by Alex Raizman
“Oh, I hear you Enki. I’m just not sure I follow your reasoning.”
Enki sneered. “You don’t have to understand my reasoning. I know why you’re here. You’ll get your wish, I’ve got no sympathy for the bitch. She’s enabling the end of the world. But to get that, you’re going to play by my rules, or you can go fly a kite made of go fuck yourself.”
Moloch and Bast's eyes met again, and Bast shook her head. You might be better than Enki, Moloch, but you’re still not the good option. Then again, I work with what I have.
"Well, at least it's a reason." Moloch said aloud. "But I wish to confirm we are still going ahead with your plan.”
Enki clutched his hands into fists again. Of course we are, you idiot. I’ve waited thousands of years for this. Do you think a setback is going to stop me? He took a deep breath. “Damn right we still are.” Enki shook his head. “We’ve got Týr’s nanoverse. I have shit to take care of. I need you two to distract the Eschaton for a bit. I can’t risk interruption. Think you could manage that?”
Bast stood up, sauntering over to the window with Moloch. She looked over the ruined city, and a smile crept across her face, inch by inch, until she was grinning a Cheshire grin. "I do.”
Enki grunted. “Finally, some efficiency. Care to share with the rest of the class?”
“No, Enki. I’d like to work with Moloch on this alone.” She saw Enki’s blood begin to rise and held up a hand to placate him before he could explode again. I want to do this without you screwing us over, she thought as she said, “I want to make up for my mistake, free you to work on other angles.”
The little hateful dots that were Enki's eyes lit up. "Too clever, Bast. I'll let you two do it, then."
“One thing, Enki,” Bast said before the brutish god could turn to leave. “I want my prize. Tell me where it is. You got outplayed by the Eschaton already once. I am not going to risk losing it because you got yourself killed.”
Enki laughed. “Tell you what, Bast? You finish this task, and I’ll tell you where your little toy is. That shouldn’t be a problem - if the Eschaton’s distracted, he can hardly bother me, now can he?”
Bast fumed. “Fine.”
With a grin, Enki turned and walked through the doorway that lead back to his nanoverse.
Moloch grinned. "Black void, he's a thick little jackass, isn't he?"
Bast laughed to hide the seething hatred she felt. "Yes. But I do have a plan. Not that I’m upset Enki left us alone to deal with things.”
"Oh?"
"Oh yes, Moloch. Ryan gave us his weakness earlier; it just took me a moment to figure out."
She cast her eyes over the ruined city of petrified corpses, and it took a bit for Moloch to follow her gaze. When he saw what she saw, he started to laugh that hacking laugh again as she nodded in confirmation.
There was a saying of the modern era. You can’t make an omelet without breaking any eggs. And when you were a god, sometimes the eggs you broke were massive. She’d tried to contain the fight before, but now...breaking eggs was the best option. Or really, the only option. You forced me into this, Eschaton.
Aloud, what she said was, "Like Enki, our Eschaton thinks himself a hero. Can you do it?"
Moloch’s laughter slowed to a diseased chuckle. "Oh, absolutely, my dear. It will be a pleasure. Just tell me...where should I raise hell?"
◆◆◆
There had been a battle on United States soil. Not a terrorist attack, not a foreign power. Men and women claiming to be gods had brought a monster into the United States and fought in an urban area. They’d somehow set of a WMD that had harnessed solar power into a concentrated strike. Casualties had been miraculously nonexistent, but with the kind of power these beings wielded, no one expected such miracles to endure. A response had to be issued.
Rear Admiral Dale Bridges was going to make sure it was.
He had not been prepared for this. No one had. No existing branch of military or law enforcement was equipped to handle this situation. The Navy was chosen because these beings could hop around the world as they wished, so a global response was needed, and because only Bridges had wanted the duty.
Cowards. That was his verdict on the lot of them. The fact was that whoever lead the response would be the one who was blamed if things went sideways. Given that they were dealing with an entirely new type of threat, no one had been willing to leap at the command.
And no one else had a plan. Bridges turned to face the group he had assembled. “Now, ladies and gentlemen. We do not have experience with this type of threat. We do not have plans for this type of threat. This requires outside the box thinking, and your respective fields mean that you are now experts in exactly what the military needs.” And to hell with anyone who thinks differently. “I want to thank you again for joining us – what do you have for me?”
The Rear Admiral took a seat as he stared at his assembled think tank. Representatives from the Air Force, the Army, DARPA, and the rest of alphabet soup were present. But that wasn’t who Bridges was talking to, and they weren’t the people he expected to have the answers.
The first group of consultants were the best mythologists the Navy could snatch up. Academics who knew more about the myths surrounding figures like Enki and Bast and Ishtar and Athena than anyone else on the planet, people who might know their myths better than the beings claiming to be gods. That had not attracted any controversy – he’d been praised for bringing them in.
