“Focus, old timer,” Greyblade said.
“The fact is,” Gabriel said, unwillingly, “the magic number ten is just the maximum permitted glorified entities granted the right of assembly inside the Interdict at any one time.”
“Permitted?” Greyblade echoed.
“Yes, permitted,” Gabriel growled. “And the rest of the Angels, aside from me, are a constantly-rotating bunch of lesser clerks of the Archangelic court. I can’t remember the last time one was down here for more than six months. Most of the time they work from Heaven without even coming down.”
Greyblade found himself briefly at a loss for words. “What sort of work can they do from up there?” he managed. Gabriel snorted expressively. “How many Angels are actually on Earth right now?”
“Aside from me?” Gabriel said. “One. Kozura is in the Aganéa farmlands on an assignment. He only comes down here when there are special-case authorised trips outside the alien quarter. He doesn’t like it in here.”
“The poor fellow,” Greyblade said. “You know, this arrangement probably didn’t do much to keep Karl from walking in and making Himself comfortable,” Gabriel favoured him with a level look, but was unable to argue the point. “So,” Greyblade went on, “it’s up to us. We can’t report Karl, and we can’t drive Him out in any permanent and effective way. We’ll have to kill Him.”
“How do you kill a God?” the Drake asked in a muted voice.
“Rather curious about that myself,” Gabriel grunted.
Greyblade sat in silence for a time, leafing through old files on his conceptual interface since he still had his visor open. He sipped his wine and dabbed his mouth again.
“Is he checking his database for another list?” the Drake asked, her voice still hushed.
“Of course he is,” Gabriel replied.
“Brutan the Warrior once said that when you want to kill a God, you need to make your quest about something else,” he said slowly, “right up to the moment it isn’t.”
“So what do we make this about?” Gabriel asked.
“Well, that’s easy,” Greyblade replied. “It’s about helping Earth to isolate itself safely, with open avenues of transport back and forth between the Interdict and Corporate space. And not tearing the Four Realms apart in the process.”
“Asunder,” Gabriel said in a low voice.
“What?”
“Tearing the Four Realms – nothing,” Gabriel half-filled his glass and made a face when the bottle ran dry. The Drake rose, crossed to a cabinet, and returned with a dark bottle wrapped in atmo-control film. Gabriel took it, wiped the old wisps of film away, and squinted at the label.
“Wine is not to my taste,” the Drake said, “but my customers swear by the Old Grange. Apparently it has oaky highlights, but as far as I can tell that better describes the cupboard I keep it in.”
Gabriel shrugged and thumbed the bottle open using its old-fashioned lever-mounted cork. Then he set the bottle on the table and picked up his half-glass.
“What about the Elevator?” he asked, and swigged his remaining wine.
“Not even a Category 9 has the power to destroy a God,” Greyblade shook his head and lowered his visor back into place. Alcohol had minimal effect on him and he could switch off whatever effects did occur, but he was satisfied for now and had business to attend to. He began bringing up file data. “Their weapons classifications are remnants of pre-Worm sensibilities and categories of power. Flesh-Eaters and World-Eaters are small- to mid-range defensive and assault weapons. God-Eaters have wider-ranging destructive capabilities, and I believe they were named for their semi-sentient status and their ability to take out an enemy God’s entire worshipper base. They can demolish whole realms, they can burn Portals out of the fabric, a galaxy like the Playground wouldn’t be difficult … they’re anti-personnel dialled up to Apocalypse.”
“That’s … terrifying,” Gabriel said, “when you know as many horror stories about the Elevator as I do.”
“And they’re not even the most dangerous things in her arsenal,” Greyblade said. “I don’t know much about the All-Eaters, since they’re classified and outlawed and bound by a whole bunch of treaties and conventions. I know they’re capable of tearing a hole in a Dimensional wall, and consuming just about any other matter on a practical sub-aactur level. But that still doesn’t really affect Gods, seeing as how They’re not really composed of matter as we understand it. The Destarion might be able to bore a hole into unreality and slap a God in the face with her All-Eaters, but we don’t want to slap Karl’s face.”
