Keth had also drawn steel, and fueled by a wound than ran with blood so thick as to be almost black, he cut down his first opponent with ease. He found himself facing two men, and though they were well trained in the art of swordplay, their lack of steel armor proved to be to his benefit. Though his wound had nearly disappeared, it still charged his blows, and his opponents could not withstand the force of his attacks for long.
Cor grew weary of his skirmish with Marya, as he constantly fended off her blows. Soulmourn wanted to wreak havoc; he could feel the blade’s desire to punch through her armor, bury itself in her body, but he somehow managed to control it. Marya’s dagger occasionally found its mark despite his armor, but it only inflicted very minor wounds. Still, his flesh was cut, and he bled. Cor focused on the strength that built within him until finally he decided to act.
He deflected Marya’s sword again with Soulmourn’s flat edge and then dropped Ebonwing to the ground to take the wrist of her sword arm. Cor was much stronger than the girl without having been wounded, but pushed by the spilling of his blood, her wrist cracked in his vise-like grip. She yelped as her sword fell to the ground, and she desperately stabbed at him with her dagger. Cor had already released Soulmourn and caught the blade itself with his bare right hand, and icy hot steel sliced his fingers and palm to the bone. Using his weight and strength, Cor roughly pushed her to the ground, falling upon her. In the fall, he’d lost his tenuous grip on her dagger, and it plunged into his back below his hauberk even as he clamped his bleeding hand firmly around her throat.
Marya struggled, and her eyes widened in fright. It wasn’t that he strangled her as he had another monarch before, but that she felt him will her blood through the flesh of her neck. She struck again and again with her dagger, sometimes glancing off of his armor, sometimes finding her mark. Her strength grew as he pulled the blood from her body, powering her stabs with more and more force, but Cor’s wounds began to heal even as she struck. Finally she struck his hauberk with such force that the blade shattered and the hilt and guard broke away. She took to beating on him with a closed fist. With lightning, unnatural speed, Cor released his grip just long enough to bat her hand away with a satisfying crunch of bone and again close it around her neck.
“You can’t win, Marya,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re dead. Accept me as Lord Dahken now. Obey me or die.”
As he looked upon her for just a moment, he could see her weighing her options, but it was the motion of her eyes that made him realize his danger. It was just a flicker, but her eyes glanced off of his face to just over his right shoulder. Cor turned just as the broken toothed man was about to bring down a two handed sword. A wickedly thin, curved blade suddenly poked its way through the man’s abdomen, and he lost his grip on his own sword as he looked down stupidly at it. The sword point retreated from whence it came and then appeared again to sever the man’s head from his shoulders. A gout of blood went up as the body fell to the side to reveal Karak’s armored form.
Karak said crisply, “An honor duel between Lords should never be interrupted by one’s servants.” He bowed briefly and returned to his place with the other Seven Lords.
Cor nodded at the man and returned his attention to Marya, who had gone limp under his weight. Seeing she again looked at him, he asked, “So what will it be?”
Marya closed her eyes and breathed out heavily. “I am yours, Lord Dahken.”
“I’ll kill you at the first sign of treachery.”
“Yes, Lord Dahken.”
Cor climbed to his feet, feeling suddenly dizzy as he surveyed the carnage. He still felt himself bleeding, and he wondered if one of the wounds would be fatal if he didn’t attend to it soon. There were six dead men and Keth, who seemed unharmed, and Marya still lay on the ground at his feet, grimacing in pain as she struggled to stand. Cor reached down toward Marya’s neck, and she flinched before realizing that he meant only to grip the front of her plate armor to haul her to her feet.
“We’re both wounded,” Cor said. “Heal us, now.”
Marya tried to remove her gauntlets, but found she was unable due to the broken bones in both of her arms or hands. Cor roughly took her broken wrist in hand and yanked the plated chain glove from her hand and dropped it to the ground, causing the girl to squeal in pain as he did so. She did as she was told, and Cor felt his wounds finish closing and disappear altogether. When it was done, it seemed that his dizziness had transferred to her.
