Colossal Colossal Pete loped up. The Ogres were enjoying this opportunity to get out without the uncomfortable freezer suits. And the added surrealism value of having Ogre Clerkangels really couldn’t be understated.
“Do you want the warm thing again?” Pete asked. He lifted the warm thing helpfully, hanging it from two forearm-thick fingers.
Ludi shrugged. There was no point arguing, because it would only confuse them. “Sure,” she said, leaned back and lifted her arms. “Thanks, Pete.”
Pete laid the warm thing, which was actually a decent-sized slab of grey stone with a bent metal bar stuck into it, carefully across Ludi’s thighs. It settled there, not quite heavy enough to cut off circulation and certainly not warm. The Ogres had found it on the first stair they’d landed on, and for some reason had gotten it into their heads that it was warm. Maybe, to their big chilly fingers and at the sunny location in which they’d found it, it had been warm. Now, however, they’d been carrying it through freezing near-vacuum above Earth’s atmoplane for a couple of weeks, and it might as well be ice.
Still, she let the heavy block sit on her legs, and shivered while she waited for the others to come back. Or the story to wake up in her head. Or something.
The communities here were strange. Slightly hostile, although you could only be so hostile when there were Ogres snuffling around your house. Definitely self-reliant. And they had no intention of moving downstairs.
Downstairs. The Milkies weren’t a religious denomination – almost fiercely the opposite, in fact – but for some reason they had built their communities on the stairs between Earth and Heaven rather than between Earth and Hell. Sheer coincidence, or a deep-seated cultural aversion to the world below, Ludi wasn’t sure. Lucifer said the Hellbound Stairs were no place for imbeciles, and that was probably true. There weren’t many communities on the Eden Road between Earth and Hell, and fewer communities of humans.
The relocation of the Hellbound Stair population was a logistical issue, but not an ideological one. But they all needed to be moved. They all needed to be warned. Warned about the event that was to come. Even though they had no idea what the event was going to be. If Earth was going to vanish, and the Eden Road severed…
It all depended on where the relative field was going to cut across. If a relative field was going to cut across. If that was even the plan, at this early and nebulous stage of things. The problem, as far as Ludi understood it, was that a relative field didn’t generally cut through anything. It was a field, a bubble, you generated all the way around something and then you sent the whole lot into soft-space. It didn’t work if something was sticking out of it. When you started forming that bubble too close to things, it got dangerous long before you got close enough to cut them.
But Ludi wasn’t a relative field technician.
Frogsalt and Kozura emerged from the nearby town hall and walked back towards the group. Ludi tried to shift the warm thing, and grunted uncomfortably. It was too heavy to lift.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“They are not particularly receptive,” Kozura said. “The Milky Way Cultists never have been, really, with Angels. They consider us emblematic of the entire flatworld problem,” he paused for a second, frowning in thought. “Also, they consider flatworlds to be a problem,” he concluded.
“But they listened?”
“They stopped talking until we had stopped talking,” Kozura replied. “Sometimes that is the best you can hope for, with humans.”
“I told them a joke,” Frogsalt said.
“Mehapmiamariel told them a joke,” Kozura said wearily. Ludi looked at Frogsalt invitingly.
“What’s the difference between reality and unreality?” Frogsalt smiled and stepped up to Ludi. She lifted the warm thing off her lap one-handed. “About five hundred thousand megatons per cubic femtometre per picosecond.”
“I don’t get it,” Ludi admitted.
“It’s a power differential statement,” Frogsalt said, and put her free hand on her hip. “Galatine would have laughed.”
“Galatine had not slept in six days when we left,” Kozura noted. “He would have laughed at the Ogres’ warm thing.”
“To be fair, the Ogres’ warm thing is objectively funny,” Frogsalt replied, hefting the slab.
“We have left some seeds,” Kozura said. “When we know more about what is to come, we will be able to direct the vines to grow as we will.”