“Did Brutan the Warrior ever kill a God?” the Drake asked.
“Not in any story with a verifiable basis,” Greyblade replied. “He may have head-butted a few and bashed the occasional tankard of ale into the occasional Divine visage, but that’s about it. The mythic equivalent of the Elevator’s most impressive trick, essentially.”
“And those are the stories with verifiable bases?” the Drake asked unsteadily.
“Afraid so,” Gabriel said.
“In any case,” Greyblade went on, “if we tell the Destarion about Karl, the result is likely to be the same as if we told the Gods. She’d demolish this entire flatworld as easily as you’d take apart one of those fabricated cows downstairs.”
“Would she take such a drastic step against one of the centremost Pinian realms?” the Drake frowned.
“A world the Pinians have already abandoned?” Greyblade said. “A world already contaminated with ideology and power-generating technology of this grade? And already under the sway of an enemy God, putting the seared realms and the actual Divine Seat at risk? It’s a wonder she hasn’t done it already. The space occupied by Earth is a firebreak waiting to happen.”
“She’d also be obligated to escalate the information,” Gabriel said, “and the Elevator probably could get the Brotherhood’s attention.”
“I’m actually more nervous about her finding out about this conversation than I am about Jalah finding out,” Greyblade admitted honestly. “Damoraks, as Gabriel was saying earlier, are sort of a pet hate of hers. Any data-searches or discussion of them would raise flags.”
“We are quite safe from the Elevator’s eyes here,” the Drake said. “This is Osrai’s domain.”
“Alright,” Greyblade said, “that’s going to have to be good enough. I might have a strategy.”
Gabriel and the Drake looked surprised.
“Even for you, that was fast,” Gabriel remarked.
“Okay, well the truth is, the Burning Knights have always had strategies in place for acting in a support capacity during Divine conflict,” Greyblade admitted. “Most of that is just taking out as many high-ranking mortal combatants as possible, but since we’re in this alone, and talking about the Category 9’s God-Eaters made me think about it…”
“Let’s hear what you’ve got,” Gabriel said, pouring himself a glass of the newly-opened wine.
What Greyblade had, aside from millennia of Burning Knight combat porn about leading glorious charges against the Henchthings of Nnal and putting the dark Pantheon to the sword, was a file he’d assembled from data in the Thalaar Institute archives. About the methods the Destarion had employed to use the then-Lost Disciples as weapons.
Nobody was quite sure how she’d done it, but the Godfang had tapped into the three Firstmades in their oblivious human guises. Following the link Stormburg had forged in his brief interception and interview with the Second Disciple, she had sent the Pinian force skipping across the rolled-up planet Earth like a psychic sniper drone. Human leaders, the rich and the greedy and the powerful, had dropped like flies in a mass-murder that came to be known as the Atonement.
What few people knew was that these deaths were … possessions, of a sort. Firstmades, as eternal spirits that simply wore flesh like clothes, were adept at travelling in noncorporeal form, and inhabiting the bodies of lesser beings. They generally didn’t do it, because it wasn’t nice … but they could.
And under the Destarion’s guidance, perhaps even under her control, they did. Certainly, in their astral forms between human-fleshed incarnations, they had the perspective of ages and access to a full suite of memories for which a human brain lacked the capacity, and so they saw the need for what the Elevator was proposing. Perhaps between lives, the Firstmades and the Godfang approached one another on some psychological level, and had even agreed on this drastic course of action.
Each forcibly possessed victim was occupied for a brief time by the lost Firstmade consciousness, shunting aside the occupying mind long enough to offer a brief apology and shut down autonomic systems, putting the guilty party into a coma that deepened to death within a few weeks. The power of a possessing mind to dominate and then demolish a nervous system was quite terrifying.