Cor released her and strode over to Keth. He smiled as he placed his hands on the younger man’s shoulders, who repaid the action and the smile.
“I knew you wouldn’t betray me,” Cor said, and the men embraced with a soft collision of armor. He then turned to again address Marya, whose face suddenly seemed drawn and defeated. “We have much to discuss before I return to Byrverus.”
“Then I am still Queen of Akor?” she asked.
“I cannot speak for Akor,” Cor replied, “but I suppose so as long as they’ll let you. Perhaps you can keep your throne by showing wisdom and not petulance. Regardless, Keth and I return to Byrverus with the Seven Lords. We have agreements to make and a war to fight with Losz.”
“It is settled then!” Naran howled, jumping to his feet. “We march to Byrverus, to wealth and glory!”
* * *
“Do you trust her?” Keth asked. The two sat alone around a lazy fire, surrounded by a horde of raucous, yellow skinned Tigoleans.
Cor thought about it for a moment before leaning back onto one elbow. “Of course not, but I don’t think she can do anything against us now. And she can’t rule. It won’t take the Akorites long to realize that, and they’ll run her off.”
“What then?”
“Then,” Cor drew out the word with a sigh, “I suppose you’ll need to go find her and bring her home. A little more hardship for Marya, and she’ll rejoin the Dahken. I’m sorry, Keth. I know how you feel about her.”
“No,” said Keth, and he pulled his eyes from the fire to look at his lord, “I feel nothing. She is just another Dahken, and a dangerous one at that.”
“I’m sorry,” Cor said again. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Thyss. Give her time. She’ll come around.”
“I don’t care,” shrugged Keth as he looked back into the fire, but Cor didn’t believe it.
“I just hope we can relax in Byrverus for a time.”
“War with the Loszians is coming, Lord Dahken.”
“I know,” Cor sighed, “and this time, we must take it to them. I want peace, Keth. I cannot tell you how much I want peace. There are other things to be done. Even now, I feel things pulling me in all directions.”
“Other Dahken?” asked Keth.
“I hope so, but when will we have the time to find them? No. I’m afraid we have to deal with the Loszians first. I’m going to demolish their empire tower by tower, and then slay their gods.”
“How do you intend to do that?”
“I have no idea. I can only hope the gods have given me the strength,” Cor said, and he pushed himself off the ground to stand. He began to walk toward the modest tent Naran supplied him but stopped short to turn around. “Keth, you should likely try to get some sleep. These Tigoleans set a hasty pace. I even hope to merge with Red and Mora before they make Byrverus.”
“I’m not quite ready yet, I’ll sleep soon. Good night Lord Dahken.”
Cor nodded and wandered off to his tent.
19.
Locks, firewalls, controls, encryptions, logarithms and algorithms – the fact is that I’m neither a mathematician, nor a computer scientist. I know a little about every science, but I don’t have the equivalent of a degree in any of them. That was the disadvantage of being pushed into officer school at the Academy and shining the whole way through. Learning any one discipline to that level was reserved for the other guys, the men and women I would command.
It amazed me how quickly that all changed. It seemed like I had barely kissed my mother goodbye,
and I burned through the Academy with a commission in three years. I graduated with a commission at twenty, the only cadet in that class to make junior grade Lieutenant, and before I knew it I was third in command of a brand new Explorer-class, the Herbert Walker. We took a shakedown patrol, cruising the stars for three months (relative in our time) before coming back to AGS for one week “shore leave”. On the third day, an EMC operative set off a device that killed himself, about a dozen civilians and seven SACA service members. Lieutenant Commander Hayes was one of them. All of a sudden, I was First Officer. What the fuck?
