She laughed; she was so gorgeous when she did it. “Devon, walking down the street with you is dangerous, but I continue to do so on a regular basis.”
“But you’re still recovering—”
“No, I’m not. Not really. I’m as good as new. Seriously, I think most of me is new now. Most of Yves, too.” She smiled all the way to her brilliant, Prevo eyes, and he melted into a puddle of goo that would do anything she asked. “I’m ready to go on an adventure with you. Take me to…” she made a production of considering the ceiling “…how about a new universe?”
“Are you only saying this because you feel guilty for me staying here?”
“If that’s true, then I’ll turn around and leave you after—kidding!” Her lips puckered together. “I want to go.”
He hadn’t expected this. But he’d concede he had been kid-gloving her a little bit. In the early days of her recovery she’d needed it, but now…had he been blind to her coming alive right in front of him? Had he—horror of horrors—been holding her back?
“Okay, but—”
“No ‘but’s.” She patted his cheek and skipped off toward the bedroom. “I’ll go start packing.”
22
SIYANE
EKOS-2
MOSAIC PORTAL B-3 / ENISLE ELEVEN
* * *
THE INSTANT THEY TRAVERSED PORTAL B-3 to Akeso’s universe, the distress coursing through Caleb’s blood spiked to a painful level. It screamed through his ears from the inside out, less a call for help and more a cry of vexation—of dismay, frustration and a taint of fear so foreign to Akeso’s essence.
He gritted his teeth and tried to push the clamor to the background, because Akeso’s distress was riling up the diati. It hummed in agitation, if not understanding. He held his hands up in front of his face and found them radiating crimson auras. “We should hurry.”
Alex’s lips were drawn thin and tight. Of course she was sensing the increased anxiety as well.
He reached over and touched her shoulder. “Sorry. You already know.”
“It’s definitely an uncomfortable sensation, but at this point I’m mostly worried about what we’re going to find.”
He didn’t dare draw any conclusions yet, but whatever was happening could not be good. Akeso wasn’t exactly the panicky sort, yet panic now laced every vibration.
A small astronomical body orbited Ekos-2 at the lowest sustainable altitude. Any closer and would become trapped by the planet’s gravity well and soon crash to the surface.
“Akeso didn’t have a moon.”
Caleb shook his head. “No. This is the moon from Ekos-3.”
“Surely not. It should have taken several decades at a minimum for it to somehow get here, not seven months, regardless of whether it managed a slingshot maneuver or simply propelled itself here by launching projectiles for thrust.” Her eyes narrowed. “If the Kat watcher here, or any of the Kats, helped the moon along to engineer this confrontation….”
“The Kats have their ethereal hands full at the moment. I doubt they have the time to play games in their toy universes.”
Alex scowled. “I’m just saying, if they did?”
“Then words will be exchanged. But that’s for later.”
“Focus on solving the crisis at hand. Right. Valkyrie, what else do we know?”
‘In the time since our last visit, the lunar body has also developed a mature atmosphere and been fully terraformed. You would likely be able to breathe on the surface.’
She glared at the moon in suspicion. “Let’s not find out. I seem to recall this one didn’t like us too much. Bring us around so we can see what’s transpiring between the moon and the planet.”
As they crested the lower profile of the moon, the answer soon became clear: a tremendous amount. Spherical objects similar to the ones they had previously witnessed Ekos-3 delivering to its moon were now being hurled from the moon into Akeso’s atmosphere. At any given time a dozen or more were en route.
Caleb frowned; the tactic shouldn’t work in reverse. “Aren’t the projectiles burning up in the planetary atmosphere? I assume they’re made of timber and foliage.”
‘Initial analysis indicates they are encased in a protective layer of resin. Though the layer is not impenetrable, it enables some portion of most of the projectiles to survive and reach the surface.’
Alex snorted. “Clever little devil plant.” She shifted to face him. “Game plan?”
He watched the moon’s attack proceed apace for another second, but gaping in horror wasn’t going to save the day. They needed to act. “First, and quickly, let’s drop down and assess how Akeso is responding to the attack. See if anything I tried to teach it is making a difference. If so, we don’t want to accidentally work at cross-purposes.”
She altered their trajectory into a steep descent.
‘The atmosphere in the region currently being targeted—but not in other regions—is denser than on our last visit.’
He was briefly heartened. “Akeso’s trying to make it harder for the projectiles to get through. That’s something.”
The atmosphere fought them as well, and it was a bumpy ride down.
When they cleared the cloud layer, at first nothing looked amiss. But maybe he needed to look with better eyes.
He stopped trying to seal off Akeso’s voice and opened himself up to the desperate anxiety churning inside him. It hurt, but he bore the pain, because it meant Akeso hurt a thousand-fold more intensely.
Now he saw the turmoil beneath the idyll. No wind rustled leaves, but tree limbs quivered nonetheless. Grass blades stood at attention, and the streams had developed rapids without obstructions to overcome. The thickened atmosphere created a canopy of angry clouds that stole the color from the normally vibrant flora.
Then there were the scorch marks. They spotted four circles, each thirty meters in diameter, within which all life had been burnt through to a crisp. Dead zones.
