by Nick Webb
No, the problem was her reach. Without being able to use the ships’ own broadcast signals, she would have to touch each ship on her own, and sending her thoughts all the way across the millions of kilometers to Parees was hard enough. Sending commands was harder. Because it wasn’t just commands—it was a communication protocol. Send and receive. Data downloaded to her mind was processed, went through a decision flow, and then commands were sent. Rinse and repeat.
Trying to use Parees as a conduit to get to all of Ka’sagra’s ships … was proving impossible.
She was able to get to one, with brute force, shoving the commands through Parees’s mind so hard that she felt his hands spasm on the slick wall of the computer terminal.
But that was only one. There were ten left besides Ka’sagra’s ship itself, and she did not have the reach to touch them all.
She needed more.
She needed to be more.
So she reached out. Above. Below. All around her. Computers, networks, servers, mainframes, zeros and ones and electrons and impulses. She looked at them, saw them as crude devices, looked away, then looked again, and they were more. Much more. They were wavefunctions and quantum mechanics and Schroedinger equations and Pauli exclusion principles and a fine, delicate dance of math and reality.
More. She needed to be more. She had to be, if she wanted to stop Ka’sagra.
So more she would be.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Near Sun
VSF Svalbard
Bridge
He was on the ship. That broken drone, the one who had slid too far into human thought to be useful. Parees. Ka’sagra had only felt the most fleeting presence, but it was enough. Her hand smashed down across the soldier’s face and he lay quiet, blood dripping from his nose.
She stared down at him for a moment. Her chest was heaving. Her life-blood was seeping away. They thought they could change it all now? They could never hope to.
But she knew that was wrong. Fear was now pumping in her veins. She knew of Tel’rabim’s labs, and she knew that the Dawning had been freed, living among the humans, learning things it should never have learned.
A thought nagged at her: it was still possible that these pesky little humans would stop all of this. They were in her computer systems, and if they could find a flaw—
The drone couldn’t do it on his own. That thought came with startling clarity. The Dawning was the linchpin of their plan, and she was not invulnerable. In fact, Ka’sagra had a very good idea of just where she was. She reached out, and she felt her. Perfect. How perfect. How poetic. She was holed up in the very place Ka’sagra herself built as the interface into the Temple of Knowledge—the place Tel’rabim so callously called, the archives.
How fitting that her interface was directly under the city. The city’s massive inverted peak pointing directly down to where the Dawning was now, helpless.
She checked to make sure the soldier was still unconscious, and then she drew her robes to the side as she swept past him. Humans were necessary for her ascension, she had come to accept that, but it didn’t mean she had to like them.
Dirty, stupid, stubborn things. As devoted to life as their Telestine counterparts, and infinitely more unpredictable.
She smiled. After her handiwork on Tokyo and Denver, Tel’rabim had spent incredible time and resources to protect London from any stray ships. He was so desperate to search the archives, and so sure that her destruction would come with a bomb on a shuttle, that he had not even thought to prepare for other possibilities.
And she always had another plan up her sleeve.
Ka’sagra pressed the button and watched the chain reactions play out across the screen. It was a marvelous feat of engineering that kept the cities afloat, it really was.
Unfortunately, it was very, very easy to disrupt. A mis-calibrated graviton emitter here, a mismatched quantum phase envelope there. And the whole artificial gravity containment well was compromised, and then … gone.
And Telestine London fell. The inverted tear drop descended like someone had caught the aftermath of a stone being thrown into a pool of water on video, and then played it in reverse. The droplet was an entire city that looked like it should be flying up, but instead it sank down, down, down. And the Dawning would never escape the inexorable, crushing weight of Telestine London as it demolished her, grinding her into the very earth she had been so desperate to save. Yes, even she, the Dawning, Tel’rabim’s abomination, would ascend. Soon, all of Telestine London would ascend with her; Ka’sagra blessed their names.
She turned back to the soldier. The Dawning would no longer be a problem. Now, she could deal with this human at her leisure. It would be best that he go to the ascension without fear. Her personal distaste for his species mustn’t prevent her from doing her duty as a high priestess.
She knelt by his side and shook his shoulder.
“Wake up,” she said softly. “Soon you will be in heaven, my dear soldier.”
Soon, we’ll all ascend. Together.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Earth
London
The London Library
The sky above them was falling.
One of the drones, released from Ka’sagra’s orders, stumbled sideways and attempted to bash the girl against the desk.
She stopped him with a thought, and he froze there motionless, hand still raised to strike her.
The antigravity that kept Telestine London in the air had completely failed. The giant spike pointing down from the bottom of the city was directly overhead. One small part of her brain, of her ever-expanding being, did the calculation. Oh, how perfect. The tip of the spike was currently aimed exactly three point four two centimeters from her left ventricle, and falling rapidly.
Another part of her mind tried to figure out what had just happened. Ka’sagra had sensed her—and she was responding with as great a lack of delicacy as she ever had. Why just kill the girl, when she could kill an entire city?