I digress, because none of that has anything to with what I was talking about. I’ve found that it is harder and harder to keep focused on one particular thing when different parts of my mind seem to be watching everything on this planet all at once. It almost seems like magic, certainly to the people that live on Arcturus, and I think it’s the enormous raw processing power of this facility that makes it even possible. Someone said something about that once – I seem to remember some quote about advanced technology appearing as magic.
The people here have magical abilities, and they seem to pass those powers on to their children. It’s obviously genetic; it has to be, but what manipulation of their genes made this possible. Who did it? I presume the gods, but what was the purpose? Why here? Who are the gods? To my unhappiness, we had discovered absolutely no life in what small portion of the galaxy we’d explored. Let me rephrase – we’d discovered no intelligent life outside of basic flora and fauna, much of which was not too dissimilar from Earth as it once was. The African who had shot at us claimed we had set ourselves up as gods. SACA had colonized Arcturus thousands of years ago by local reckoning (God damn, time dilation fucks with your head if you let it).
I knew the answers were here in the station’s computers, and it was my lack of advanced knowledge in information systems that caused my slow pace at uncovering it. Ironically, it was the power of the station’s computers themselves that helped me break into the data files I needed. I don’t know anything about decryption and data security procedures, but the system here interfaces almost like a person. I only needed to tell it what I wanted, and the computer itself wrote the programs necessary to break in. It was incredible really, and the moment I came to the epiphany, the station practically shook with the gods’ anger. They knew it was only a matter of time before I knew everything, and this fact angered them. Or scared them?
I don’t know how much I can explain right now; it’s all a whirlwind right now, a tornado of recorded verbal, visual and written logs. Hypotheses turned into facts by experiments, discoveries, failures and massive amounts of data, much of which I don’t totally understand overlaps in my brain. As I assimilated the information, reading, hearing, experiencing it, my head began to hurt. It was too much, and it came to fast. I became aware of my physical body, such as it was, because The Universal Link Device started to make a bizarre and very slight buzzing sound, and it grew warm and then hot. I was afraid it might burn out, and who knows what side effects that would have had! Just as the heat and the pain grew unbearable, it was all over. I was at the end. I knew it all. I know it all, if I can just make sense of it and place it in the right order.
Dahk. Dahk? Who is Dahk? Doc. Doctor Harold Brown, Hematologist and Geneticist. They called him Doc. He’s the one who figured it all out. Well, he’s the one who made it all happen the way Zheng wanted it to happen. The people here are ninety nine point nine infinity human, but it’s that infinitesimally small portion that makes everything possible. That’s the key.
Zheng? Admiral Zheng? How fucking old is the Iron Chinaman?
Why here? Why anywhere? Location. Distance from Earth and Mars? If you’re going to do something illegal, further away is better. No, it’s the physics of the place. Random chance created something physically different here. Was it random chance or God? It must be random chance. If it were God, He would’ve done it on Earth ages ago. Physics. Something’s different in the physics of Arcturus. Urso, the Great Bear, solved that part. Urso. Oskar Isaksson – a one hundred thirty kilo Swedish physicist, standing over two meters tall.
It all comes down to particles. Atoms, molecules, electrons and quarks all combine differently here to create the same things with different properties. That’s what Isaksson discovered.
I had a conversation with my father about it once when I was thirteen. We sat opposite a table in the booth of a small eatery with a large glass window to my right, his left. We watched people walking through the street, and a tran ran on a rail overhead every ten minutes. Most of the buildings in this part of town were made of glass and used structural steel from cannibalized Ark-class ships as per Doctrine. Very little material was used that wasn’t renewable or reusable, and glass of course was virtually limitless from a raw material standpoint. Most SACA cities reflected light almost painfully from all the glass. My mother and I had gone to Mass, and he picked me up afterward to take me out to eat. We sat waiting for our order, a couple of soy burgers.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked. I wished he hadn’t. It was a loaded question, and I knew it.
