by Lee Bond
Not to mention he’d come out of the torture with an astonishing new power and a heightened sense of right and wrong, both of which Antal knew would come back to haunt him in the coming years.
If he failed to breach The Cordon ahead of time.
The Kith summoned up images of Griffin Jones using his Kin’kithal powers to literally burrow a hole through the fabric of the Unreality, assessing, analyzing and dissecting everything the flame-topped warrior did, utilizing the whole entirety of his considerable intellect and wisdom to fully comprehend what it was Griffin Jones was doing.
A hole. Burned through the Unreality. Even though what he watched was nothing more than a representation of the actual act, Antal felt that if he stepped forward, if he personally interacted with the vision, he might fall into it.
That was how powerful Griffin had become. As the Kith scrutinized the … fire vortex … for the fiftieth time, he lamented his decision to torture the lad as much as he had.
This new revelation was disconcerting.
“Damn the humans and their ever-elastic genome, double damnation unto the Kin’kithal and Kith’kineen in all their forms.” Antal booted The Cordon, then again and again as he felt the damned thing was mocking him with it’s eternal resilience and endless domination of the vista. “Where I sought to weaken, I only enforced growth. How does this happen? Why does it happen? How is it possible that they acquire such new talents so easily while I had to spend infinity growing more and more mad with each passing step, only to find that the most I can do is next to nothing? Though there are only two left, that is too many! Agh!”
Antal had the form of what Griffin could do, now. It resided inside him, nestled against all the strange things he’d seen and learned over the millennia, but there was no point in trying to replicate the Kin’kith’s masterful vortex; old as he was, as steeped in ex-dee power as he was, Antal was not and could not ever be as skilled as the scions of N’Chalez. They’d been conceived with their talents already there, right from the beginning, had grown accustomed to their strangeness inside the womb, had seen the first brilliant rays of life cascading around them, already ready to harness what was theirs.
The only thing that’d taken time was control. Finesse. Expansion.
Black rage threatened to swallow him whole, and Antal struggled against that dreadful tide. He needed to stay in control, if only long enough to decide what to do, how best to proceed.
Losing his temper now, devolving into a maddened beast that rampaged across the Galaxyship, destroying everything that came into his peripherals … that’d be to lose the opening gambit. He needed to stay focused, to derive a method of getting something through the sealed breach. The window-like nature of that patch … it demanded exploitation.
Antal rumbled angrily as the scene unfolding before him began displaying Chad Sikkmund’s offerings. Slender threads of static ex-dee electricity popped and sparked across Antal’s body as the wise-cracking, heavily accented FrancoBritish assassin-turned-impossibility began forming the device that’d capture and marshal Griffin’s fire vortex to where it was needed most.
Grudgingly, Kith Antal tipped his head in recognition of a fresh new player in the game they were all about to play. He didn’t know how it was possible that Sikkmund could so easily manipulate the very matter that surrounded him, or why the Unreal Universe itself didn’t lash out as it always had before now, and hated the man for it; here, within the Galaxyship, he could do something similar to what it was the Arcadian did, but the comparison was a slender connection only.
Inside the Galaxyship, the unstable laws of Unreal physics were further transformed, made weak by the absolute and utter conjunction of extra-dimensional forces, thereby giving Antal enough leeway to redirect matter in any way he so chose, but it was costly, difficult, and the Universe did –from time to time- realize what was going on and struck back. Structures degraded, whole batches of clones spoiled, harmonics failed … the list was endless.
But Antal could do it. He could bring anything he dreamed of to life.
Just not as swiftly, or as perfectly, or as negligently as Chad Sikkmund of Taryn did.
Kith Antal wanted to rage over Sikkmund’s very existence but was wise enough to suss out why it was someone as impossible as the FrancoBrit cyborg even existed in the first place: the Engines of Creation.
