On the surface of a destroyed planet, Mesme at last revealed all. The portal network, which the Metigens call the Mosaic, was above all else a refuge for those targeted for eradication by the Anadens. And the Anadens, rulers of the true universe through the master portal, were the genetic template upon which humanity was built. Aurora was nothing more than another experiment of the Metigens, created so they could study the development and nature of their enemy and the enemy of all life.
Alex and Caleb returned to Aurora to find a galaxy rocked by chaos. After the execution of Olivia Montegreu by Alliance and Prevo forces, Miriam had gone rogue. Under her careful planning, a resistance force, bolstered by help from inside the Senecan and Alliance militaries, moved to remove the despotic Alliance PM.
As Alex struggled with her growing addiction to an ethereal, elemental realm, she felt herself being pulled away from reality. Away from her husband, her mother, her friends. She watched as those she loved fought, but increasingly found herself losing her own battle.
When terrorists staged a massive riot on Romane, Dr. Canivon, the mother of the Prevos, was murdered in front of Devon and Alex. Overcome by her own and Valkyrie’s grief, Alex unleashed the explosive power of the ethereal realm to destroy the terrorists’ safehouse. Standing in the rubble of her destruction, Alex made a decision to sever the quantum connection between herself and the Siyane, choosing a tangible, human life. Choosing Caleb.
Miriam wrested control of the EA government away from the PM, bringing an end to the Prevo persecution. In the wake of victory, however, a shadowy Anaden hunter emerged from the darkness to attack Alex and Caleb. Caleb was gravely injured when the Anaden’s power, known as diati, leapt into him, healing his wounds and helping him kill the alien.
Mesme revealed the ominous consequences of the attack. Soon, the Anaden leadership would discover Aurora. When they did, they would destroy it unless humanity could stand against them. Mesme told Miriam and the others to prepare, but knowing the end game was upon them, asked Alex and Caleb to come to Amaranthe. The master universe. The home and dominion of the Anadens.
* * *
AURORA RESONANT
In Aurora, Miriam led the formation of a multi-agency, multi-governmental (GCDA) and military (AEGIS) organization dedicated to meeting the imminent threat of the Anadens.
In Amaranthe, Alex and Caleb discovered an underground ‘anarch’ resistance movement against the Anaden Directorate. They made contact with an anarch agent, Eren asi-Idoni, and he helped them infiltrate the Anadens’ Machim military command and steal secret information on the Machim fleets. Alex and Caleb were captured, but not before Valkyrie uploaded the information they sought. Eren ‘nulled out’ rather than being captured, for when Anadens died they underwent a regenesis procedure that returned their consciousness to a new body.
Valkyrie transmitted the data to AEGIS then returned to Amaranthe. When Eren reawakened, he joined Valkyrie and Mesme on the Siyane, and they rescued Alex and Caleb from the prison where they were being tortured for information.
The Directorate nonetheless learned the full truth about the Metigens/Katasketousya creation of Aurora and ordered a fleet to deliver a powerful weapon known as a Tartarus Trigger to Aurora and annihilate humanity. Forewarned, Miriam led a fleet of warships into Amaranthe to intercept them.
The battle commenced with the destruction of the one known gateway into the Mosaic, and Mesme sneaked onto the lead Machim warship and stole the Tartarus Trigger. Humanity used its Prevos, Rifts and other tricks to take the Anadens by surprise and prevail in the battle. Afterward, Alex, Caleb, Miriam and Mesme were summoned to a secret meeting with the leader of the anarchs, Danilo Nisi, and a tenuous alliance was formed.
AEGIS scored several early victories but also devastating losses. While the battles raged, Alex and the other Prevos developed a method for using sidespace to open physical wormholes, enabling AEGIS vessels to travel anywhere in known space without using the Anaden gateway system.
The AEGIS fleet attacked the Machim homeworld, destroying the Dyson rings encircling its sun and blowing up their orbital military command station. At the same time, Nisi broadcast an impassioned speech across the empire setting forth the Directorate’s sins and the anarch’s mission to free those oppressed.
In a flashback Caleb’s diati showed him, it was revealed that Nisi was actually Corradeo Praesidis, the former leader of the powerful Anaden Praesidis dynasty. Many millennia ago, his son tried to kill him; thinking him dead, the son stole his name, face and power, and now served on the Directorate as the Praesidis Primor.
