The Blood Groove (Purgatory Wars Book 4)

by Dragon Cobolt

  Epilogue

  President Amanda Deinhardt signed off on yet another piece of paperwork. Despite constant crowing about becoming a paperless society, she had yet to see it actually get to the White House. But, considering the things hackers could do to computer programs these days, she supposed paper had its advantages. She was about to pick up another stack of memos when the door to the oval office opened.

  One of her favorite aides – Martin Shelton – stuck his head in.

  “Madame President,” he said, smiling. “The NASA guy is here for you.”

  Deinhardt preferred a relaxed White House. The aides and staff repaid that – a change from the previous administration – with almost fawning loyalty. She nodded.

  “Send him in, Martin,” she said.

  The NASA guy turned out to be named Dr. Robert Pero. He was dressed in a suit about three decades out of fashion, wore thick bottle glasses, and looked almost entirely like a completely stereotypical NASA scientist, save for the fact that a furrowed knot of flesh was all that was left of his left ear. Seeing the glance, he smiled at the President.

  “Old motorcycle accident. Glad it just took the ear,” Dr. Pero said, taking her hand, shaking it.

  “Well, I’m glad to see that too,” Deinhardt said. “What is it that you needed to speak to me about? I was told that it was something that got ya’ll down at NASA runnin’ around like ants who got their hive shook up.”

  Dr. Pero smiled shakily. “That’s, ah, one way of putting it.”

  He pulled out his tablet. Tapping it on, he brought up a picture. It was of a gray white crescent surrounded by blackness. He tapped the side of the tablet, his voice firm.

  “This is a photograph of Charon, the moon of Pluto,” he said. “The Second Horizon probe took it yesterday.” He swiped the photo left. “It took this one five seconds later. Then this one. Then this one.”

  The pictures showed, clearly, a bright white flash coming from Charon. Then, later, a stream of gas shooting out into space, as well as some debris. A few glinting specs.

  Deinhardt’s brow furrowed slowly.

  “Dear god,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” Dr. Pero said. “It’s a horse.”

  Or, more accurately, half of a horse. It looked like the explosion had ripped the poor beast in half. The flash freezing from being exposed to space had rendered the image less gory – that and the fuzz introduced by the extreme distance of the Second Horizon probe. But it was still distinctly disturbing. Deinhardt had a fondness for horses, one that had helped her during the campaign trail, on interviews, and commercial spots.

  She shook her head.

  “Have you heard of the Vanderbilt Effect?” Dr. Pero asked.

  “I think so,” Deinhardt said. “It was named after some kid, right?”

  “Yes, Liam Vanderbilt is why we even know it exists. Exotic particles bombarding a specific part of space-time can create a rapidly rotating fourth dimensional object, creating a linkage between the targeted area and another.” He licked his lips. “The research at Atlanta, the work by Dr. Chelsea Brown and her husband-”

  “Ah, Doc,” Deinhardt cut him off. “Concise.”

  Dr. Pero gulped. “W-We assumed the exotic particle shower was a random event. Natural phenomenon, as nothing we know can make it. Weird things hit the Earth from time to time.” He paused. “But Dr. Brown did the math. Vanderbilt would have ended up in Charon.”

  Deinhardt bit her lip.

  “Ma’am,” Dr. Pero said. “If he went there...”

  “So can we,” Deinhardt said, her eyes speculative. “

  Dr. Pero nodded.

  Deinhardt smiled. “We choose to go to Charon not because it is easy. We choose to go because it is necessary.” She grinned. “I’ll start making some phone calls, Dr. Pero. I think NASA just got a budget increase.”

  ***

  Ares leaned back in his little office, situated in the center of Purgatory’s sun. Brax’s skull looked down at him from over the bed that he had made. Ares had a pleasant mental image of fucking that Fizit bitch on that bed, under her lover’s skull. If Brax’s child wasn’t in her womb, he’d eat his own sword.

  There was something marvelous about taking another man’s woman.

