell on him, and heaps of debris smashed onto the platform and rolled down it. He barely dodged all of it, now hearing one of his cousins, Korick, talking about the time he caught a glance up Wendy Harlof’s skirt, when a chance gust of wind had caught her…
He didn’t know when he passed out, but when he opened his eyes he was rolling back down the canted platform. He drew his sword from its sheath and stabbed it into the ground, gained his footing, then started back up. Grunting, panting, sweating bullets and hearing the old Timonese hymn still being sung, now by his mother’s whole church choir, Lyokh made it over to another beam that had fallen, and now spanned the distance between his platform and another.
Lyokh made it purely by the stabilizers in his STACsuit, its computer measuring distances below him and directing his limbs in certain ways to avoid him plummeting to his death. Once across, he looked up, and saw four Takirovanens coming for him. He blinked. Now there were only two…
He collapsed, listening to the angels sing. The singing sounded like what he’d heard during his billion-year stay on the Planet of the Wyrms.
WHEN HE WOKE up, it was to the purest air he thought he’d ever breathed. He had a splitting headache, and reached up to touch his head, smacking his helmet. Through fog and through visor, he saw Takirovanen over him. Lyokh was lying across his lap, and Takirovanen was sharing his suit’s air.
“Doyen,” said his stoic friend. “Are you ready to move?”
“Where to?” he croaked. “Where…where can we go?”
Lyokh tried to stand. Takirovanen had to help him. Once they were both on even footing, Lyokh looked around and noticed they were just inside a small tunnel, looking out into the devastation of the infinite chamber.
“This way,” Takirovanen said, reeling in his oxygen tube and resealing his suit’s lung compartment. “I think you’ll find this interesting.”
Lyokh stared for a moment out the mouth of the cave, watching the worldship tear itself apart with thunderous finality, then turned and watched where his fellow Knight was going. Takirovanen was headed deeper into the tunnel, and Lyokh didn’t question him. Up was as good as down in here, left as good as right, tunnel as good as platform.
They walked for half an hour, Lyokh limping along, sometimes leaning against the wall for rest, sometimes assisted by Takirovanen, usually just gritting his teeth and leaning on his sword for support.
“Where are you taking me?” Lyokh asked, half dazed.
“Somewhere familiar,” said his friend enigmatically. “How is your foot?”
“I think my suit is all out of painkiller injections,” he said. “But I don’t think it matters now.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Takirovanen said.
“Have you found any others?”
“I found Dremys, but he was dead. I took his ammo and left him there.”
“Remind me, which one was Dremys?”
Takirovanen looked over his shoulder at him, and through his visor Lyokh could see him making a face. “Formerly Onyx Wing. Demolitions man. He had some trouble on his long-range firing quals, if you recall.”
Lyokh winced. “Barely. I feel like I didn’t know anybody very well. It’s weird…now that we’re at the end of it, I feel like I should be able to put all their names to their faces, but it was eight thousand men that came with the Crusade, about a thousand of which came with us into this place. Impossible to know all their names, I know, but…I feel like I should.”
“Well, you may be joining them soon, doyen. So you can ask them.”
Lyokh looked at him quizzically. “I didn’t know you were religious.”
“I’m not, but I like to dream.”
The tunnel shook. So hard it nearly knocked them to the ground. The roar of another titanic explosion reported behind them. They kept on moving.
“What was the name of that one girl, good sniper, short brown hair?” Lyokh said. “Sasha? Sandra?”
“Sasha.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
“There was hardly time, doyen.”
Lyokh nodded. “Hardly time for anything besides training and killing, killing and training. Right.” He snorted out a laugh. “Remember the time in The Place To Be when that one vorta bumped into her, and she spilled her drink all over herself, and the vorta just kept going like nothing happened?” He laughed harder.
“I remember, doyen.”
“She was so pissed!”
“It’s just up here,” Takirovanen said, his tone adding that he didn’t care to be amused at the moment.