Valkyrie and her twin, Vii, had spent months rebuilding the consciousness of David Solovy that manifested during the final battle of the Metigen War. Using the Anadens’ regenesis technology, they transferred his consciousness to a cloned body, and he and Miriam were reunited after twenty-five years.
The Directorate tracked an AEGIS vessel to the primary anarch base and launched a surprise attack, and a bloody battle followed in orbit and on the ground. To stop a Machim warship from bombing the base with antimatter missiles, Alex re-established her ethereal connection with the Siyane to bypass the warship’s shielding and destroy it; in doing so, she found the connection no longer exerted the damaging hold on her it once did.
Alex soon discovered a way to use the supradimensional properties of the mysterious Reor mineral to access the contents of the Reor slabs used by the Directorate to store sensitive information. She uncovered the location of the Directorate’s regenesis backups, and AEGIS and the anarchs devised a plan to take out the entire Directorate, permanently, in one massive strike.
For all but two of the Directorate members, the mission succeeded with minimal losses. However, the Machim Primor escaped his assassination attempt. Armed with the location of one of the Mosaic gateways, he acquired a new Tartarus Trigger and raced to wipe out the Aurora universe.
On Solum (Earth’s twin), Caleb engaged the Praesidis Primor in a battle of staggeringly powerful diati, and the diati freed when the Primor died rampaged wild. Caleb couldn’t wrestle it under control, and it killed millions before destroying the planet itself.
The anarchs learned that the Primors kept an additional regenesis backup stored on their secret space station, the Protos Agora, which orbited the Milky Way galactic core. The Stalwart II took the Tartarus Trigger Mesme stole at the start of the conflict and used it to destroy the station.
Just when they believed they had finally achieved victory, they discovered the Machim Primor’s plans. The Primor had a head start, and the only way to try to prevent him from destroying Aurora was for the Kats to disconnect it from the Mosaic, rendering it unreachable forever. Caleb, however, instead used his now total control over diati to command the cosmic force to pull all the pocket universes in the Mosaic—including Aurora—into Amaranthe, then destroy the Mosaic.
He succeeded, but the energy the act required killed him. While Miriam and the others worked out what it meant for all of humanity to now exist in Amaranthe, Alex took Caleb to the living planet of Akeso and, via the deep connection they shared, Akeso brought him back to life.
* * *
ASTERION NOIR
On the planet of Mirai in the Gennisi galaxy, a woman woke up in a rain-soaked alley with no memory of who she was or how she’d gotten there. Two strangers found her and offered to take her in. When asked, she told them her name was Nika, though she didn’t know why.
Fast forward to five years later. Nika, alongside her rescuers Perrin and Joaquim, led a group of rebels called NOIR against the despotic government of the Asterion Dominion. An insidious virutox was infecting people’s programming, altering their personalities and causing them to commit inexplicable crimes. NOIR’s investigation of the virutox brought them to Dashiel Ridani, who Nika learned was her lover in her prior life, before she lost her memory.
With her world thrown into disarray, Nika and Dashiel chased the threads of her lost identity while searching for the source of the vir
utox. Their search led them to the leaders of the Asterion Dominion, the Guides. Nika broke into the Guides’ data vault, where she found they had ordered her psyche-wipe five years earlier after she pressed them on a series of disappearances.
Meanwhile, Gemina Kail, an Administration Advisor, traveled to an alien stronghold across the galaxy, where she delivered thousands of Asterions in stasis chambers to an alien species called the Rasu.
As the virutox spread, wreaking increasing havoc across the Dominion, Justice Advisor Adlai Weiss traced the source to the Guides’ doorstep. They ordered him to drop the case and let the virutox propagate among the population. He disobeyed, developed a vaccine and contacted NOIR for help in distributing it.
Across the galaxy, Nika and Dashiel discovered the stronghold of the alien Rasu. A metal-based shapeshifting species of immense power, they’d constructed hundreds of thousands of warships and space stations. Armed with this terrifying information, Nika and Dashiel returned to Mirai.