“I think so,” I answered. “I want to.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, and I went back to staring out the window. After a minute or two during which he waited patiently, I said, “I guess I want to know it’s all for a reason.”
“And what if it’s not? Isn’t existence enough reason on its own?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. How is everything possible?” I asked.
My father and I never had the warmest relationship. In fact, it’s very possible he only hugged me three times in my life, and I’m not sure he ever said that he loved me. He was a stoic man. I say was because he must be gone now close to five hundred Solar years, maybe more if I did the math. I said once that he was Chinese, and that’s more or less correct. He was actually born in Taiwan, but he left Earth shortly after receiving his PhD. He met my mother in an emergency care center on Pollux.
“It all comes down to physics. I’m not a physicist, but I’ll try to explain it as best I can,” he replied. Technically he was a physicist, but with the equivalent of a Master’s degree, whereas his PhD was in botany. He actually had several degrees in scientific fields, but he always described himself as a botanist. “The universe and everything in it – Pollux, me, you, this table, everything – is all made of the same stuff. Everything is made from atoms and their constituent particles, all combined to make molecules, and these create everything in the universe. It is how they’ve come together that makes the universe what it is and how we understand it. These behaviors are not solitary to one part of the universe, but are in fact repeated through the universe over and over, even in our own galaxy.”
“Okay,” I said as a pale white man delivered the food to our table. My father poked at his burger somewhat distastefully. I’d heard him talk once or twice about how everything on Earth once tasted better, but that’s also why Earth became what it is now.
“Somewhere in our universe,” he continued, “it is likely that Wei and Paul Chen are sitting at a table having this same conversation in the same place on the same planet, but in a different galaxy.”
“What?” I asked with a mouthful of half-chewed food. He looked at my open mouth with some degree of consternation, and I closed it to resume my chewing more politely until I could swallow. “Wait, does this have to do with alternate realities, created by decision points in history?”
“No, you’re thinking about the relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics. Those are different universes. I’m saying that somewhere in our universe, maybe in our galaxy, we are having the exact same conversation. Two people in an identical place, just as real and thinking as we, are having the same conversation.”
“How is that possible?” I asked, thumping back in the booth harder than I planned.
“Because the behavior of every atom in the universe is infinitely predictabl
e,” he answered. He saw the doubt on my face I’m sure, so he changed directions. “You don’t think so? Let me ask you something. Is the universe infinite?”
“Yesss?” I replied, but then I thought better of it. “No. I don’t know.”
“Let’s go with no, because all of our known science shows it is not. In that case, because we understand the behavior of all matter and that behavior does not change, there is an infinitely non-zero chance that matter has combined the exact same way in some other part of the universe as in our small section of it.”
“Infinitely…?”
“Infinitely non-zero. Simply means that it is not impossible. Now let’s just say the universe is in fact infinite.”
“Okay?” I prodded.
“If the universe is infinite, to mean that there is a limitless amount of matter in the universe creating planets, solar systems, galaxies, et cetera, then the infinitely non-zero percentage chance gets multiplied by an infinite number an infinite number of times until it equals an infinite number.”
“Sooooo,” I reasoned, “there’s an infinite number of mes and yous on an infinite number of Polluxes having this exact conversation right now.”
“Precisely,” he concluded. “All because the behavior of matter as it merges with other matter is the same in all parts of the universe.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said, my burger forgotten. I wasn’t very hungry anymore. Seeing my father’s annoyed look, I changed my statement. “Doesn’t seem likely.”
“It is simple logic based on physical facts,” he replied almost arrogantly as he began to eat his own burger. “What would your mother or her priest say on the matter?”
“I think they’d say God created everything, the Earth and the heavens. So anything that exists is according to God’s plan,” I answered, and honestly, that was an easy one.
“Would God create more than one Paul Chen on more than one Pollux?” my father asked, eyeing my intently.
The Cor Chronicles: Volume 04 - Gods and Steel Page 14