She hadn’t repeated the performance, and the Pinians hadn’t made an issue of it once they’d returned to their full selves. They’d refused to set foot aboard the horrible old relic, but Greyblade could hardly blame them for that. Still, it had shown him the Destarion was capable of dealing with ancient and powerful forces like the Firstmades, even though the circumstances had been exceptional and the Pinians not exactly fully realised. Whether or not she’d forced it on them, the Destarion had orchestrated it. At a distance. While in hibernation.
And they’d known she was capable of things like that already, because of the connection Stormburg had theorised, then uncovered, then utilised when he brought the Second Disciple’s consciousness – or some between-incarnations echo of it, Greyblade was resigned to never knowing how it really worked – through the veil for a chat. The Elevator had facilitated it.
The dialogue that had taken place with the Second Disciple’s shade was a matter of record, albeit highly classified. And it was this achievement that Stormburg’s team had been able to use, not only to direct the Lost Disciples back into a semblance of awareness and power, but also to patch together enough external support to keep the human race alive, keep Earth from becoming a third seared realm, and – amidst those successes – allow the Destarion to wield the Pinian souls like a sociocultural scalpel.
The lone Flesh-Eater Stormburg had been living in, with her patched-together little setup, had been unable to contain even a consenting soul – and a near-mortal at that, the soul of a Disciple rather than a God – for more than a few days. The soul had then slipped away into unreality along with the rest of its passed incarnations, but its purpose was served. And the system, complicated enormously by the veil and by the necessity of catching the Disciple as it passed from one life to the next, was established.
But none of that really mattered – not yet. Because when you went to war against a God, you had to make it about something else.
Until it wasn’t.
Greyblade looked back and forth between the Dragon and the Archangel. “The Category 9 Convoy Defence Platform’s secondary God-Eater,” he said, “doesn’t use exotic Divine-analogous radiant reaction mass the way the primary one does,” he explained. “It’s actually a relatively simple variant – if you’ll pardon the pun – of superluminal field technology.”
“I’m willing to grant limited absolution for the pun – which was weak at best, by the way,” Gabriel said, “as long as you stop lovingly describing weapons specs and explain shit to us poor innocent civilians.”
“Sorry, just a little bit more loving description. The secondary God-Eater,” Greyblade continued, “operates by surrounding its target in a relative field, then spreading it across a wide area at ten thousand times the speed of light. A flawed relative field, essentially. It’s actually called ‘dirty field generation’. It either dissipates the target harmlessly as dissociated atoms, or turns it into a superluminal projectile to take out other targets.”
“As hilarious as the mental image of firing Karl the Bloody-Handed out of a cannon might be, I’m not sure it’s a winner,” Gabriel noted.
“That’s because we’re not going to do it to Karl,” Greyblade said. “We’re going to do it to Earth.”
JUICE
“I thought the idea was to prevent the Elevator from harmlessly dissipating Earth across a wide area,” the Drake said, “but I assume you have more.”
“Yes,” Greyblade replied. “I’m not suggesting a standard God-Eater attack. I’m suggesting we actually surround this world in a clean relative field and actually take it somewhere. Not far, just … out of the way.”
“I don’t suppose I need to tell you Earth is about six hundred million square kilometres of bad attitude,” Gabriel said. “And that’s just the surface.”
“That would require a tremendous amount of power,” the Drake added.
“Just for the weapon version it would take a heap of power,” Gabriel clarified. “The Elevator could carve up a flatworld that way, but there’s a reason she has more efficient instruments of megademolition. And to actually move Earth, all in one piece…”
“The relocation of Earth is a diversion,” Greyblade said. “It deals with the danger posed by the soul waste and gives the humans an alternative to isolating themselves using a device that could destroy this world and everything around it,” he paused. “If such a device even exists,” he was forced to add.
“That’s a Hell of a diversion,” Gabriel said. “Even if they go for it, how does it help us? And what’s it diverting everyone from?”