Had to be. There was no other explanation. When Garth N’Chalez and his brood of backstabbing traitors had descended into the bowels of their hytech vessel to disappear for thirty thousand years, the Engines themselves –itself, whatever- had obviously and immediately begun work on generating a new hero to perform the task of Universal rebirth. Wildly different than N’Chalez yet eerily similar, Chad Sikkmund could do what he could do, and with the full permission from the Universe itself.
Which struck Antal as hardly fair. He hadn’t asked to become embroiled in things. No, he had not. All he’d wanted was to be smarter, stronger, more … more adept at life, and when the chiming bits of lights in the sky had offered him that and more than he’d been able to conceive of when he’d been nothing more than a peasant, he’d leaped at the chance.
“And here I am, now, thirty thousand years into the future, confronted with children, younger, faster, more in tune with the Universe than I could ever hope to be.” Antal kicked The Cordon again, harder than before, still with the same results. “Now I have three enemies on the other side, all of them with powers I can mimic if I choose, but never to their level. Three. This is some bullshit. And they’re going to go right to my damned son, fill him to the brim with information. Intel I can’t afford to have out there.”
Several things needed to happen, and all of them in swift order, all of them requiring considerable amounts of time, energy and effort.
He needed to create soldiers, not clones.
One for both Griffin Jones and Chad Sikkmund. They’d be real live people, with actual intelligence, true consciousness and a built-in desire to destroy their opposites. Their creation would be fraught with errors, both from within and without; it’d been somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-two thousand years since Antal had put his hand to the act of pure fabrication, and he knew he’d be rusty, and there was the Engines and the Unreality’s dislike of such things to contend with as well.
“Has to be done.” Antal nodded, then quested through ex-dee to that place where he stored his primary control mechanisms. He wordlessly uploaded the basic schematics for the Birthing Chambers that’d –hopefully with minimal losses- eventually give rise to warriors capable of battling a fully-enhanced Kin’kithal and whatever a Platinum Brigadier actually was.
The systems responded with a summation of elements that’d be required to do just that. Antal ground his teeth. Damn near too much was needed.
Taking into account his own mistakes and reprisals from the fabric itself, it was looking like nearly a million tons of pure material was going to go into each, and in this kind of operation, there was going to be no way to reclaim anything; any matter that spoiled or was otherwise deemed unusable would remain unusable until the end of time itself, and any raw energy that became ruined would phase into frequencies either too wild or too minimal to be of any use whatsoever.
“Needs to be done.” Antal commanded the hytech machines that ran the majority of the Galaxyship’s functions to do as they were told. Anything lost would be recouped once The Cordon fell, either directly through the acquisition of planets while he moved towards the inner systems or through the destruction of enemy forces.
Satisfied with his choices though still kicking himself for assisting Griffin Jones with his ascent to a higher form of Kin’kithal and failing to comprehend the absolute threat that Chad Sikkmund actually represented, Kith Antal considered the next task on his to-do list.
Breaking through The Cordon.
Now that he knew it could be done, he could do it.
The trick was in the last bit, the bit that he was only capable of understanding only
through observation of the final moments, just before Griffin and Chad slipped through.
Someone on the other side had helped them.
That was the trick. The secret way in.
Antal stuck one of his whale-sized eyes up to the window, tried to peer through. Shadows, nothing but shadows. Hints of movement, the suggestion of bodies moving this way and that, nothing concrete.
Nothing certain.
But Chad and Griffin and whoever had assisted them in their jailbreak weren’t stupid. They knew how important The Cordon was, and of the two, Griffin definitely knew that Garth would not be terribly pleased at what they’d accomplished.
So they were still there, on the other side, working to undo the damage.
It was a race, then.
Antal pulled his face away from the window.
This was a race Antal could win. He knew it in his quartzy bones.
All he needed to do was build a machine that could weaken this side of the shield enough to allow passage of ex-dee-tainted material through into Trinityspace. Once there? Just a matter for that matter to reorganize itself into whatever was needed. In this case, to start, something small enough to steal more matter –or energy, whichever was more bountiful- until there was enough available to begin construction of the other side of the bridge that Antal intended on striding boldly across.
