by Brian Trent
“We don’t precisely know,” Apollo conceded at last. “But let us consider what we do know: our enemies despise life and seek its total, final extermination. Their manual efforts have failed them. But you—”
“We believe,” Lady Wen Ying interrupted smoothly, “that our enemies have endeavored to apply the best technologies from your civilization to their purposes. In the past they attempted genocide through painstakingly localized attacks, showering life in lethal energies. Burning it away inch by inch. Far too ineffective.”
Apollo gave a very human sigh. “Humans have changed the battlefield. Nuclear weapons, bioweapons, antimatter, plagues…Tiamat views intelligent life as the worst affront, you see, but his plans now depend on you.”
“How many of these twisted creatures are left?” demanded Celeste.
“Three of them. Three of us.” He was suddenly Doros again. His beard flowered out of his chin, his stature shrank. “We are the last.”
Celeste prompted, “Stillness is collecting antimatter. That would cause a hell of a lot of destruction, but it wouldn’t exterminate life.”
Apollo moved to the bamboo trees and stared absently at their rigid stalks. “There are ways…in theory…”
Gethin watched his face. “You and your allies had a meeting in Arcadia. You mentioned your enemies might be constructing a Midas Hand.” He spun around to Celeste with real panic in his eyes. “That’s why they wanted the antimatter missiles and the cathode rail.”
She didn’t follow him, but his burst of fear was contagious. “What is a Midas Hand?” she asked helplessly.
It was Apollo who answered. “Some of us theorized long ago that it might be possible, knowing what we did about the nature of matter and energy. But there was never a technological means to…”
Gethin picked up from his friend. “A Midas Hand is a hypothetical device which acts as a switch. It can ‘flip’ matter into antimatter and vice versa. Just think of it: turn one half of a planet into antimatter and disintegrate everything. Absolutely…everything.”
Something strange and cruel happened in Celeste’s eyes, but Gethin barely noticed. He found himself reflecting, most unexpectedly, of his childhood in the stalks of London’s arcology. Of waking up early with the spectral light of a rainy morning at his bedroom window, the horizon engulfed in milky fog, the metallic canopy of Upper City blotting out the firmament. Dad and Mom in the kitchen sharing coffee, enjoying the precious minutes they had together before work. It came to him as a crashing wall of anguish, the acute realization of how much would be lost and how fragile the world was.
And the shuttle explosion! Great stars! The missing ingredient to apocalypse must have passed through my body on that shuttle!
Apollo looked weary. “Gethin, there is so much more to tell, but now…”
Lady Wen Ying touched his shoulder. She was grinning, and the air was suddenly uncomfortably hot and pregnant with danger.
Something happened in Apollo’s eyes. The moment of contact from his lady friend triggered an awful realization.
“Eris!” he cried.
Gethin wasn’t certain what happened next. Dimly he realized he was flying outwards from where he had been standing. His eyes stung with whiteness, there was a vibration that implied sound, and then he crashed through bramble. His skin felt like it had been scrubbed off his body with a grater.
He blinked, felt his face with slow, groping fingers.
Whiteness. Searing and painful.
He was blind.
In his ears, voices were speaking in short, panicky tones. He couldn’t make out the language being used; the pain in his skin soaked all his attention. But he realized there was a horrifying storm raging around him, bursts of hot air and thunder.
“Gethin!” Keiko screamed through his sensorium. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”
He tried to stand. His feet tripped over a heavy, immovable object. Then Celeste’s rough hands were on him, dragging him backwards, and her strained voice came to his ear. “Gethin! Can you hear me?”
Strange shapes began to materialize in his vision. Fuzzy, indistinct, gyrating shadows behind a murky veil. He heard rapid-fire explosions and sonic booms.
“Celeste?” he asked. “My eyes…”
His vision began to focus. Red lights flashed in his sensorium, advising him of first-degree burns to sixty percent of his body. He discerned the Outlander, her scarlet hair, and the gardens over her shoulder. Depth perception returned and with it he saw Apollo, like a crushed bug beneath the pincers of a giant praying mantis.