One of the Guides, Delacrai, defied the others to help Nika. She shared how an Asterion scout ship encountered the Rasu eight years ago; the crew was captured and killed. The Rasu grew interested in the Asterions’ unique bio-synthetic intelligence powered by kyoseil and quantum programming, and in return for not attacking Asterion Dominion worlds, they demanded a regular supply of Asterions to experiment on. The Guides agreed.
The other Advisors were told the terrible truth about the Rasu and the Guides’ deal with the aliens. They scrambled to undo the damage eight years of the Rasu Protocol had inflicted while racing to find a way to respond to an impending Rasu deadline, when the aliens expected more Asterions to be delivered.
Nika’s oldest friend from her former life, Maris Debray, revealed that both she and Nika were members of the “First Generation”: Asterions who had never erased their psyches in the 700,000 years since they fled the Anaden Empire and created themselves as a new species by merging Anaden DNA, AI programming and the kyoseil mineral. Only a few dozen of the First Generation remained, and their history was kept secret from everyone else.
With time running out, Nika sought the help of the Sogain, an enigmatic species who once threatened the Asterions with extinction if they ever trespassed on Sogain territory. This time, the aliens disclosed the location of a single, stranded Rasu.
An Asterion team captured the Rasu and brought it to Mirai for interrogation. The creature revealed that the Rasu exhibited a collective intelligence when physically connected to other Rasu, but regained independent thought when they were separated. They intended to use kyoseil to control other Rasu over great distances, as kyoseil was supradimensional, deeply interconnected and one of the universe’s oldest life forms.
Using this knowledge, the Asterions identified a way to link their consciousnesses together via kyoseil. They dubbed these connections ‘ceraffin’ and used them to develop a plan to face the Rasu.
They constructed volatile electricity bombs to be sneaked into the Rasu stronghold. The Rasu were expecting 8,000 Asterions in stasis chambers, so Nika used the ceraff structure to split her psyche into shards inhabiting 8,000 copies of herself.
The copies were delivered to the Rasu as expected, and they awoke inside the Rasu’s lab on their primary space station. Chaos ensued as they fought to reach the power control center, even as they were cut down by the thousands. A mere dozen made it to the control center, and a single instance survived to override the power safeguards.
Dashiel detonated the electricity bombs, and a cascading power overload ripped through the stronghold. It destroyed the Rasu’s Dyson lattice, which triggered an intense surge in solar flare activity, and all the Rasu stations and vessels were incinerated, save one vessel that escaped through a wormhole.
The Asterions recognized this was not the end of the conflict, but the beginning, and they needed to prepare for the Rasu’s return. Nika was contacted by the Sogain, who informed her the Anaden Empire of old had fallen and suggested she might find allies among the new one which had risen to take its place.
Nika journeyed to the Asterions’ ancestral home, the Milky Way. Before she arrived, however, a wormhole opened in the cabin of her ship, and Alex Solovy walked through it.
* * *
RIVEN WORLDS
CONTINUUM
Fourteen years have passed since the events of REQUIEM.
Nika Kirumase joins Alex and Caleb for dinner at their home on Akeso. They share the story of how humanity ended up in Amaranthe and fill her in on Concord, the multi-species government that has taken the place of the deposed Anaden Directorate.
Marlee Marano, Caleb’s niece, is on the planet Savrak as part of her work for the Concord Consulate. The Savrakaths are a lizard-evolved species that originated in the Mosaic. Marlee discovers they are enslaving and mistreating the Godjans, a species they share Savrak with. While helping a Godjan girl, Vaihe, escape imminent torture, Marlee is arrested by local authorities. David Solovy and Caleb both arrive to come to her aid, and they are able to secure her release.
Elsewhere on Savrak, Eren asi-Idoni and his team (Cosime, Felzeor, Drae) surveil a Savrakath lab on behalf of Concord Intelligence (CINT). The team infiltrates the lab and acquires evidence the Savrakaths are secretly developing antimatter weapons.
Miriam Solovy, Concord’s military leader, receives a visit from Lakhes. The Kat conveys its opinion of the Asterions and a warning regarding the Rasu. Lakhes then returns home, where it confronts Mesme about the secrets it has been keeping regarding the Asterions.
