“Good,” Lucifer nodded. “Follow.”
The TrollCagers’ Latin had improved dramatically in the past year, but humans and Archangel still talked past one another more often than not unless they used very simple phrases. It helped, Galatine had found, that Lucifer didn’t seem to care as long as you could understand and obey basic instructions. And she almost certainly understood modern Earthly languages, even if she refused to acknowledge them when spoken in her presence.
“Yes,” he stammered, and followed as the Archangel turned and swept from the room with a moderately disastrous swing of her vast black wings across his cluttered desk and bedside shelves.
They descended into the warehouse proper, where Lucifer had apparently cleared some space by the simple expedient of pushing two of the massive shelves at an angle towards the wall and up against a stack of packing crates. She’d then marked out a wide trio of concentric circles on the floor – black for the metre-across circle in the centre, red for the ten-metre-diameter second circle, and yellow for the largest. The yellow circle appeared to be about twenty-five or thirty metres across, but some of it was missing on account of the warehouse wall intersecting one arc.
“If experiment fails,” he was reasonably sure Lucifer said, “the yellow line, dangerous, inside. The red line, death,” she looked around. “If experiment fails big, the marching war of light matter may take half of TrollCage into nothing.”
“Maybe I should stand in the red and put myself out of my misery,” Galatine muttered, half to himself. “When Ludi and Magna get back and see these shelves, let alone half the warehouse taken to nothing by the marching war of whatever…” Lucifer was ignoring him. “I stand in red,” he switched back to Latin, “save time.”
“You do not get that easy free of this,” Lucifer said stoutly.
“What is black?” he pointed. “Unmake? Hole to Purgatory?”
Lucifer grinned. “If experiment works,” she said, “this is good area. It means we target okay. If experiment works, and is outside this – then experiment worked but needs to work better.”
Galatine nodded. “Good.”
Lucifer raised a small communicator – she’d refused to explain how she was getting comms through the Interdict, and Galatine supposed if you had to ask, you probably weren’t authorised to know – to her lips and barked, “Krät.”
Galatine had never learned any of the languages of Hell, but he assumed this meant ready, because a moment later there was an amusingly Angelic pop of displaced air and a small assemblage of metal components appeared half-in and half-out of the black circle.
“Hey,” Galatine grinned and pointed. “Success.”
Lucifer grunted. “I give to techs a new anus,” she said. “Target is off.”
“But no marching war of light matter,” Galatine said, and it dawned on him. Luminal matter stream instability, he thought. Sounds better in Latin. Most things do. “The material intact,” he noted. “You can take from Good Intentions and put on Earth. Within very small area. Accurate.”
“Within quite accurate,” Lucifer disagreed with a scowl, and crossed to the sample. It wasn’t a fountain – they hadn’t gone into full production yet – but it was a very close approximation in composition and internal structure, so they could test how well the device survived the light-speed transfer. It wasn’t just getting the object from A to B without turning it into a rail-gun round. It was also making sure it was all there when it arrived at B, and every molecule was still in its correct place. Lucifer picked up the sample, carried it back across to Galatine, and put it on the recently-realigned shelf next to him. Then she raised the communicator again. “Krät-wah.”
There was another pop, and a second sample appeared. This time it was inside the black circle. She gave a nominally-satisfied grunt.
Galatine looked thoughtfully at the object as Lucifer went over to it, picked it up and turned it over in her hands, examining it. He thought about the data Ludi had sent them from the Eden Road a while ago.
“How many of those have you?” he asked. “The – the light march jump attachings.”
Lucifer looked up, heavy eyebrows raised. “More than you need,” she replied.
He stood and looked at the sample in Lucifer’s strong hands, and at the black circle on the floor. He turned to look at the one she’d left on the shelf next to him, its little jump-transponder even now denaturising and flaking off the side of the device as it was intended to do. It kept the light-speed signal strong through delivery, and then dissolved so the customer didn’t need to worry about disposing of excess parts – or, in this case, so the source of the luminal transmission could not be traced. Not that, if this whole thing worked the way it was supposed to, anyone would care about the source anyway.