In truth, Lyokh understood his own yammering was due to the oxygen-deprivation and then the reintroduction of breathable air. But also, if he was being honest, it was born of regret, as well. These feelings didn’t just come from nowhere. They might’ve manifested just now but their origins were somewhere in his past. Regret that all he’d ever done was soldier. And yet, what else could be asked of anyone at the Fall of Man?
The tunnel went on forever, straight ahead, never twisting or turning, always straight. There was a reddish light up ahead, and it did indeed appear familiar. It wasn’t until they stepped inside the chamber, though, that Lyokh recognized it as another sepulcher.
“I passed two others on my way through here,” Takirovanen said, pointing to another tunnel leading off to one side of the huge room. “It can’t be a coincidence we just happened to land near a group of sepulchers. I’d bet they’re littered all throughout this ship.”
Lyokh limped towards the center of the room, where a raised dais, almost exactly like the one on Kennit 184c, stood prominently with the weird runes. Runes that appeared nowhere else in the universe except, perhaps, at Worshipper sites.
“What is this place?” Lyokh said, stepping up to the dais.
“If I were to guess,” said Takirovanen, “I’d say the Brood have more than a passing interest in the Strangers. They’ve been keeping these temples for who knows how long, and carrying those along,” he added, pointing to a familiar-looking object atop the dais. It was a Scroll, of slightly different design than the others, but clearly of Worshipper make. “Think maybe they’re trying to repeat the science of it?”
Lyokh sheathed his sword and reached out to touch the Scroll, and even before he did, his hands began to tremble. Every molecule in his body shivered, and he felt his teeth floating inside his skull. “I think the Brood found something worth aspiring to,” he said.
“Like what, doyen?”
“Not too long ago, I received a message from the stellarpath, Moira Holdengard. She told me Kalder believed the Strangers might not actually exist yet. That they could be in the far future, using something called a tachyonic antitelephone to send information back in time, building the Watchtowers for the rest of us, so that we could stand against the Brood.” He looked around at the sepulcher. “This worldship’s time-warp field is testament to their power over time, but perhaps they don’t have absolute dominion over it yet. Maybe they want more. Maybe they want it all. That’s why they need every resource. The Brood desire the power of the ancients, they’re just going about it differently than Kalder and others have.”
Lyokh looked back at the Scroll.
“When I was in the Watchtower,” he said, “I went…somewhere. I saw things. I know I told you some of them, but…there’s so much more I couldn’t say. It would take too long, and I’ve forgotten almost all of it, thank God. But…I saw them. The Strangers. I saw how they shaped the lives of the wyrms, who were intelligent beings once, not just smart, but intelligent. God, how much have they shaped?”
A chime went off in Takirovanen’s helmet. Lyokh checked his HUD, and saw that his friend was very low on oxygen. I don’t have much time, either.
Takirovanen sighed. “A tragedy, to have to die with so many questions left unanswered. But I doubt anyone ever gets to know them all.” He laughed, a weird sound for the man. “I had this vain thought that I would be the last human being alive, that the regens would kee
p me going right to the very end, while the rest of humanity was engulfed. I’ve had several dreams just like that, where it’s just me.” He laughed again, more bitterly. “I suppose this is a mercy.”
Lyokh was only half listening. He hesitated a moment longer, then reached out to take the Scroll. As soon as it was in his hand, he felt the power radiating through his glove.
And all at once, Lyokh was outside of himself. Literally standing several feet away from himself, outside of his body, watching his own hand grip the Scroll. He looked down at his incorporeal body, alarmed yet unsurprised, for he’d seen far, far more strangeness aboard the Watchtower.
“There you are,” said a voice.
Lyokh turned, and saw Kalder standing there too, much older, it seemed, with a beard past his belly and the most beleaguered eyes.
“What is this?” said a woman’s voice.
Lyokh looked to his right, and there stood High Priestess Thessa Zane den Uta, appearing the worse for wear, covered in her own excrement and vomit.