The entity that had passed itself off as the great Lady Wen Ying had increased in size and transformation, and she hung over her victim with the triumphant glee of an alpha predator. In the explosion’s aftermath, she had sprouted a half dozen pincers, lancing Apollo’s torso and limbs like pins through a butterfly. He was trying to dissolve away into mist, but somehow she held him steady…her pincers glowing. Apollo shivered in place, attempting to vanish; each time, he was yanked back into solid form.
And his body! It was burning away beneath her terrible pincers. Fading to translucence…
His attacker leered. She drew near as Apollo strained against her. Here was a grotesque mockery of the female mantis, in the orgiastic moment of copulation, a half second before decapitating her mate.
Eris, Gethin thought. That was the name of the last of the High Priests of the Outlands, the ones who had unified Stillness into a persistent threat.
Only she, like Tiamat and Apophis, was much more than that.
Apollo attempted again to dissolve in her grip. The phalanx of pincers flashed, keeping him in place. He continued to fade.
She’s devouring him, he thought, numb with panic. She’s gorging on his soul.
McCallister was screaming in Gethin’s ear, but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from the awful scene. Eris sprouted new pincers to aid in her hideous evisceration.
“You killed her?” Apollo was saying, dissolving into vapor. “You killed Lady Wen Ying?”
“As I will consume you too,” the creature hissed above him. “Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat, no?”
Apollo glared weakly. He was a glass ghost, curls blushed with gold, marble muscles taut where she impaled him.
And he was whispering something. Like a dying man needfully offering prayers to any god that would listen.
Gethin amped up his hearing. The crackling energies of the two entities swelled into a buzzing, discordant cacophony.
And through it, he caught what Apollo was saying.
“Sy’hoss’a!”
It seemed that a meteor flashed through the room. It struck Eris headlong, ripping her off her victim. One moment Eris was there, and the next she was gone and the eastern wall of the gardens was a gaping hole leading out to sea.
There, on the marine horizon, two plasma clouds were spinning in hideous embrace. One was clearly still Eris – Gethin amped his optics and made out her mantis-like shape. But a caged mantis she was, since a larger cloud of charged particles had surrounded her with imprisoning tentacles. Her attacker enfolded her, the tentacles burning into her ‘body’, and Eris shrieked. Forked red lightning crackled between them.
For an instant, Eris broke free of her assailant and dove for the ocean. The larger cloud snapped out tentacles and caught her before she could submerge, halting her escape so abruptly that the seawater dimpled as if hit with a jet of high-pressure air.
“Gethin!” Celeste cried behind him.
He tore his gaze from the sea battle and gazed onto a protean haze. Freed from his attacker, Apollo the Great was trying to reconstitute into a tangible structure again. The haze compressed into a vaguely humanoid silhouette – flesh appearing, a hint of a face – only to whirl apart. Clever geometries of willpower reverting to formlessness.
“No!” Gethin cried
, driven by instinct to help this defiance against oblivion. He rushed into the mist; the charged air caused the hair on his arms to stand up. He smelled the clean odor of ozone.
Out at sea, Eris gave a screech unlike anything Gethin had ever heard. She – it – attempted another piteous dive to the sanctuary of the ocean. Once more, its opponent caught it, yanked it back into a firestorm of plasma. Flaming debris tattered and sloughed off Eris’s body like party streamers, sizzling, collapsing, into the Pacific.
“Gethin.”
The voice hummed by his ears, felt more than heard.
“You must find where Apophis and Tiamat are hiding. If they have indeed created a Midas Hand…”
“I don’t know where they are!” Gethin said helplessly, running the possibilities in his head. He unmuted McCallister and told her to conduct an aggressive search of all known Stillness hideouts.