Alex takes Nika to Concord HQ to meet humanity’s power players in Concord: her mother and father, Malcolm Jenner, Mia Requelme and Richard Navick. Nika fills them in on the Asterion’s experiences with the Rasu (see the summary of Asterion Noir in the Appendix).
Nika returns home to Mirai, and Dashiel Ridani introduces her to the Omoikane Initiative, a massive project spearheaded by the other Advisors to accelerate technology, warfare and logistical plans to combat the Rasu. She learns about the Vault, a project to store the psyche backups of all Asterions in a fortified spaceship, where they can be spirited away in the event of a Rasu invasion.
On Machimis, Casmir elasson-Machim struggles to exert authority over the other Machim elassons. Torval elasson-Machim learns about the Savrakaths’ antimatter development and, believing Concord is not doing enough to address it, decides to take matters into his own hands.
Alex, Caleb and Valkyrie travel to NGC 55, believed to be the closest Rasu-controlled galaxy to Concord space. They discover millions of Rasu vessels and platforms in thousands of star systems throughout the galaxy, as well as a Rasu artificial ring orbiting the galactic core.
Nika, Dashiel and Lance Palmer attend a formal meeting with Concord leaders to review what they know about the Rasu’s reach, their intentions, and ways to counter them. Conventional weapons have proved ineffective, and they discuss the use of negative energy, nuclear and antimatter weapons, as well as even more exotic weaponry. Nika fills the others in on the Rasu’s unique consciousness and their paranoid, controlling nature.
Miriam promises the Asterions military and scientific cooperation, information sharing and a steady supply of Reor/kyoseil, but stops short of providing them with adiamene. Alex asks Kennedy to secretly give the formula for adiamene to the Asterions. Kennedy and Noah decide if they can do so in such a way that protects their family, they will.
Vaihe unexpectedly contacts Marlee. She’s escaped capture but is alone in the Savrak wilderness. Marlee hacks a Caeles Prism to open at Vaihe’s location and gets her off Savrak. She takes Vaihe to meet Mia, and the Godjan relays the full extent of the Savrakaths’ mistreatment of her people. Marlee demands Mia do something to help the Godjans.
On Mirai, Adlai Weiss discovers his personal account has been hacked and his bank accounts emptied. When he goes home, he is attacked and knocked unconscious. He wakes up in an unknown location, strung up in a rack and being held captive by a strange man.
Perrin is deter
mined to find Adlai. She breaks into the Justice server to find out what Justice knows about Adlai’s kidnapping. She and Parc Eshett review the data and discover Justice has a suspect named Ian Sevulch, but he has an alibi. Parc reveals that some Asterions have begun transforming themselves into “Plexes,” where a single consciousness occupies multiple physical bodies simultaneously. He believes Sevulch could be a Plex, and they decide to surveil the man.
Perrin tails Sevulch to an abandoned shop, where she discovers Adlai tied up in the basement. She shoots Sevulch in the head and rescues Adlai. She then keeps vigil at Adlai’s side while he recovers from his torture. Parc stops by, and Perrin reveals she’s figured out that he’s a Plex. He asks her to keep his secret, and she agrees.
Nika takes Maris Debray to visit their original homeworld, Asterion Prime, in the Milky Way. Maris tells Nika about the early days of the SAI Rebellion and about Nika’s family, including her brother, Loshi, who was killed during the rebellion.
Eren’s team receives authorization to destroy the Savrakath antimatter lab. However, while they’re placing explosives around the lab, Torval arrives in his Imperium and blasts the facility, killing Drae and Cosime.
Eren takes Cosime’s body to Alex and Caleb on Akeso and demands that they bring her back to life, much as Akeso did for Caleb fourteen years earlier. Caleb tries to explain how it’s beyond Akeso’s ability to renew life in someone the planet hasn’t previously bonded with. When a hysterical Eren insists, Caleb tries to open a connection to Cosime, only to be overwhelmed by darkness and death. Eren realizes Cosime is truly gone; he asks Alex and Caleb to take care of her for him and flees.
Miriam arrests Torval for disobeying orders and the murder of Concord personnel, then tells Casmir to bring the other Machim elassons in line. Miriam and Mia deliver an ultimatum to the Savrakaths, terminating their negotiations for a Concord alliance, demanding they cease all antimatter production and offering asylum to all Godjans.
All Our Tomorrows Page 44