Alex looked perplexed. “Is the attacker trying to burn the living organic material away? What would that achieve? I always assumed the physicality of Akeso’s consciousness extended far underground, if not throughout the planet’s interior.”
“I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I think these marks are Akeso’s doing. It’s sterilizing anywhere the projectiles make contact.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because were I in Akeso’s position, it’s what I would do.”
‘Given limited options, this makes sense as a strategy. The immediate danger posed is one of infection. A lifeform such as the Ekos species shares many characteristics with a virus. One can presume the goal of the attacker is to parasitically overwhelm Akeso’s consciousness and replace it with its own.’
“In which case a scorched earth defense may be the only way to stop it. Good analysis, Valkyrie.”
Alex surveyed the scene below skeptically. “But can’t Akeso, I don’t know, overpower these islands of the enemy without too much trouble? It controls the whole planet, and these projectile impacts are barely more than pinpricks in comparison.”
Her point should be valid, but…. “Would it know if it did so successfully? Could it trust that it had?”
The possibility of one’s own mind gradually changing, so subtly you might not even notice as bit by bit you became something other than what you had been, until one day, the old you would no longer recognize what you had become…he shuddered. He also recognized the shudder wasn’t entirely on Akeso’s behalf, but he couldn’t dwell on it right now.
He shook his head. “No. Scorched earth is the better option, even though it means Akeso is killing pieces of itself.”
They caught up to a projectile breaking through the atmosphere. It plunged to the surface like a meteor, and the impact shook the ground in rippling waves of fury.
Alex zoomed in the visual scanner, and they watched as root-looking appendages began wiggling their way out of the mass into the now-exposed dirt. The next sec
ond the surrounding grass, flattened by the impact, caught fire.
Caleb pressed the base of his palms to his temples as pain shot daggers through his mind. He could feel the grass blades dying, and with it the rising lament of Akeso’s consciousness.
Alex shot him an anxious look. She didn’t appear to be suffering as much as he, but she plainly felt it on some level.
The flames swiftly consumed the foreign matter, yet they continued to burn deeper into the ground in an attempt to eradicate all traces of the invader. The ring of fire extended out several meters beyond the impact crater.
Taking no chances. Sacrificing more of itself to save itself.
Finally the fire faded to smolder and die away. But there were other impacts ongoing elsewhere, triggering other fires of immolation. He didn’t need to see them; he could sense them.
“Akeso’s winning the battle for now, but it’s losing the war. The attacker will force it to burn itself meter by meter until nothing remains. Then it will take over anyway.” Abruptly he straightened up. “But we can stop it. I can stop it.”
“Caleb….”
“Return to space.”
She studied him openly, concern surpassing doubt on her countenance.
“Please, trust me.”
“I do.” She nodded in acceptance and arced the ship upward.
They hovered four kilometers above the lunar surface, cloaked and undetectable.
Alex drummed her fingers on the dash. “We can open fire and not stop—use Akeso’s tactic and burn up the flora. It’ll attack us, but the Rifter can handle the onslaught. Oh, even better—we’ve still got two negative energy missiles on board from when we were planning to go on the last AEGIS mission, before Plousia. They’ll tear this moon up.”
“Not badly enough, or fast enough. We need to stop the attack now, then destroy it so completely it can’t stay nearby, regrow the flora and try again. Maneuver us so we’re situated directly between the moon and the planet.”
“Do you really think you have enough power to do this?”
He hadn’t told her the plan yet, but it seemed he didn’t need to. “I think I must have enough power to do it. It’s required.”
“This will be orders of magnitude greater than anything you’ve attempted.”
“Nisi said I hadn’t begun to test the limits of my power. It’s time I did.”
She regarded him for another beat, but did as he asked before he was forced to press the point.
Here, situated in the scant space between the planet and the moon, the planet’s mesosphere buffeted them as they worked to hold a stationary position, while its gravity tugged at them as they worked to remain aloft.
Caleb breathed in, trying his damnedest to focus amid all the wrenching sensations coming from the planet below—despair, anger, confusion—his own response to them, and the diati’s instinctual feedback loop response to both. “Valkyrie, activate the Rifter.”
The lights in the cabin dimmed. The extra power needed to maintain their position plus the power needed to run the Rifter meant there wasn’t much left over.
‘Done.’
“Get ready.” Whatever that meant, right? His field of vision narrowed until the moon became all he saw.
DESTROY
A wave of energy surged out of him, and everything went black.
“Caleb, talk to me! Valkyrie, what’s wrong with him?”
He felt empty. Weak.
Warnings of moderate severity from his eVi flashed in his vision. He blinked until his eyes stayed open. He was on the floor outside the cockpit. Alex’s face floated centimeters above him. She looked frightened.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re white as a sheet…” her brow creased “…and your irises are almost blue.”
That explained the emptiness, at least. “How long?”
Her hands roved from his cheeks down over his neck, but any damage there was wouldn’t be found on the outside. “Just a few seconds.”
He let Alex help him to his feet and stumbled into the cockpit in time to see fissures opening up on the moon’s exterior. They raced in all directions, cutting deepening scars into the crust and through to the mantle.