Images of massive Imperium rings flitted through his head like a geological-scale hoop-toss.
“How many more?” he asked her.
OF FOUNTAINS AND SEALS
As the weeks and months crawled by, Galatine began to feel like he was the only fixed point in Ogrehome. He remained, while Magna and Ludi and the Angels and even the Ogres came and went. He remained, and worked on his project. He chipped away at the mountain, while his friends ran back and forth carrying rocks.
He’d made progress, if you tweaked the definition of ‘progress’ to such a point where ‘eliminating the impossible and readjusting the goal accordingly’ qualified as progress. The Earth’s soul-pollution problem didn’t really seem to have a solution. Sooner or later the contaminated, screaming vitality from the guns was going to soak through the entire flatworld and leave it as a toxic slab of rotting stone. And the less said about what was living on the world by that stage, the better.
He could, however, shore up the dump sites and use his proposed changes to the power network to slow the degeneration to a near-standstill. And once the guns were gone, technically, the problem would at least stop getting worse. Because at the moment, the governments of the world seemed to have no interest in doing anything but increasing the rate at which they were thundering towards poisonous oblivion, guns blazing all the way.
So yes. If you moved the goalposts a bit, you could say that achieving one of the main aims of the project would also take care of another.
The main problem was the sheer guesswork of it all.
He’d never really understood the living guns, or the process of creating them from the souls of human victims. And that was a problem, because he was the Gunsmith. If he didn’t understand it, then nobody did – or ever would. He’d just made them, and then been horrified at how they’d worked.
And if he didn’t understand the guns, to say he didn’t understand the fountains and the power network was a hilarious, horrifying understatement.
“We didn’t understand the guns, and we don’t understand this,” he said moodily. “This is just the best I can do with forces I don’t understand, same as then. That’s what scientists do. Make our best guesses at things, test them, and see what happens. We usually try to keep those guesses and forces small. Safer that way. But there’s no safe way to do this.”
Gabriel had returned to TrollCage Storage from don’t-ask-where, and for the past few days had been slouching around the warehouse, drinking coffee and keeping Galatine company through his brief stretches of agonising uncertainty between feverish iteration and testing, and hours of deep, blessed unconsciousness. The crusty old Archangel was no help whatsoever with the complexities of it all, but he was excellent at the big-picture stuff.
“At some point, Gaz,” Gabriel said, “I think you left ‘scientist’ behind. You’re in ‘mad inventor’ now, and have been for long enough to have gotten comfortable.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Gabriel acknowledged with a little coffee-mug salute. “Look, if someone’s going to mad-inventor us out of this mess, I’d rather it was a guy who knows what’s in all the jars and what all the switches do. And Jalah knows, normal science isn’t going t
o do the trick. Like it or not, you’re the best one for this job.”
“Because I made the guns,” Galatine said.
“Because you made the guns,” Gabriel agreed placidly. That was another benefit of looking at the big picture with the Archangel. He had very little sugar-coating left in him. “Here’s a little question I’ve been asking myself,” he went on, “and I’m half-afraid to ask you because at best, you’ll probably have some terrible answer I don’t like. At worst, you won’t have actually thought about it at all.”
“Go ahead,” Galatine said. “Always happy to hear about things I may not have thought of, this late in the game.”
“We drive Earth out of the Four Realms,” Gabriel said, shuffling his hands horizontally to illustrate. “Heaven – under the gravitational pull of Castle Void – drops and hopefully lands staircase to staircase with the stump left above Hell. All held up, theoretically, by the Eden Road and the Rooftop.”
“And hopefully without worldquakes that will level every building left in the Three Realms,” Galatine added. “I think I know what your question is, though.”