Celeste stepped into the mist, breathing hard. She took a breath and said, “Tiamat? Apophis? I know where they both are.”
The ancient entity made another attempt at human form. Again, it whirled apart, only this time managed to create an aetherial countenance in the mist.
Outside, Eris gave one final ululation for mercy. Gethin didn’t want to look, hating it absolutely in that instant. But Celeste tugged and pointed. Eris burst like a fiery piñata. Only a single entity hovered over the sea.
“You realize who that has to be, right?” Celeste said. “Maybe we should get the hell out of—”
The entity hovered over the rolling waves. It had grown luminous, and very much like images of jellyfish, its tendrils draping loosely.
Then it vanished.
And reappeared in the chamber with them.
Gethin and Celeste were knocked aside as the jellyfish-thing materialized around Apollo. It grew new limbs to offer a loving embrace…as if trying to manually keep Apollo from total dissolution.
Gethin pulled himself back to his feet. “Will he die?” he asked. “Please tell us if there’s something we can do! Please…”
He trailed off, as the jellyfish transformed, midair, into a festering wall of malefic eyes, burning with lunatic fury.
And then it was upon him.
Chapter Fifty
Dealing with the Devil
King D. didn’t worry about being assaulted in the caves. He rarely worried about being assaulted at all; the streets of Odessa were a tough place, and he had climbed its pecking order through brutal acts of survival. He figured he could clobber a dozen Stillness purity-freaks without tapping more than an ampule of the tech marketplace distributed throughout his body.
He wasn’t worried, therefore, when a shadowy shape intercepted him as he returned from the lavatories.
His bodyguards were a different story. They darted in, shieldfists snapping open to create a glassy barricade around him. As the shields linked, King D. stared through them to the shape.
Father Apophis himself.
“Stand down!” King D. barked to his retinue. The shields retracted. He bowed in apology. “Father Apophis? I am deeply embarrassed by this. My guards are jumpy in the best of times. Please forgive me.”
The High Priest smiled pleasantly. “You are forgiven, honored visitor.”
“Wait for me at the junction,” D. told his guards. They moved off, six men and one woman, like scolded, shaken children.
He abruptly understood their shame and confusion. They must have swept this corridor for intruders. Their optics were so finely tuned that they could zero in on a single gnat…
So where the fuck had the High Priest come from? A secret passage?
“Your Grace,” King D. began. “I am honored by your presence.”
“And I’m honored by yours! We honor each other!”
This was the nearest King D. had ever been to the upper brass of these maniacs. He knew what his field operatives knew: the fundamentalists claimed leadership by an unusual triumvirate: Father Apophis, Father Tiamat, and Mother Eris. In all probability, the three were merely the public face of the movement, while an underground cabal made the strategic decisions.
Apophis’s proximity was such that the StrikeDown prince could see pores in the man’s nose. “You read my proposal?” D. inquired.
“I did.”
“I urge you to consider it in the face of our common enemies.”
Apophis wore green vestments that he had personalized with curious markings and snakelike glyphs. “Tiamat has no intention of returning your missiles,” the priest said flatly.
“I see,” King D. said.
“Do you, indeed?”
“Yes,” the StrikeDown leader replied, abandoning the pretense of diplomacy. “I see plainly that Stillness is in the hands of a true fanatic, and unless you are prepared to defy your master, we have little else to say to one another.”
Apophis smacked his lips. “You can’t possibly believe that a cache of well-aimed missiles will bring the InterPlanetary Council to its knees. They have built their very foundation on the status quo: solidarity against the common enemy of the Outlands. You won’t change that with your meager resources. Better men than you have tried.”
“You underestimate the power of fear,” King D. replied with conviction.
“Ha!” Apophis staggered back, genuinely amused. “Fear is my specialty! And yes, it is a most powerful tool indeed. But you hardly have the means to exploit it, sir.”