And, of course, why stop at one city when she could take out an entire solar system? The old Dawn would have snarled in anger. The new Dawn accepted it, calmly and serenely.
There was nothing to be done, nothing at all. There wouldn’t be a way to turn those antigravity projectors back on completely before the city slammed down onto the ground, with her under it. Pulverized into dust. She had, what, another few seconds?
Six point five two seconds, to be exact.
Now, six point five one.
Six point five.
Six point four nine seconds.
She made her preparations. She reached further and higher and deeper than she ever had. And, right at the four point nine nine eight two seconds mark, she did it. She reached out, and as if with the tips of her fingers, she delicately plucked out the right code, the correct combination of orders that would simultaneously reach into each of the eleven ships Ka’sagra controlled, and overload their engines.
No. Mustn’t destroy the ships. The mono-isotopic iridium would eventually drift down and possibly initiate chain reactions. Smaller, but chain reactions all the same.
No. She needed to get rid of the bombs completely.
Four point nine nine eight one.
Four point nine nine eight zero.
Time was slipping through her fingers at an alarming rate. Less than five seconds now.
The solution presented itself. Intuitively. As if one small portion of one part of an ancillary section of her brain made the connection all on its own.
Another, more sarcastic part of her brain added the flourish.
FTL those bitches out of there.
Four point nine nine seven nine nine.
Four point nine nine seven nine eight.
Tick tock, Dawn, time’s ticking, she thought. A stretch, a poke here, a shove there, and few quadrillion calculations later, and she figured out the right FTL course for all eleven ships to send them deep among the stars, and they darted away. Only one left: Ka’sag
ra’s. That one would be up to Nhean, Parees, and Larsen.
Humanity was safe.
The Telestines were safe.
Both parts of her heritage, safe.
Four point nine nine seven two seconds.
Four point nine nine seven one seconds.
Four point nine nine seven zero seconds.
Good God, this was taking forever. She knew she’d never be able to move her human body out of the way in time, but that didn’t make the wait any less excruciating.
***
As the entirety of the city slammed down onto the ruins of Human London, skyscrapers and support struts meeting in a shriek of metal and splintering against one another, buildings above shattering, the raw force of the impact smashing flesh and bone into a pulp, the girl … died. And all the drones around her. And thousands of Telestines and drones above her.
But in her final act, in the trillions of picoseconds she had left, she managed to restart the antigravity generators. Not all at once, and certainly not at full intensity. But as a result, the city collided with the ground with far less force than it would have.
At least, that was what the computers recorded. The thousands upon thousands of computer cores and memory banks above and in orbit and all over the Earth. Some recording the seismic reading, some recording actual video. Such an important milestone in the history of humanity and in the history of Telestine culture must be documented, of course.
Religions would be born, beliefs would spring, and a new dawning of knowledge would shine from this moment—some of these computers came to this conclusion. Other operating systems decided that was illogical. Others didn’t think anything at all. One computer played solitaire and designed a machine that would print books. Paper books. For gifts, of course.
But most decided something new, something singularly unique had just happened.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Near Sun
VSF Svalbard
Bridge
Ka’sagra watched, her fury rising like a storm, as the other eleven ships leaped away, out of her reach. She could not even feel her sisters aboard. They were … gone. Not even in the solar system.
It was not possible. How—?
She took a breath, and forced herself to calm.
“Fine. You have only made the ascension a little slower for us all.”
The soldier called Larsen, now awake, sniffed at the blood pouring from its nose. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She smiled serenely, and touched the crude human buttons on the console to initiate the comm signal to both Nhean down below, and to Walker, and to her dear, dear friend, Tel’rabim.
He’d want to hear this too.
“Laura Walker. Nhean Tang. You have failed. You think you have succeeded, but you have only prolonged our ascension by scant hours. There is enough iridium 191 aboard this ship to cause a chain reaction as large as the one that engulfed our own sun. I should know. I was there. I failed then, but I will not fail now. I had hoped all twelve of my ships would reach the sun’s surface simultaneously and result in a supernova that would then mercifully reach you in mere minutes, but … alas.”
Larsen had been reaching for something nearby, and she kicked him in the face. He groaned.
“Soon, a coronal mass ejection the size of ten Jupiters will speed outward from the sun at one tenth of the speed of light. It will reach you in an hour and a half. It will reach the rest of humanity in a day, at most.” She sighed in delight. “Finally. We will all ascend. Together. And Walker, Tang, and dear, dear Tel’rabim, I thank you. It would not have been possible without you three, especially. Until we meet in the heavens.”
She pressed the buttons that would initiate the final acceleration burn into the sun.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Near Sun
VSF Svalbard
Engine Compartment
Nhean looked down in disgust at his handiwork. Two Daughters of Ascension priestesses dead, a bullet each through the head.