“I’ve got the upper hand this time, boys.” Antal chortled, which sent the trapped Heshii swimming through his body fleeing in all directions. “Easier to weaken than strengthen. Soon enough, you’ll see.”
And so it was that Kith Antal began the second phase of his new plan to destroy the Universe and punish his wayward son.
Thirty Days
Stride, eyes shut, hands gently resting on the railing separating one section of the command center he was in from the viewing station that was situated directly in front of a Screen stretching for nearly fifty feet in all directions, felt the status of his great and wonderful Asteroidship.
Tremors. They plagued his home, rattled keepsakes and mementos –oh yes, even the great and vile Harmony soldiers who now preferred to be called Horsemen of the Apocalypse held on to things from their past, Fenris included, though many would suffer terrible fates if the story ever broke- from their perches, made gangways and deck plates creak and groan as if the Peloponnese was haunted.
An impish grin curled sightless Stride’s once-handsome face. Who was to say his ship –all their ships- weren’t haunted?
For certainly, whenever he thought of Lisa Laughlin, the so-called Starlight Lady, it was as if she was stood there right in the room with him, brilliant slashes of sapphire light burning brightly through the splits in her skin. A lopsided smile on her face, understanding eyes that were so deep you knew that no matter what you’d been through, she’d been through worse than you, with your imagination, could hope to invent or create. She deflected all questions that bordered on intrusive with easy readiness, for of course, the lovely Lisa Laughlin had known what you were going to ask even before you did.
But she’d always given you that chance, hadn’t she? To know what you were going to ask, and then to make that definitive decision to not? Fairer than most deserved, given her unique and terrifying ability to read the minds of every single sentient being, anywhere, in the whole of the Unreal Universe.
“Fenris used to hate that.” Stride told the empty room just as a loud and particularly voluble groan moaned through the command center. He felt one section of the Great Screen buckle under the titanic pressure, but the thing held, as it always had. Of course nothing untoward happened.
He was in an Asteroidship. One of the finest in the fleet, to be honest, and there was nothing in the Unreal Universe that could cause her lasting harm, the least of all this little storm in the depths of space. He’d squatted out more furious turds and had come out just fine.
“This is just a bit of weather.” Stride patted the railing with a sure hand. His ship had been with him since almost the beginning. They were inseparable. Nothing would happen. He was here, there was no reason to hide his power, and so if the unthinkable were to befall grand Peloponnese, he’d just … exert himself.
Stride missed Lisa. They all did. She’d become a part of their lives, an honorary Harmony soldier, and even though she’d decried some of their plans –for how could she not know precisely what it was they intended- she’d stuck with them, patiently tutoring them on how best to prepare for the arrival of her father, Garth N’Chalez.
That evoked laughter, and so Stride did just that. He tilted his head back and laughed until the hilarity overwhelmed the groaning, creaking and rattling caused by the skirts of the Storm outside.
You didn’t prepare for Garth N’Chalez.
Oh, Fenris liked to pretend that he had everything under control, that he had mechanisms and plans in place that’d force the Engineer down a very specific, very unalterable course, but that was just the old arrogance talking. He was having a tough time dealing with the idealistic and fat ex-banker currently ruling the Solar System, so putting Nickels in his place seemed to be a very far off dream.
“Ah.” Stride opened his eyes at last, allowed the brilliance of what was on the Great Screen to flood into him. “But the fat bastard is doing it with such panache, Fenris. You can’t deny that! When the old man stuck to his guns, proved immune to the extent of your powers, and then dropped Ute Tizhen to the ground like a felled shubin, you’ve got to admit, we all felt the first pangs of worry.”
On-screen, the vicious Storm wrought by Ute Tizhen and Tomas Kamagana burned brightly with furious hostility, eliciting a whistle and a headshake of admiration.