“Kozura’s got a meditation garden,” Frogsalt confided. “He likes to make metaphors about it because it’s way easier to predict what a flutterflower patch will do than a group of humans.”
“They both flap around rather a lot when you pour water on them,” Kozura disagreed, in a rare display of humour.
Frogsalt conceded this with a grin. “Anyway,” she went on in a businesslike fashion, “that wasn’t all I wanted to do here,” she tossed the slab back to Pete. “Come on.”
She led them out past the cluster of insulated houses and across the bare grey steprock towards the wall that was the hub.
This community was unusual for settlements at this elevation, in that it didn’t need environmental bubbles to hold air. A constant chilly breeze emitted from a gaping cave mouth in the hub and played across the community before dissipating towards the mid-point of the step. The hub, the massive hollow pedestal that ran up the centre of the Eden Road, had a gap here that allowed air to seep out into this area. The sheer architecture of it was enough to baffle and frighten Ludi, but it was also how they’d managed to access the step without dealing too much with the Interdict authorities.
They hadn’t arrived through this gap, however, but a larger and more official one a few steps down. This gap was more like a natural cave, albeit still monolithically squared-off like most Eden Road geology.
Frogsalt led them into the cavern, and through a tunnel dimly lit with warning phosphorescents in yellow and red.
“This tunnel was made during one of the Darking wars,” she said, “while Hell and Earth were still under construction. It’s supposed to have been sealed up, but there were other routes through to the superstructure. Here,” she led them up a crudely-carved flight of stairs. “Look.”
Ludi dutifully studied the wall where the little Angel was pointing. The grey rock of the staircase was broken by a horizontal seam of something dark and gleaming like tarnished silver. As she looked at it, Ludi felt a stirring at the base of her skull. The story-telling lizard uncurling and giving a languid blink.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“It is Imperium,” Kozura said. “A metallic superelement of great rarity and value. So hard, it is said that it can only be cut and shaped by the energy a God is capable of bringing to bear. A powerful God. The living guns could not make a scratch. If they could, the humans most likely would have tried to cut the Eden Road before now – and we would have been forced to destroy them altogether.”
“I’ve never heard of Imperium before,” Ludi said.
“It does not naturally occur in the Void Dimension,” Kozura replied.
“Or many others in the ten million, for that matter,” Frogsalt added. “They make the prison cell bars for Class Three criminals and higher out of Imperium, or so it’s said. Or they did, in bygone days.”
“But it’s naturally occurring here?” Ludi asked, then felt suddenly foolish. “No, because this is a constructed geological feature,” she corrected herself. “Nothing is naturally occurring here.”
“The whole Four Realms are an artificial construct,” Kozura agreed. “And the Eden Road’s central hub-pedestal – almost ninety-nine percent of it – is made of pure Imperium.”
“The pedestal is a hollow tube,” Frogsalt said, “made of hundreds of rings of Imperium, sheathed in native rock. It doesn’t just connect the Four Realms – it holds them up. Four enormous plates, balanced on a single finger sticking up through the middle of them. We believe there are buttresses on the undersides of each world, but the
y’re not Imperium. Just some other super-strong material. But the Imperium in the hub bears the weight of all four.”
“This is the Titan upon which God built our worlds,” Kozura intoned.
“Alright,” Ludi said, “very nice. And safe to assume it can’t be severed. Even by half of it being enveloped in a relative field and pinged off somewhere.”
“Enclosing Earth and the seared realms in the veil wasn’t enough to break the Imperium,” Frogsalt said. “The stair just poked right down into the gulf, then out the other side, and went on holding Heaven aloft despite not even existing in between. If it underwent a state-change inside the veil, that was Limbo’s doing. And we don’t have Him to help us this time.”
“Gabe never mentioned seeing a big Imperium pedestal sticking through the solar system,” Ludi noted. “But if we can’t cut it–”
Frogsalt shook her head, then pointed again. “Right,” she said, “but as you can see, there are some parts where it’s native rock almost all the way through. The hub is made of rings, resting on one another all the way down to the Rooftop. Any ‘cutting’ we want to do will need to be through as much normal rock as possible, and then between the rings.”