They’d tried to use some sort of EM pulse to disable his gun. Fortunately, one of the last things Schroeder had made for him before he delivered the Venus fleet to Walker was an EM resistant firearm. Nhean had known that the Telestines had the technical ability to disarm through EM pulses, and the development of a firearm resistant to that tech had seemed prudent. He’d grabbed it from the weapons locker on the Arianna King, almost as an afterthought. Good thing, too.
He almost hadn’t, remembering the gore from the last time he’d shot a Telestine. He was not a soldier. He was no superhero.
But he was one smart, wily fellow, goddammit.
He’d been standing outside the launch tube when Ka’sagra made her announcement. The missile launch tube, which, unfortunately, was right next to the power core.
The engine compartment was shielded from the core’s massive radiation output, of course.
The launch tube was not.
“Until we meet in the heavens.” Ka’sagra’s final farewell grated on his ears.
He opened the launch tube. The radiation alarm blared inside the engine compartment—the levels were so high that he knew, even though he couldn’t feel the effects yet, that he’d already signed his death warrant.
“Not today, Ka’sagra. I’m afraid you’ll be going alone.”
He pulled himself into the launch tube and shut it behind him.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
Near Sun
VSF Svalbard
Bridge
His eyes had opened to slits when she suddenly pushed herself away from him and ran from the desk.
He wasn’t sure what she was doing, but he knew that if Ka’sagra wanted to do something, he didn’t want her to succeed.
She made her little speech, something about the nova still being on, and Larsen shoved himself up off the floor and tackled her sideways away from the desk. His head came down hard on the metal grating of the floor and he yelled in pain, but he hung on.
“I’ve won.” Ka’sagra’s long fingers had found his throat and were squeezing against it. His hands scrabbled weakly at her arms, but she was strong, far stronger than she looked. “Don’t resist, my brother. We will ascend together, you and I—just as our species will.”
Larsen tried to roll away. A knife. A gun. Anything. He needed to kill her and turn this ship. He’d hold a gun to her head and—
She was already determined to die. What was he going to threaten her with?
Movement flashed behind him and the next moment, the High Priestess went sprawling away. Parees stood behind her, panting, the edge of a metal chair stained with her blood, and then went scrabbling towards the navigational controls.
Her shriek of fury was enough to make both men wince, but Parees didn’t hesitate. Even as Larsen tried to draw in one wheezing breath, Parees turned at the last moment as she charged and threw himself at Ka’sagra’s slender form.
He wasn’t trained to fight, that man, but he gave it everything he had. He may have been just a human, but he seemed to fight like a Telestine, his strength magnified.
Ka’sagra’s body jerked with each blow to her abdominal wound, but Parees’s fists simply weren’t enough. She wrenched her fingers around Parees’s throat the same way they had around Larsen’s. This time, she was not trying to make a point, however. This time, she was trying to kill quickly.
Parees gave a gasp of pain and his fists lashed out, battering at the wound, at her throat, at her face.
Larsen managed to get up long enough to take two running steps and drop, his elbow directly over Ka’sagra’s face. The side of his head where she’d hit him still felt like fire, but he couldn’t focus on that now. If he let Ka’sagra get past Parees, everyone was dead anyway. He locked one arm around her neck and pressed his torso down onto her face with every ounce of force he could muster. He jerked back and forth, trying to snap her neck, but Telestine bones were surprisingly strong.
Parees was gasping for air behind him,
and Ka’sagra was trying furiously to batter her way free, but Larsen hung on for dear life. They had to get to the navigational controls.
All of humanity depended on it.
“I hate your kind,” Ka’sagra hissed. “I don’t know why the heavens even want you. I should have ascended years ago, and instead I was forced to live in the bellies of ships and know darkness beyond what any mind could bear. I doubted—the test of waiting for your kind made me doubt! I will always hate you for that.”
“Doesn’t sound very enlightened,” Larsen gritted out.
“Larsen!” Nhean’s panicked shout reached him a second too late.
The gun slammed into his head and Larsen slumped sideways. Before he could stop her, Ka’sagra had shoved her way free. She aimed his own gun at Parees and fired.
The gun worked. The blasted thing worked. The EM field must have only temporarily disabled it.
She shuddered backwards with the recoil. Her own blood was soaking the front of her robes, but she had enough left in her for one last act of revenge.
The force of the shot spun Parees and he slumped against the desk. Bright red spread across the white surface. His face was, for just a moment, a mixture of surprise and sadness, and then blank with death.
Nhean was laughing, though. Larsen looked up at him. His face was deathly white, and there were horrific red and white blisters all over his face.
“It’s done.” Nhean shook his head. Trembling, he pulled a sidearm out of his shirt and leveled it at Ka’sagra. “It’s done, the bomb is gone. I launched it. It’s now in a stable orbit around the sun, and when Walker gets here, she’ll recover it and destroy it. You’ve lost.”
He pulled the trigger, and this time, Ka’sagra was too injured to get out of the way. Larsen watched the back of her head burst open as the exit wound bloomed, she collapsed, and then it was done. There was a ringing silence in the room.