“We disagree,” King D. replied, noting the odd grace with which Apophis had moved. The fucker was certainly a lanky specimen of man, but he possessed an unsettlingly feral agility. A martial artist could move like that. Fluid, almost like a cloud.
“Then let us return to where we agree,” Apophis said evenly, and there was something obscenely flattering in his voice. “The overthrow of the system. Earth Republic cut off at the knees.”
King D. kept his voice neutral. “I’m listening.”
“That is what you desire, yes?”
“You know it is.”
“What if resources were no longer a consideration?”
“How so?”
Apophis stroked his lengthy chinbeard. “Suppose, for only a minute, that your strategy did not depend on missiles. Pretend with me. Let us imagine that there existed a wellspring of limitless energy, granting you the freedom to focus on strategy itself. No supply lines to be cut. No mills to be pillaged. A wellspring of power for you to tap, unendingly?”
D. felt his impatience mounting. “Sophistry. Why waste our time this way, Your Grace? There are no limitless wellsprings.”
“Allow me to rephrase. If I were to offer you an energy source vast enough to accomplish your objectives, what precisely would that be worth to you?”
“I’d have the resources I need if Father Tiamat would cooperate!” King D. let his anger show at last. “This is how rebellions fail…through in-fighting and ego-driven games.” He regained control, looking past the priest. His bodyguard Lalania was visibly tuning in to the argument. “I fear we have nothing more to say to one another.”
King D. stalked away, cursing what had to be done now. There was no alternative. The missiles were on site and a group of fanatics stood in his way. He would send his bodyguards to kill them all. It would be messy. Costly. Yet he could not afford to let these weapons sit in a cave…not with war breaking out.
D. was halfway to his guards when Apophis was in front of him again.
“King D,” the High Priest sang, looking more amused than ever.
The StrikeDown leader froze. What the hell?
“You must permit me to finish,” Apophis chastised. “I do not idly approach people with the offer I’m about to make.”
Lalania was already coming down the hallway, ready for business. D. stopped her with an outstretched hand.
“Then tell me more,” he managed, stricken by this unsett
ling display of teleportation. For a superstitious moment, he wondered if this holy man was somehow the same terrorist on Luna. He had joked about it on the way over, he and his bodyguards. But beyond sharing the same name – a sheer coincidence, certainly – the terrorist and this lanky priest looked nothing alike.
But thinking it, he suddenly realized that there was a vague resemblance. Both sported a Middle Eastern swarthiness, and the same oil-black hair. Still, the Williams Sports Dome was two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away. It couldn’t be the same man.
Could it?
Apophis steered him by the arm, down the corridor and into a branching passageway. King D.’s audio crackled with Lalania’s worried voice, but he muted her.
He went into an alcove.
And froze in place, his heart flipping around in astonishment.
The missiles! They were here!
* * *
The room transformed as they stood there.
A contraption unlike anything King D. had ever seen remained the nexus of the rocky alcove, sporting its eccentric array of metallic quills. But the missiles! Six antimatter missiles were set into the chamber’s pillars, which, King D. noted, were not for engineered architectural support but rather as…what? Power generators for the weird-ass machine? Cables snaked into it like umbilical cords.
As Father Apophis stood beside him, however, the reliquary changed. The scuffed granite walls blushed into sandstone. Fresh paint materialized on the rock face, slithered into hieroglyphic friezes of cats, falcons, decorative papyrus trees, and herons. The air flooded with rich, honeyed light hailing from a source King D. couldn’t discern.
Only the machine was unchanged. A static fixture. As constant as a fabled time machine.
Indeed, for the first few seconds of this metamorphosis King D. wondered if it was a time machine. What else could the goddamn thing be? How could this room transform itself so radically, and without any indication of sensoramics, holos, or vidveils? Father Apophis couldn’t be hacking his optics; he had powered them down. Then he realized that even if it was a time machine, that wouldn’t explain the Egyptian motif; if they were shuttling backwards several thousand years in China, they would still be in China, not in this openly Egyptian locale.