  His palm rested on the desk before him. It had taken many years of experimentation. With his mind freed from the shackles of mortal worship, he was no longer tied to being Ares, God of War. There was so much power in being a god. Powers to move, to shape, to make matter dance as he would will it. Yes, his power was actually lessened from what it used to be.

  Yes, the prayers were distant and muted.

  Yes, every worshiper he had now seemed to count as only a tenth of what they used to be.

  But the freedom alone made it worth it.

  He might not be able to make a spear that could cleave the sky. He could no longer make armies immortal and invincible when he needed it. And his priests could no longer heal by using his power.

  Not that many had noticed yet. Priests of Aries rarely were called for that art.

  But he could teleport. He could change his shape. He could pick apart minds at his pleasure.

  He was himself.

  And so, he subtly changed his hand. Soon, his skin was the skin of an elf. His blood was the blood of an elf. His heart beat came in the same steady beat beat beat of an elf. And his face, reflected to him in the mirrored surface of the wall, was the face of that elven bitch he had sired Liv in.

  The desk recognized her.

  “Administrator Liz’Ten, welcome back,” the computer spoke in Ancient. “How may I assist you?”

  Ares smiled, and spoke in the dead woman’s voice. “Can you check on System Administrator Four?”

  “System Administrator Four’s functionality has failed, Administrator Liz’Ten,” the computer said. “Do you wish me to wake System Administrator One? Or Two?”

  Ares shook his head.

  Three had been destroyed during the War against the Ancients - the war that had brought him and the other gods freedom. One and Two were both far too sane to be useful to him. But System Administrator Four – Sys-Min-Or – had been perfect. Scattered and confused and so easily led. He tapped his fingers on the desk, then leaned forward.

  “Show me Earth again.”

  The crystal pods that thrust from the desk glowed to life. Dozens of screens appeared in the air. Those in the middle showed images of the world of Earth. He could see how it had changed. The new glow of lights. Cities, each with millions - billions - of people. The other screens showed the feeds from dozens of media programs. He saw tanks driving through a dusty desert. Strangely green tinted footage of a city in flames. Anti-aircraft fire streaked through the air. In another, children were escorted from their school, panic on their faces. The police were approaching as helicopters circled.

  “-at least twenty dead in this latest shooting-”

  “-terror attack leaves dozens wounded as-”

  “-heroic Marine and a fellow bystander stopped the knife wielding-”

  “-we shall bring down fire and fury unlike anything-”

  “-this far! No further! We shall-”

  “-overcome!”

  “No, no, we won’t go!”

  The voices – in dozens of languages – flowed through Ares. He leaned back, feeling an almost sexual thrill buzz through his body, accentuated by the feminine form he had taken. He grinned and let himself slide back into his male form. His hand caressed his lap.

  “War on women,” he murmured. “War on terror. War on drugs. War on poverty. Wars by the bushel. Wars by the pound. Wars for all occasion...”

  His eyes glowed.

  “Wars for me.”

  THE END

  Exclusive Sneak Preview - Cadet by Dragon Cobolt

  There were many shards of many lives. They glinted and shimmered in a long string of reincarnations. They were fragmentary. They were incomplete. They were glimpses into other times and other places.


  A man with gray hair, standing before a legate’s council, holding up a contract scroll. His voice is strong, booming out and filling the room. People watch, rapt, from the audience stadiums surrounding him, while hovering drones record the moment for posterity. His knuckles slap the bottom of the contract, causing the crystal-printed wafers to activate piezoelectric machinery woven through the lettering. Hologlyphs surround him, a hazy aura of evidence and arguments to underline and counterbalance his words.

  A woman waving a slogan-poster before a collection of rioters, despite the rocks that whistle past her ear. She holds it aloft, and behind her are half a dozen men in heavy gear recognizable as Korvosian stormtrooper uniforms. Glowing eyed gas masks. Long trench coats, woven through with hardened strands of jade and adamant. Crossbows cradled in their hands. They look ready to open fire on the crowd of rioters – but a gesture from the woman's hand holds them back. She turns back to look into the crowd. Her eyes are filled with determination that could move mountains.