Then there was the second group. Many of them hadn’t even bothered to dress up. They were not especially clean cut, they were not very disciplined, and many of them were in terrible physical shape. If they were new military enlistees, Bridges would despair. In this situation, however, the Rear Admiral was going to give them the same respect he gave the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because unlike the Joint Chiefs, they had the expertise he needed.
This group of people wrote comic books.
“The problem,” said Lazzario Littleton, who had been writing for one of the major comic companies for nigh on twenty years, “is that they’ve demonstrated an extremely wide powerset. We’re not talking energy controllers, we’re not talking paragons, we’re not talking bricks. The closest archetype in the genre is Reality Warpers, which,” and here he gave a small nod to the Mythologists, “makes sense given what they’re claiming to be, your admiralship.”
“And how, then, does one beat a Reality Warper?” Bridges liked that term better than gods. It fit more into reality, and it was not sacrilege. They’re demons, I’m sure of it, but there’s no need to argue the fine details.
“They’re some of the toughest villains we have,” Lazzario replied. “I mean, when a Reality Warper is in a story? It’s a full comic event, you know? Every story we write that year ties into it, and we use our entire cast of characters to take them down.”
“Sadly, we have a dearth of superheroes, Mr. Littleton. Up until recently, such things were believed to be impossible.”
Lazzario nodded. “Which is why you need to fight fire with fire. You need your own gods.”
Bridges frowned. “I thought we were going to be discussing a conventional response to this threat, Mr. Littleton.”
“That’s the problem, though!” Lazzario exclaimed. “Conventional doesn’t work here. That’s the thesis of pretty much all superhero fiction – normal responses don’t work against superhuman threats. We’re all suddenly cavemen armed with clubs trying to figure out how to take down a B-52. We’re not going to manage it because we can’t touch it.”
The Rear Admiral felt his frown deepen. I do not want to have to admit this was a waste of time. More importantly, I don’t want it to be a waste of time. We need creative thinking here, and when life starts to imitate fiction, then the fiction writers should be able to come up with the solution.
“He’s right, Rear Admiral, sir,” said Carmen Durden, a professor from Harvard. In contrast to the hefty Lazzario, she was built like a collection of sticks, with hair that p
oofed around her head and glasses that looked ready to fall off her nose. “The tales of mortals besting gods almost always involve one of three things – another god, trickery, or some kind of enchanted item. We don’t know if conventional weapons will even harm them, let alone kill them.”
And the academics are proving equally useless…just like military intelligence already has. Rear Admiral Bridges reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So you’re telling me you have nothing?”
Carmen nodded to Lazzario. “Well,” the man said, leaning forward. “We’re fully outside the realm of realistic here, but…”
“Out with it, man.” Dale Bridges didn’t mean to snap, but he couldn’t help it. He was used to people speaking and acting with the efficiency born of endless discipline.
“They bled all over the battlefield. In both the comics and the myths-” a glance at Carmen, who nodded, “-divine blood can have special properties. The scene’s been quarantined, right? Why not collect some of their blood and see what your research guys can make with it?”
“Ichor,” Carmen clarified, “divine blood was called Ichor by the Greeks, sir.“
Dale Bridges scratched his chin. It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard so far. “Don’t you mean make of it, not with it? We should have our research team analyze this blood and try and figure out-”
Lazzario wasn’t so rude as to cut him off, but he was shaking his head. The Rear Admiral stopped and motioned for him to continue. “I mean, that’s good too, but I meant make with it. Smear it on some bullets. Stick it in an engine and light it on fire. Mix it with chemicals and see what it does later.”
“There’s precedent,” Carmen added. “Arrows dipped in the blood of Lanerean Hydra ultimately slew Heracles. Talos, an automaton, was only beaten when it was drained of Ichor – like it had its fuel line ruptured.”
“There’s also a scientific reason to pursue this line of inquiry.”
Bridges turned his attention to Doctor Shivani Pivarti, an Indian woman in her thirties, with long hair done up in an elaborate style. A bioengineer, she had been among the first in the scientific community to publicly state that Enki and the others could have powers that “some would consider supernatural”. Her discussions with the media, as well as her well-reasoned posts on her blog, had quickly put her on his radar.
He also liked that she called them “things”. He’d prefer if someone else agreed with him on their demonic nature, but anything was better than “gods”.
“We don’t know anything about their physiology,” Doctor Pivarti continued. “They could be an evolutionary mutation, or a new subspecies. At this point we can’t even rule out the possibility that they’re extra-terrestrial. The chance to study their blood could definitely help us determine how to fight them.”
The Rear Admiral nodded in slow thought. “Thank you all for your time. I want you all to go back to work, and I want you talking with DARPA. I want to know what of our existing arsenal we should bring to bear against these things.” He rose to his feet, then added, “Doctor Pivarti, please stay behind for a moment.”