“Well, the relocation setup provides the perfect cover for the end game against Karl,” Greyblade said. “A lot of that will utilise the same system, but it’s going to take some more study. I don’t know enough about the sinkholes, or any of it yet,” he mused for a moment, rolling through datastreams. “The problem will be getting the support we need,” he said.
“Oh, that’ll be the problem, will it?” Gabriel said.
“If the alien quarter is really as isolated and untrusted as it seems…”
“We’re unlikely to get mass government support for a proposal to fly Earth’s carcass out of harm’s way at superluminal speed,” Gabriel said, “even if we had a relative field generator capable of it.”
“We have one,” Greyblade said.
The Drake shifted in her seat. “We can’t get the Destarion to do this,” she said. “Even if she had the power, she’d figure out what was going on as soon as we outlined the plan to her, and we would be back at square one.”
“Only briefly, though,” Gabriel added, “because she’d blow up square one about three seconds later, for having a Damorak God in it.”
“That’s true,” Greyblade acknowledged. “Anyway, we need her for the next phase.”
“How many phases are there?” Gabriel demanded.
“About as many as you’d expect,” Greyblade replied, “considering that we’re trying to remove a Divine cancer from the centre of a Firstmade dominion.”
Gabriel sighed. “Come on, then.”
“The power grid and the soul fallout network,” Greyblade said. “It should be possible to use them to feed a relative drive generator. Especially with Karl here. We can intercept Him, capture Him the way Stormburg of the Áea captured the Second Disciple’s shade. The energy channels out through the power grid and into the sinkholes. The excess from that, we vent out of the old converters, but we’re a long way off yet. Most of the power goes into the relative field for the few seconds we’ll need to jump,” he hesitated, still absorbing data. “We’ll probably need to take down the Interdict’s field suppressor ships.”
“That’s not the most important problem right now,” Gabriel snapped. “Even if we succeed in doing all that crap you just said about intercepting and capturing Karl the Bloody-Handed, and moving the entire Earth, how is that any different to activating the veil and vanishing the damn place?”
“I objected to that approach because … look, even if it didn’t do any damage to the overall system the first time around, you know better than anyone that Earth was practically dead by the time the veil lifted. And the seared realms were dead,” Greyblade
said. “And even if it goes that well this time around, and the disappearance of Earth doesn’t cause Heaven to fall and everything inside the veil to ultimately suffocate … the veil was practically impermeable. That means no more travel – not even as laughable as the travel that is currently possible through the Interdict. With the relative jump, we will control the rearrangement. It–”
“Excuse me,” the Drake said. “I have never even been in a superluminal vessel, but I do know some basic facts. What you are proposing is accelerating to relative speed in proximity to a world – indeed, from in between two worlds – something which even I have learned is very dangerous to the vessel in question. Does it make a difference if the vessel is as large as Earth, or the worlds some distance from one another?”
“I’m pretty sure Earth is a safe distance from Heaven and Hell,” Greyblade said cautiously. “The size of the field shouldn’t make a difference.”
“I thought there was a rule about vessel sizes,” Gabriel said, “like a big ship can take off near a small ship and only do minor damage to their engines, but a small ship taking off near a big one would get totally…” he shook his head. “I’m no good at this,” he growled and rustled his dusty old wings demonstratively. “I’m not a spaceship kind of guy.”
“We should contact your–” the Drake began.
“Does it really matter?” Gabriel interrupted brusquely. He turned to Greyblade, who angled his helmet and looked as politely interested as his closed visor would allow. “I’m sure you’ve flown plenty of big unwieldy ships too hastily out of places before,” the Archangel said.
“Nothing the size of a flatworld,” Greyblade admitted. “There’s big distances involved, but there’s also big fields involved. Or one big field,” he spread his hands, then set them on the table with a clank. “And a hundred-and-fifty-kilometre-across spiral staircase stuck through the middle.”
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