“What’s Earth standing on?” Gabriel said.
Galatine nodded. “Well, the good news is I have actually thought of that,” he said.
“Is there bad news?” Gabriel asked.
“In this project?” Galatine chuckled humourlessly. “Osrai and I have run a bunch of simulations. In the conceptual top half of the Void Dimension, we have stellar gulf and gravity is provided almost solely by the objects with mass in there. In the bottom half, Castle space, we have an approximately similar gulf and gravity is provided by the objects with mass in there. That, for a truly obnoxious volume of space, is Castle Void itself. The main difference in physical law is that in Castle space, something as big as Castle Void can exist without collapsing into a black hole the size of a half-million galaxies.”
“With you so far,” Gabriel said.
“And in between those two Dimensional states,” Galatine went on, “we have the Face of the Deep. The only place in the Void where flatworlds like these can work. Castle Void’s gravitational pull is responsible for giving the Four Realms their structure, if you like, but it is also responsible for pulling the worlds down and smashing them to pieces if the Eden Road fails.”
“Which brings us to Earth,” Gabriel said.
“Which brings us to Earth,” Galatine agreed. “Earth will be placed at the upper edge of the Face, at a so-called hangpoint where it is neither pulled away towards Cursèd’s Playground, or down towards the Rooftop.”
“So anybody still living here after the jump will have to go without gravity?” Gabriel asked.
Galatine shook his head. “The Earth is still a bloody big slab of rock and magma and water,” he said. “It will have a certain amount of gravity.”
“On the top and the bottom,” Gabriel said with a grin.
“The underside of Earth has gravity already,” Galatine pointed out, “even if it’s not really measurable because of the pull of Castle Void. Away from that influence, I imagine it will be stronger, yes. In time, it might even become habitable.”
“It’s still not going to be Centre-normal gravity,” Gabriel predicted.
Galatine shook his head. “The rest can be provided by the power network, though,” he said. “The same conduits and release points that we’ve used for energy since before the unFlutter, and that we’ll be using to generate the relative field, can also be used to bump up the local mass in some of the more exotic node-junctions. I don’t remember the name of the compound, but it’s been part of the megastructure since – presumably – Castle Void was a lot smaller and didn’t…” he smiled, “suck quite so much.”
“Nice one,” Gabriel grunted. “So you’re not just turning Earth into a spaceship, you’re also going to give it artificial gravity.”
“The funny thing is, Earth-as-spaceship is one of the most common and unifying tenets of Milky Way Cultist faith,” Galatine remarked. “Mind you, they believe Earth is a ball and the sun is a million or so kilometres across, instead of a couple of hundred metres. But the same basic principle applies.”
“Hm,” Gabriel said moodily. “You made your paper God yet?”
“Oh,” Galatine missed a beat at the unexpected shift of topic. “You know about that, do you?”
“I know about a lot of things,” Gabriel replied. “Like your fantastic schoolboy crush on Lucifer. I mean really, man. Points for aiming … okay, ‘aiming high’ might not be the best phrasing…”
There was little point in attempting to lie to a being so abiding and ancient. Galatine might as well have the truth written on his forehead. “I can’t help it,” he said simply, “and I won’t offend her by bringing it out in the open or anything. It’s just difficult not to admire someone who is doing so much to help us. And doing it so well,” he leaned forward, unable to keep the excitement from his voice even now. “Every challenge in production, every problem in our development or logistics chains, she makes it all go away. All the materials we need, all the tech. The light-speed distribution–”
“I know, I know,” Gabriel chuckled. “And look, for what it’s worth, she’s evidently impressed with your efficiency and inventiveness. And that’s saying a lot, considering the shit your inventiveness has come up with and the fact that a huge amount of this work is intended purely to clean up after it,” Galatine must have looked comically downcast at this, because the Archangel chuckled again. “If she wasn’t impressed with you, she wouldn’t be helping so much. Just … don’t lose sight of the fact that if Earth vanishes, Hell – and its administrator – gets a promotion the likes of which the Pinian dominion has never seen. In fact as far as I know, it might even stop being Hell altogether.”