“That sounds just stupendously difficult,” Ludi said.
“Which is why humans haven’t done it before now,” Frogsalt reiterated by way of agreement.
“Considering the difficulty of the rest of the mission, as sold to us by the Archangel Gabriel,” Kozura said, “what you are currently contemplating may represent the easiest part of the whole plan.”
“The biggest problem is what happens if we manage to wrap a relative field around Earth and the near-Earth stairs, cut through the rock and between the Imperium with it, and whisk Earth away like a tablecloth from under a bunch of plates and glasses,” Frogsalt added, gesturing illustratively with her hands. “Galatine said that the Godfangs’ weaponised relative field generation tech might be enough to deal with the how. As to the what next, we’re basically left with Magna’s prophecy.”
“Three sisters standing between Heaven and Hell,” Ludi said. “Maybe it’s completely literal. Replace the hub with three Godfangs. Are their hulls strong enough to bear the weight of Heaven?”
“Category 9 Convoy Defence Platforms were not built of Imperium,” Kozura said, “possibly because God had used the Brotherhood’s entire supply building a forty-five-thousand-kilometre-tall spiral staircase.”
Ludi was a little taken aback at this incongruous attitude from an Angel, but reminded herself that the Archangelic court had long been a sort of near-mortal counterweight to the Brotherhood’s absolute theocratic reign. Not a very effective one, but still.
“Heaven would crush the Godfangs like eggs,” Frogsalt agreed. “They could probably destroy Heaven easily enough, but hold it up? Not with the strength of their hulls alone. Plus, they’re only about a hundred kilometres tall each. Even stacked end to end, that’s barely enough space between Heaven and Hell to allow for some of Heaven’s larger stalactites. Plus, Lucifer just got the Pandaemonium Spire back the way she likes it.”
“Whatever occurs when Earth is … removed,” Kozura said, “we need to take structural steps to hold up Heaven. A controlled felling, rather than a tree falling in a storm.”
“He’s really not going to be happy until he gets to retire and garden full-time,” Frogsalt twinkled.
“I will also attend the stand-up comedy routines with which you intend to fill your retirement,” Kozura said, “time permitting.”
“The air’s dry enough up here without you two getting in a snark-off,” Ludi said. The shifting coils of the story had gone dormant once again, leaving her almost sexually frustrated. “So the upshot of this is, we need to hope the Godfangs can, one,” she raised a gloved thumb, “generate a relative field capable of cutting rock and worming between Imperium plates, and two,” she added a finger, “create a reinforcement field capable of holding up a flatworld.”
“Pretty much,” Frogsalt said.
No, the lizard said between her ears. Close, but that’s not it. The Godfangs might show Galatine how to make the field work, but they’re not going to be generating it. Six will do battle. Galatine’s plan with the guns, somehow, is what’s going to provide the power for the field. And, in the death of the guns, expose the open door to Karl the Bloody-Handed. That’s not quite right either, the lizard whispered as it closed its eyes again, but it’s close.
Thank you, she sighed to herself.
“Paraludi?” Kozura leaned in. “Are you well?”
“You want warm thing again?” Pete rumbled in the depths of the passage.
“I’m alright. I guess we’re not going to find out about any of the Godfangs’ capabilities until we get them back here,” Ludi summarised, “which we can’t accelerate by freezing to death. So unless you have come up with a better way to convince the Milkies to move, can we please go back downstairs?”
THE FLASH-IN-THE-PANTHEON
It had proven impossible to properly verify his latest round of simulations without a God to test them on. A God to feed whole into a power network, then vent harmlessly out through the fountains, leaving nothing behind. Killing It.