After the others had left, he turned his attention back to Pivarti. “Less than an hour after Enki’s televised interview, you were on the news giving reactions and commentary. How did that happen so quickly?”
She gave him a slight smile. “I called the network and volunteered.”
“And from the first,” he said slowly, “you’ve spoken with certainty, not speculation. Trying to project confidence?”
“No. I have confidence.”
“Explain.”
“These things are not new to me, Admiral Bridges. I have been aware of them for some time and studying them as best I was able. Quietly, until now, as scientific reputations can be very fragile. I still find myself feeling a bit reticent, or I would have said more in the meeting. Had you not asked to speak with me, I would have approached you and requested a private conversation.”
His heartbeat quickened. “Do you have some ideas about how to fight these things?”
She smiled, reaching into her coat pocket. “Better than ideas, Rear Admiral. I have prototypes.” She pulled a bullet from her pocket and handed it to Bridges.
When he took it he felt…something. A warmth, an energy. It felt almost alive.
Finally, someone with answers. “Come with me, Doctor Pivarti. I think I have a great deal of work for you.”
The two exited the room as the Rear Admiral began to bark orders to collect all the Ichor they could recover.
Chapter 13
The Problem with Omnipotence
When Ryan woke up, he was still outside his nanoverse’s staging area, Athena looking at him through the glass with a raised eyebrow. She motioned him to come in. Of course. If she comes out, the plants will eat her. Ryan worked his way back to his feet and entered the way he had exited. “I didn’t think I’d pass out in my own nanoverse,” he grumbled to Athena.
“You’re still Nascent. Expect it to keep happening.” Athena was failing to suppress a grin.
“You thought that was funny!” Ryan accused.
Athena shook her head. “No. I more thought it was sad.” She paused for a second, and then nodded. “And yes, I did want to laugh at you.”
Ryan grumbled wordlessly and headed back to the console. After considering all the buttons, he hit one that said “Time Sync.”
In an instant, they were back among the field of stars. Ryan had to shake his head to reorient himself. “That was abrupt.”
“Omnipotence doesn’t guarantee seamless transitions.” Athena regarded him, “Nor, apparently, does it prevent slamming face first into your own staging area.”
Ryan took the high road and ignored the second comment. “Why do we need to fly there, but can just bounce back out?”
“Because you thought that’s how it should work, on some level. We are in your nanoverse, Ryan. Your rules. Now. Tell me what happened.”
Ryan began to recount the story, leaving no details out. Athena took a chair and listened patiently as he did. "...so then I gave them a book of science," Ryan finished up, not for the first time wishing he was being met with Crystal's endless exuberance as opposed to Athena's vaguely judgmental silence. I'm looking forward to telling this story to Crystal.
"Science? Which branch? There are multiple types of science, after all." Athena sounded...well, sarcastic, but maybe it was an amused sarcasm, not directed at him. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. As much as Athena was ragging on him, at least she was answering questions. He appreciated that, so much he found himself warming up to the sarcastic goddess. Is there a goddess of snark? Either way, he liked her. Kinda. She was difficult to handle and had zero patience but spending a day in his nanoverse had given him some perspective on things. Ryan had decided that, in the grand scheme of things sarcastic and answered questions was about equal with friendly and told him to roll with it.
"Yeah, I know, but the book I pulled out - since I had to will it into existence - I just specified 'all the science they need to advance their culture to the modern era as quickly as possible.' Figured that would cover the basics."
Athena tilted her head, considering. "A circuitous route, I think, but given how time flows...but why not just will them to have advanced technology?"
Ryan grinned, glad to have an answer. "I thought about that, but anything I willed into existence wouldn't be any different from whatever we have in the core universe, right? This way, I could get some unique weapons, something no one’s ever thought of before."
That got an actual, unmistakable turning upwards of the lips from Athena. "Clever. Did you change any physical laws while you were there?"
"No?"
"Good. That means whatever they make should still work here." Athena leaned over his shoulder and pointed at one of the icons.
"I thought so." Ryan pressed the icon Athena had indicated, and in the middle of the staging area a three-dimensional model of the Earth appeared, almost as tall
as Ryan. He walked over to inspect it. "Hey, Athena, why do Enki and his lot care what happens to Earth? Or, for that matter, why do we?"
Ryan was paying attention to Athena, and noticed the slight tensing of her neck muscles, the way her knuckles turned a shade whiter. What the hell about that set her off? "How do you mean?" she asked.
"Well, I mean,” Ryan found himself choosing his words carefully, “I care because I've only been a god for like a week. So I've got people out there who care about me and stuff, and who I care about. But the rest of you are thousands of years old, right?" He shrugged. "I figured you would get callous after a while."
The tension faded as quickly as it had arrived. Did she think I was some kind of sociopath that didn’t care? It was the only thing that made sense to Ryan, but he decided not to press the issue as Athena nodded and said, "Ah. I assume you mean aside from not wanting to watch an entire world die?"