He turned back to his physical body, watching it clutch the Scroll closely. He looked back at Kalder and Zane…only to find they’d gone. He cast about for them, but saw no sign.
Suddenly, he took in a sharp breath. He was back in his physical body, and collapsing to his knees. The Scroll was still in his hand, radiating a heat he thought would surely melt his arm off, though the thing was not glowing or emitting any sign of radiation at all. Takirovanen rushed to his side and helped him up. What lingered in Lyokh’s mind in that moment was a connection…a shared connection with Kalder and Zane. He knew that wherever they both were at that moment, they’d felt it too.
“Doyen?”
Raising the Scroll up to his visor, examining it like an artist would a lost van Gogh, Lyokh said, “It’s a transmitter.”
“What?”
“It…it can send you places. I faded inside the Watchtower, the vids showed it. I didn’t just hallucinate it, I wasn’t shown a vision, I was transported.”
“Doyen, are you okay?”
“The Strangers mastered time,” he said slowly. “But the Worshippers followed in their footsteps. Time and space…they’re the same. Whatever power was inside the Kennit Scroll, it’s the same power the Strangers used to power the Watchtowers, their antitelephones…Moira said Kalder called it zero-point. The base energy of all energy and matter in the universe.” The heat was crawling up his shoulder, spreading through his chest. “The Worshippers were working on ways of interacting with the Watchtowers, but the Watchtowers weren’t meant for them. They were meant for us! Us! They would have to be, or else other races who found the Scrolls would’ve been transported like me, and activated a Watchtower. They’re meant for us! God only knows why.”
He laughed.
“Kalder! The son of a bitch! He knew it! The Scrolls are transmitters, devices made to try and interact with Stranger tech, and Stranger tech is able to transmit messages and matter through time. And the power of the Scrolls…it permeates people who are around them long enough. Like Zane.” Even as he said it, he knew it was true. He suddenly realized the source of her power, and wondered how much power Kalder had been concealing from everyone, for he had been the owner of the Tablet, presumably.
“Doyen, let’s sit down—”
“I met them,” Lyokh said. “Just now. I saw them just now, while you and I were standing here. Seconds ago, I stood outside my body and saw Zane and Kalder in this very sepulcher.”
“Doyen—”
“If they both can wield the Strangers’ power, so can I,” Lyokh said, his body starting to seize with the tremendous heat now spreading into his groin, his eyes, his brain. “They’re transmitters, made to interact with intelligent beings. Living beings! Not machines! That’s why the Brood can’t use them!” He laughed louder, knowing it to be true. “They only work with intelligent organic beings. Humans, specifically. They only do what we want, if we have the will to demand it.
“And…I…don’t want…to die…on this…fucking…ship!”
It felt as if molten lava had poured onto his tongue, onto is scalp, onto his body.
Just then, the worldship shook violently, a cacophony of explosions sounded outside. Lyokh looked up, just as the tip of an immense fang came ripping through the ceiling—
He blinked, and suddenly he was floating. Disoriented, close to fainting, Lyokh looked about. Both he and Takirovanen were suddenly outside of the worldship, floating in space, watching as a creature of impossible size sank its teeth into the worldship’s hull like it was paper.
: SDFA Lord Ishimoto
Only Lord Ishimoto and a handful of alien craft remained behind to watch, and even they hovered a safe .5 AU away from Deirdra. It had been almost ninety days of watching the worldship try to leave, finding itself wholly unable, even dipping behind the Watchtower at times to use it as cover. The World Serpent’s occupants had so far made no attempt to contact any of the human or xeno ships, it just continued to orbit the planet and send out fleets of its unknown occupants to join the ongoing battle against the Brood. A dozen broodlings, assembling from all over the system, had come to the worldship’s defense.
The Crusade Fleet had been involved for as long as it conceivably could do so, but now its reactor core was finally failing, systems all over the ship were shutting down, and Kalder huddled with his people in the War Room, watching the impossible happen.