This was true power, true destruction, true annihilation. If only they could harness the destructive power of this rampaging nightmare, unleash it on their true enemies, whole legions would twist into nothingness with each sweep. They’d be able to overwhelm their Great Foe’s clonic engines, push the fiend ever backwards, force him to retreat.
“And then Garth, no doubt slouching around somewhere in the background mooching for free food and stealing the cutlery, can ride in to vanquish his mighty father.” Stride nodded. The story bore all the hallmarks of a true legend. “And then, while he is thusly occupied, we can all sneak away into the last tatters of Fallen Darkness.”
Stride felt pinprick disappointment rising through Harmony. Fenris. Of course he was listening in. More than all of them, Fenris Valeren was immensely interested in the Storm that girded Huey’s Shield; if a wrinkled old immigrant and a resurrected Goddie could puncture their way through, then they, the mighty Latelian God Army, should be able to do more than that.
“But the Engineer isn’t here.” Stride cautioned smugly through Harmony, bouncing the sentiment directly off Fenris’ head, but the ‘leader’ of their group had already returned his attention to the conflict raging elsewhere in the quadrant. “And even if he was in the room,” Stride continued on, just as smugly, “he wouldn’t even know what the hell I was talking about.”
Getting through Huey’s Shield was a matter of prime importance. Now they were finally engaging the Trinity Army properly –with all signs pointing to complete domination with fatalities falling squarely into the ‘acceptable loss’ category- getting past the unbreakable shield surrounding Latelyspace grew more and more important.
And not just because of the Trinity Army lurking on the other side. After lingering with the others for a while to behold the first few strikes against the assembled Heavies and their lesser counterparts in Regular Army, Stride had little that was good to say about them. The Heavy Specter Elites did have some things that were quite hair-raising –and eye-opening- when it came to the Cordon-tech they were packing around, but at the end of the day, nothing was better than what sprung from Harmony. Much of what the Heavies did could be easily replicated –at least he and verbose Solgun believed it true- by Twoesies and up.
It’d just take practice, and effort. If it was even necessary.
No
, there were other rea…
On-screen, a bubble of lightning wreathed with gyrating blobs of immense gravity bubbled into existence, almost as if it’d risen from the utter depths of an impossible ocean, forcing Stride to pull his head from his deep thoughts and to focus, very carefully, on what was going on.
Peloponnese groaned and rattled, and as the swell of energy caromed too closely to her, a high-pitched wail shrieked through the long corridors. Off to one side, damage control machines blipped a warning; the outer layer of the Asteroidship had endured significant damage to the eastern hemisphere, and while Stride read the systems that would be affected if another such strike banged into them, he watched as chunks of rock –some weighing tens of thousands of pounds- fell into the blobby nightmare.
“And into the dust you go.” Stride nodded his head farewell, the urgent desire to figure out some way of controlling these forces resurging once more. There would be no greater weapon. Visions of huge balls of gravnetic-infused lightning tearing across the lengthy battlefield that waited for them all lit up in his mind, detailed imagery of benighted Harmony clones being cruelly torn apart, ripped into splinters, forced to die by something much greater than they could comprehend.
Most of the others were in accord, but Fenris had a point.
Fenris always had a point. Now they’d learned that the Trinity Army wasn’t as fearsome as they remembered –loquacious Solgun had waxed philosophic, and at great length, on his belief that it had to do with the Goddies’ better connection to Harmony as for what was shaping up to be a walk around the park- there was the more important task of preparing Trinityspace for Antal’s arrival.
Stride tipped an invisible hat in thanks to their missing Starlight Lady. While she’d been reluctant to tell any one of them the things they’d wanted to know –how best to kill Antal, how to affect ex-dee to sunder his connection to that powerful plane, how to scuttle his Galaxyship- after countless thousands of years of pressure, she’d finally relented, revealing a willingness to lay out his plan of attack.