A barrage of projectiles hurtled toward the Siyane, as expected. Those that would have hit them were captured by the Rifter, to reemerge far from the planet below, alone and adrift to die in the void of space.
The moon began to crack apart. The surface crumbled as it came unmoored from its core. Alex gasped. He concentrated harder.
AWAY
Despite being mostly apart from him, the diati obeyed his command. The moon shuddered and rocked back as its structure lost all coherence. Trees and chunks of rock separated from the disintegrating surface, but all the pieces traveled away from them and the planet below, off into space. It was as if an invisible force drove them away.
Which of course it did.
His knees wobbled, and he leaned into the dash for support. He was weak because all his diati was out there executing on his commands, drawing purpose and intentionality from his will. Draining him of the strength needed to fuel its actions.
The last clinging pieces of the mantle were stripped away, leaving the core of the moon exposed to the vagaries of space—but before space could do its work, the core blew apart in a torrent of metal, melting then resolidifying into misshapen clumps.
A few stray pieces escaped the diati wall to pummel the Rifter or fall into the atmosphere. But in the unlikely event they retained any scrap of living matter, Akeso would be able to handle them.
Still, a final effort was needed to ensure no trace of the threat lingered to bide its time and grow stronger once again. He didn’t know if he could do it.
But he must be able to do it.
AWAY
As if hit with a shockwave, the remnants of the moon, already little more than a field of debris, shot away and was swallowed up by the blackness.
He nearly fainted a second time, his vision blurring as his grip on the dash faltered and the cockpit lost definition. Then all the diati rushed back to him in its own shockwave.
The physical force slammed him against the cockpit half-wall. He gasped air into his lungs as a crimson aura throbbed above his skin, head to toe. The world spun around him, and it occurred to him if he wanted to he could control it—not the spinning, but the world. The subatomic particles making it up.
Now he exhaled, again whole—more than whole—and invigorated. The aura faded into his skin, and the trauma of the whiplash vanished beneath the power of so much life flowing through him.
He gave Alex a blasé smile in response to her gaping, wide-eyed expression. “How about we go see how Akeso’s doing?”
23
CHIONIS
ANARCH POST ALPHA
* * *
EREN HAD WORKED UP A PROPER head of righteous steam by the time he stormed into Xanne’s office at Post Alpha.
The woman spun her chair around to face him. Her jaw briefly locked in restrained annoyance at the interruption. “Eren, what—”
“The next time I null out, I want the techs or docs or whoever does this sort of thing to tweak my genetic makeup. Bring me back as…a Kyvern, or an Antalla, or whatever. I don’t care, so long as you get this Idoni sickness out of me, once and for all.”
She stared at him, ended a comm she’d apparently been on when he’d barged in, and adjusted her posture. “It doesn’t work like that. If we meddled in your genetics to such an extent, you wouldn’t be you any longer.”
“All the better.”
“We can’t and won’t do that, Eren. It’s an unethical practice one expects from the Directorate, not the anarchs.”
He slouched down in the guest chair. “Then don’t bring me back at all. Disconnect me from the regenesis servers. Next time, I’ll die for good same as every other anarch lucky enough to not be Anaden.”
“You think it’s ‘lucky’ to be consigned to die forever due to an accident of fate?”
“I think it’s the appropriate fate for a monster like me.”
“You’re not a monster, Eren.”
“As the resident expert on me, I beg to differ.”
She frowned. “Did you do something I should be informed about? Something you left out of your mission reports?”
“Not lately. But it turns out, I can’t outrun my past. I tried, but I can’t outrun who I am.”
She offered him a kind, motherly smile. “Eren, you’re not the first anarch to come to us carrying the baggage of a questionable past. We all have sins to bear in one way or another. The important thing is that you chose to put them behind you and devote yourself to an honorable calling. If you’re paying a penance, well, it’s a worthwhile path to follow.”
He struggled to keep the resurgent despair off his face. She didn’t need to see it. “You’re a good person, Xanne. Better than many of us deserve, and a damn sight better than I do.”
He stood, pivoted and left as quickly as he’d arrived.
Eren fumbled around in the drawer for his stash of ferusom. Vials lined the surface of the bureau, waiting for imbibement, but this was the one that would ensure the cocktail of hypnols sent him into a true oblivion. To a place where he could escape. Not permanently, not yet, but right now he’d take escaping for a night. He’d figure out how to escape tomorrow, tomorrow.
Xanne was wrong. She was kind and well-meaning, but she was wrong. Though he’d tried—gods how he’d tried—he hadn’t put his sins behind him. He hadn’t changed, couldn’t change what he was. The monster wasn’t just in his genes; it was in his soul, and he could not excise it.
He paused to take a long swig from the bottle of wine Caleb and Alex had so generously gifted to him, then began rummaging again.
There it was. He grabbed the slender flask and slammed the drawer shut, sending several of the vials skittering off the top of the bureau.
“Arae!” He grabbed for the vial of charist as it tumbled through the air toward a terrible fate. He succeeded in rescuing it, but doing so caused the ferusom to slip from his grasp and shatter on the hard floor.
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