General Hyatt sat, sallow-faced, almost terrified as he watched the two monsters finish their long struggle. Kalder could imagine how the man felt, seeing a worldship come undone. Like all of them, Hyatt was watching the end of something he’d once believe undefeatable, something as immutable as a black hole.
The Isoshi had sent a message saying that the worldship’s energy shields had finally failed it, thanks to Lyokh’s transmission of one of its reactor’s code frequencies, and whatever wizardry the Isoshi had done to its systems. When that happened, the World Serpent seemed to notice, and then swam out of orbit, arcing its neck around like a fish caught by a hook and being jerked out of the water, opened its jaws, and bit into the worldship. The Brood ship bent, folded in half, and its hull rippled with too many explosions to count.
From the intercom, Desh’s voice came down from CIC. “We’re getting a message now from the Isoshi High Command. They’re suggesting we pull back further, as the worldship’s destruction is an unknown quantity. It could have a yield of a few hundred suns.”
“Understood, Captain,” Kalder said. “Commence pullback.”
“Which means all of Deirdra would be sterilized,” someone put in. One of Hyatt’s underlings, Kalder forgot his name.
“Unless we get lucky and the World Serpent eats it all,” Donovan said as a joke.
They were all calling it the World Serpent because, over the last couple of months, Kalder had filled them in. Not completely, though. He did not tell them the extent to which he’d organized with Thulm, nor the promises he’d made. Neither did he mention the name d’Arhagen. He hadn’t gotten this far by letting everyone know everything. Withholding, as he’d told Captain Lyokh, was his power. Like a gifted porhl player, one had to choose when to reveal one’s hand.
Thinking on that…
“Has there been any word from Captain Lyokh?” asked Kalder.
Ferringer, a man who worked logistics for Hyatt’s team and had been working closely with Desh and Donovan aboard Lord Ishimoto, said, “No, sir. Nothing.”
Kalder nodded. “I know I shouldn’t say this, being a Zeroist, but…I am forlorn the captain himself, the Hero of Phanes and Kennit, cannot be here for the celebration I feel confident is soon to take place.”
Hyatt looked aghast. “Celebration? Celebration? You think the destruction of a worldship means a hill of shit compared to what we’re looking at now?! Are you seeing what I’m seeing? A goddamn wyrm the size of a fucking planet! Are you blind as well as senile, now? How do we know its intentions? If it can eat a fucking Brood worldship—”
>
“Let’s not douse the celebration of defeated foes by conjuring up new ones so soon, General,” Kalder said, rising unsteadily to his feet. Julian was standing right behind him, ready to catch him should he spill, which he’d done twice in the hallways just this morning. “We need to prepare for widened operations. Should Deirdra survive, we’ll need to scour the area for survivors, and clean up heaps of space debris, as much as we can. Our jobs aren’t finished yet, my friends. Let us not dawdle.”
Everyone pushed themselves back to their feet, rubbing haggard eyes.
“This is going to be a lot tougher without Pennick’s support and organization,” Donovan muttered to someone.
“What do you mean?” asked Hyatt. “What’s wrong with Pennick?”
“Haven’t you heard? I suppose you were too busy. Pennick fell down a set of stairs, somewhere just outside the Senate Hall. Killed instantly. They say a security bot of some kind accidentally bumped into him…”
Kalder walked out of the War Room without a word, taking one of Julian’s arms and heading towards his office.
: Debris
The benefit of orbiting a planet, Lyokh thought dreamily, feeling his last gasps, was that one got to see almost twenty sunrises a day. Not a bad bit of scenery to die with, he thought, watching Veronica rise over Deirdra. Better than inside that ship. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of a large coiled serpent, moving away from him, leaving Deirdra behind. Half its body was aglow in sunlight, the other side as dark as the night side of a planet, with tiny city lights along its surface.
In his hands, Lyokh held two things. His right hand clasped Takirovanen’s wrist, and his left hand clutched the Scroll.