  A teenager with a headband, cradling an automatic-crossbow in dream rubble, as enemy soldiers pick their way past the warped and ruined reality that had been her home. She is grabbed from behind – thrown down. Something with four arms looms over her, all gleaming metal and whirring gears. The girl shows no fear – her boot slams into the joining between the thing's legs and despite being made of machinery and clay, the man staggers backwards, his palms cupping around his crotch, his face – shockingly human, nestled as it was between the metal – contorted in pain.

  The teenager laughed.

  There were more shards, but none floated to the surface as the soul started to contract. The fragments started to move together, drawn inwards by a sudden increase in the local pressure of... of what?

  There was no word for it in the languages of science that came before the Endwar. People that had once spoken of quanta and dark matter would have struggled to explain what was happening with anything other than a single word: magic. But there was a science here. The shinimantic properties of motonic modulation fields, interacting with natural and artificial dragon-lines of power. This science guided chunks of lifetime into contact. Where they fused, there was light. The light started off as a mere candle-flame, then grew. It hurtled into a torch in a heartbeat. It rocketed through bonfire between blinks. The light of a sun shone from the containment unit for the longest moment as the soul underwent fusion.

  At that moment, when it seemed as though the soul could get no brighter... it stopped. The light dimmed to nothingness, leaving only a hazy splotch in the air, wreathed in a mist of pale white smoke. The splotch faded and the fog wafted slowly to the sides, revealing a single glittering gemstone that looked like a diamond, if the facets of a diamond could shift and flow like water. Contained within the diamond was a luminescence that was as gentle and warming as the noonday sun.

  Tweezers made of a silvery metal, held by rubberized gloves wrapped around all too human hands, closed around the gemstone and lifted it up above the aetheric fusion chamber. Engineer Trasik breathed slowly in through the gas mask settled over his face. A single droplet of sweat beaded along the inside of his mask and he thanked the dead gods that someone had designed the mask to whisk sweat away before it dripped into his eyes. He moved the tweezers through the air, setting the diamond down on the scanner that dominated half of the workroom.

  “Careful.” Engineer Lanisbe said, just as the diamond settled into place. Trasik started but fortunately, the scanner was already closing its protective field around the diamond as it checked it for flaws. A soul fusion, in theory, was actually fairly simple – in fact, it was less traumatic than a run of the mill reincarnation. Reincarnation left almost no memories behind, allowing a new personality to form as a human being was born, raised, died heroically in the service of their nation, and came back again.

  But reincarnation was natural. Flaws occurred, but no one blamed the laws of reality when their child was born mentally deficient, or with screaming nightmares, or with an asynchronous gender. A soul fusion was done by human hands, with human minds.

  With human beings who could be blamed. Trasik could already see the Intelisec Comissariat asking him pointedly: So, Engineer Trasik, why did you deliver us a drooling moron instead of a Champion? Then he could see a future working in the prayer-mills, or being shipped into a penal battalion.

  “Let's check it,” Lanisbe said, voice brusque. If Lanisbe felt any emotion – let alone fear – he didn't show it as he stepped over to the scanner's control panel. Working the toggles and flicking switches with one hand, he took the time to slip his gas mask back and over his head. His bronzed face was cleanly shaven, the only hint he hadn't spent his entire life in a technical college being a pair of puckered, circular scars on his cheek. Trasik had never asked him where he got his scars and Lanisbe had never offered.

  “Her,” Trasik said, taking his mask off as well.

  “Don't gender it before we know what it is,” Lanisbe snapped. Trasik scowled.

  “What was the order, Lanny,” he said, knowing the diminutive annoyed the other engineer. “Three girls, two boys.”

  “This might be one of the boys,” Lanisbe said, stiffly. The scanner was starting to bring up some preliminary images. The first was of a woman holding a sword in both hands. She knocked a crossbow bolt from the air with a quick, artful slash. The image fuzzed into static on the screen and Lanisbe swore quietly. “Fuck, getting a lot of interference – the fusion was smooth, right?”