It wasn’t as if he needed to run a test, and then spend weeks and months tinkering and upgrading the design. If that happened, they were doomed. It was really more along the lines of an ignition run, a way of initiating the system. If he couldn’t get a God – a really titchy one – to submit to a small-scale test just prior to kick-off, he was never going to take down a big one like Karl the Bloody-Handed, against His will.
That was when Osrai gave him the idea to make one of his own.
Osrai, in a certain sense, was already closer to an extremely localised God than it was to being a human. Not in terms of energy and unreality-profile, but in its presence, its influence, its knowledge … it checked a lot of the boxes. Unfortunately, none of the boxes Galatine needed checked were among them, and he wouldn’t want Osrai erased anyway. The very idea was enough to bring him out in a cold sweat, in fact. But the way Osrai had used a little bit of itself to help him create the nolovirus had left him thinking about it.
Of course, even attempting to make a God would bring the Vultures down, even in Snowhome. That wasn’t what he had in mind. What they were doing was dangerous, and it was certainly against a lot of laws, but he didn’t think it was against the big ones.
What he’d ended up with was a sort of simulation, like the little buttons he’d made to test the sealing factors on the power network. A God on paper. An instantaneous deity, that existed only for the briefest possible theoretical time, for testing purposes. A … flash-in-the-Pantheon, if you like.
He rather liked that image, but he was still stuck on how he was supposed to implement it. So far, even a human-soul-on-paper was proving too much of a load on the simulated network he was using.
And he was still unable to avoid a certain superstitious anxiety about what they were doing. How was he supposed to keep the Gods from finding out they were working on a way to capture and murder one of Their ilk? Surely They knew about it all already. Weren’t Gods supposed to be omniscient?
His more rational, objective side – a side he’d rather hoped would be larger and louder by this late stage in the game – attempted to reassure him. Only the Infinites were truly omniscient, and They didn’t care about Gods much more than They cared about mortals. Mortals and Gods were pretty much the same when you looked at them from that high up. And as for the Gods Themselves figuring it out, They were too busy shouting at each other to care what a clever little ape like Galatine Gazmouth was up to. And They would continue to be too busy, until it was too late. Hopefully.
But testing the system on a God … that would get Their attention. Wouldn’t it? It might even precipitate things, meaning that if the test worked, he would need to be ready with the main event more or less immediately. And if the test didn’t work, he would have no time to fix whatever had gone wrong.
And he was no closer to solving the issue of the network seals. No matter how he aligned them, no matter how complex he made them, the sheer energy that would exist in the network would blow the seals into oblivion long before the fountains could vent it off.
He wasn’t entirely at an impasse there. He was beginning to see that the seals he had envisioned were entirely wrong. Even if he could make a couple of trillion galaxy-sized seals, it wouldn’t work. Not for long. It required a shift in the paradigm in which he was conceptualising the problem. And he was beginning to suspect what form that paradigm-shift might take, and he didn’t want to think about it.
And even when that was solved, it would still leave a whole secondary layer of conscious energy that would need to go somewhere. If a God’s soul was even remotely like a human’s. The gun, after all, produced the fire and the filth. The energy and the scream. A God, with any luck, would be at least similar. But who knew?
Which was why he needed to make one for testing purposes.
He wondered what the Angels would have to say about it if he told them he was going to try to make a God so he could practice killing It.
“We’re ready,” Lucifer, broad and powerful and almost intoxicatingly wild, strode into his cluttered workshop without knocking. It was as if thinking about them had summoned her – although he had to admit that if that worked, Lucifer most likely wouldn’t get much done around the place on account of having to continually pop into his room and shout at him in Latin.
“Yes,” he blurted. He’d almost reached the point where Ogres, Angels, and even Gabriel himself couldn’t break his concentration or distract him from a job before he was done. But Lucifer managed to make him drop everything and jump to his feet, every single time. He tapped his screens and foldered the data on his God-sim for the time being, and rose in his usual little avalanche of components and paper-scraps. “Yes. Ready.”
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