“All about the real estate, hm?” Galatine said with a sad smile.
“Not all about it,” Gabriel said. “Lucifer cares about humanity. Always has. If she’d been stuck on Earth during the Flutter, and I’d been stuck on Venus, things might have turned out a whole lot differently,” he scratched his ear reflectively. “So, you were telling me about your progress with the paper God.”
Galatine shook his head. “No progress yet,” he said. “Turns out it wasn’t as easy as it seemed on … well, on paper.”
“Imagine that.”
“Still not impossible,” Galatine insisted, “but…” he hesitated. He’d debated whether or not to mention this to anyone, just in case it turned out the whole thing had been some kind of sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination. “It was actually Blacknettle who gave me the idea.”
“Blacknettle?” Gabriel said sharply. “She spoke to you?”
“Well, it was more like she spoke to herself, while I was the only other person in the room,” Galatine admitted. “It was a little while ago – what with everyone coming and going to the stairs, I don’t really remember–”
“But she talked about Gods?” Gabriel was still looking more alert than Galatine would have expected.
Galatine shook his head. “About killing,” he said doubtfully. Now he came to say it out loud, it sounded ridiculous. “She said that all living things are – are open conduits between reality and unreality. Killing them closes the conduit, turns the stuff on this side into a dead body, a lot of little bacterial conduits, whatever. But a God is like … anything that is on this side is just a projection the God is using so we can see It and hear It, a hand It can use to manipulate the physical world.”
“Right…” Gabriel said warily.
“It didn’t make much sense to me,” Galatine admitted, “except it corroborated some of the old texts about the giela of Leviathan, the avatars Gods use to walk among us. The only way to kill one is to make the giela into everything there is.”
This wasn’t quite what the strange catatonic Angel had said. She’d murmured dreamily of drawing a soul into a physical vessel, of a pillar of burning ice, things he suspected she remembered from her time working with Stormburg and Bayn Taro
. She’d murmured that a God was less a conduit, and more an ocean. An ocean of ferocious and degenerate power, that would return to Its home in unreality as soon as you tried – the moment you had the temerity – to drain It into a framework of mere mortal physics.
Well, that was what his seals were for, wasn’t it?
“Blacknettle knew how to do that, did she?” Gabriel asked.
“Not that she told me,” Galatine replied. “I think she used up all of her words. But she did say one other thing that was interesting,” Gabriel looked up expectantly from his coffee. “She said that if we mere mortals are going to try to kill a God, we have to start by knowing exactly which God we’re after.”
“Just as well we do know,” Gabriel said.
“Yeah,” Galatine said cautiously. “But it made me think about the experiment I was considering, think about it in a different way.”
“Not much point doing a trial run for your paper God if it means the trap won’t work on the real thing.”
“Something like that. Of course, for a test run, and a God that theoretical, we’d be able to apply an adapter of sorts. Feed It through the system even though the system was intended for a different God entirely. It just … I remembered what Sir Greyblade said. About making it about something else. Until it isn’t.”
“Right,” Gabriel said, sounding a little more positive this time.
“The experiment might accelerate the timeline dramatically, so we’d want to be close to ready with everything else.”
“Full dress rehearsal rather than a preliminary script reading.”
“Something like that,” Galatine repeated, and eyed the Archangel. “Wouldn’t want to tip off Karl that we were practicing how to trap Him in a death-cage,” he added.
“Hm.”
“Hm,” Galatine echoed, feeling a sudden certainty and wondering if this was how his insighted friends felt when it happened. “Did you know from the start?” he asked.
“What?” Gabriel peered moodily back into his coffee. “That making a God to practice killing wouldn’t work? Can’t say I did – mostly because I had no idea it was even an option.”
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