  “Smooth as a Fair Folk's cunt,” Trasik said, grinning. Relief was making him sweat more than the initial fusion had. It wasn't always the case that the first image on the scan indicated the gender identity of the Champion. But it was a good bet.

  “You're disgusting,” Lanisbe said. He had brought up another screen. The teenager that Trasik had seen momentarily. Lanisbe's brow furrowed and he paused the feed. “What's that she's wearing?”

  “It looks like a headband. Don't recognize the symbol. Do we have a date?”

  “Five lifetimes ago,” Lanisbe said. “Hrm, need to find out when the soul died in those lifetimes-”

  “Two centuries,” Trasik said, his voice dull.

  Lanisbe looked at him, frowning. The feed started to skitter forward – the quantum-interface that allowed a scanner to read the memories of a human soul, even one artificially fused together, was notoriously hard to actually pause. Souls remembered what they wanted to remember, and poor, overworked engineers had to get what they were given.

  “And how do you know that?” Lanisbe asked.

  “I recognize the symbol now. That's the Suryan Front,” Trasik said, putting his hands on his face. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Those assholes in Collection just fucked us.”

  Lanisbe shook his head. “You're being histrionic. The Suryan Republic was conquered – part of this Champion's soul is originally Suryan. That is to be expected from time to time, Suryans and their decedents make up fifteen percent of Imperial Korvosa.”

  Trasik tried to not grind his teeth as Lanisbe worked his way forward. As a logician and a rhetorician, Lanisbe was more akin to a behemoth tank. He got where he was going, yes. Eventually.

  “Besides, if her core memories are properly loyal, then-” Lanisbe paused. “Oh.”

  Trasik looked at the screen. The view had continued to spool forward through important memories, jumping from scene to scene like a montage edited by an over caffinated action addict.

  Laying on her back, with her legs spread, the teenager was eagerly taking a man's cock. But not just any man. Those four arms, that sleek body. That was Unstoppable Destructive Locomotive 556 – one of the most famous Korvosian Champions... well, ever. Trasik started to feel relief bloom inside of himself.

  “Let's not celebrate too quickly. It may be rape,” Lanisbe said, quietly. But he didn't sound like he believed it.

  Trasik flicked on the speakers, then tapped on the translation program – she was speaking Suryan from two centuries before aft
er all.

  “Oh Loco! Oh Loco!” The girl's voice was high and eager. She arched her back, her smallish breasts bouncing against her chest as Loco's bottom hands cupped her ass desperately, his upper hands squeezing her shoulders. He panted, raggedly, as he pounded into her, his swaying balls slapping her butt. “Oh Loco, I love you, oh gods-”

  The clear and unmistakable sound of a world shattering orgasm wailed from the speakers.

  Trasik flicked the sound off.

  He looked at Lanisbe and arched an eyebrow. “Think we're good?”

  Lanisbe nodded. “Definitely a loyalist. Good. Let's get to the real work.”

  The duo turned and took the gas masks completely off, hooking them on the wall. The small room was dominated by the scanner on the left side but the right was the real showpiece. There was a small chute that lead to the induction chamber. In the ancient past, there had been many theories about the fundamental nature of reality. Refinements in measurement and observation, extrapolations of theories, all had pointed towards a deep mystery of how reality worked. It had taken blowing the cosmos apart to really understand what was going on.

  There was something deeply human about that.

  But the Endwar had taught the survivors – huddled in reality shields and protected by sheer willpower – that the universe functioned on a deeper level than just Newtonian pieces bumping together. Once you knew how to tap it, the soul was all that mattered. The induction chamber was the culmination of that truth. Hundreds of mana-generators, dozens of prayer-mills, and a techno-mystical infrastructure that spread across half a continent worked to focus the energies of creation into the chamber. Those energies could cause a fused soul to imbue itself into, well...

  “Bring it in,” Lanisbe spoke into the hanging speaking crystal while Trasik pulled on manipulator gloves. The door to the workshop opened and a trio of menials hurried in, pushing a vat of thick, pale gray clay. Well, menials and the teeming masses of the Populat and most of the Bureaucracy called it clay. Engineers knew better.