Fall of Angels

by Matt Larkin

  A brief hesitation.

  “Follow.” A set of coordinates for another system in the Expanse came up on the screen. Then the Lotan ship vanished, as if it had entered the Conduit, though it was nowhere near the gate.

  “Take us there,” Knight said.

  Hertz gave the order, and after another short flight through the Conduit, they arrived. An angel station orbited the local star. Lonely since no planets graced this system. Just the shimmering black of the station. Scanners registered the Lotan ship, hovering some distance away.

  “Captain,” Knight said. “Fire the ion cannons. Destroy that station.”

  For a moment, Hertz hesitated. Then she relayed the order. The ion beam slammed into the station. It superheated the hull, then, an instant later, punched through it. Explosions erupted along the station until, seconds later, it imploded.

  “What will happen?” Hertz said, as they all watched the station vanish.

  The last seal was sucked into its own singularity.

  A sudden pressure rushed over his mind, then a shriek sounded against his skull. The sound of it cascaded outward. Every psych on the bridge dropped to floor, groaning, as did Knight. A shiver ran over him, a glimpse of unfathomable hatred that lasted a fraction of a second …

  That was it. The Adversary was released. It was done. Let history blame him for what must happen.

  “What will happen,” Hertz had asked.

  Knight shook his head. What had to happen. “The birth of the future.”

  29

  “Let me count the dooms. One eye, two, a thousand, a billion eyes. Oh, what awful aspect, an eye to see my every sin, to praise it. Its festering wings beat the counterpoint to the melody of annihilation. Three birds, six wings, the fates themselves have come to cut the strings of the choir eternal. They sing their own songs in psychic shrieks that promise everything and everything is nothing.”

  New Rome University Psychiatric Hospital, Patient 2006315, no DNA match on file

  MILKY WAY GALAXY

  A void that could swallow galaxies. The antilife itself. And Caleb stood before it.

  There was nothing beneath him. No air, though he did not suffocate. He fell. Closer and closer to the hole. The Great Attractor filled the sky as far as he could see. Seemingly infinite in size and scope. And infinite in hatred. Angels had given birth to evil itself.

  And for five billion years, it had festered. Rotting like a sore on this universe, consuming it atom by atom.

  And it had changed since he’d last stood here.

  Once, in life, he had witnessed the cracked eye of a sleeping dragon. Now … now it was awake. Open and alert.

  Gravitational forces tugged him in every direction while the voices tore at his mind. Offering solace. If only he would serve. Become one with the darkness.

  Accept the void.

  His body broke apart. Molecules disintegrated as the matter that composed him fled into the black hole, feeding it. It would gorge itself on the bodies and souls of all living things. Snuffing out stars, consuming nebulae, devouring a universe … until only it remained.

  And then, from the black, something emerged. Nothing escaped a black hole. Not light. Not time. Not hope.

  Nothing escaped. But something was sent forth.

  A ship, black and shimmering, much like an angel vessel. But this one had eyes—a thousand eyes, glimmering with the pale light of nightmare. It shrieked as it flew past. Another emerged. And another. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Surrounding the greatest of all.

  It was larger than the Ark—nearly thirty kilometers long, with six inverted wings that beat in slow, discordant rhythms. Like the others, eyes covered the hull. All watching him. And he knew its name.

  Azazel.

  It swooped past him, dwarfing him like the insect he was. The promise of oblivion lingered in his mind, offering sweet release from a living nightmare.

  He awoke screaming in his cell, drenched in cold sweat. He tumbled from his cot, banging his knee on the floor, then groaning in pain. The nightmares never stopped, but this was something different. This was … not a dream.

  The Adversary was in Caleb’s mind. Showing him the future … or worse. The present. The end of time and space was upon them.

  Rapid breaths heaved through his chest. Hyperventilation. Had to calm himself. He collapsed, unable to get a hold of himself. What had happened? God Himself would tremble before the armada coming their way.

  Caleb grunted, pulled himself along the floor, and banged on the smart glass of his cell. Rachel had to know. She had to.

  After a minute, a Sentinel came to check on him. She tapped the glass so he could speak.

  “I have to see Rachel Jordan. Please, it’s urgent.”

  The Sentinel glowered, saying nothing, and tapped the glass again, cutting off sound. But she spoke into her comm.

  Rachel would come. She would come.

  Caleb hugged himself, unable to rise from the ground. Rachel would come, and he would tell her the End of Days had begun. It was too late to do anything. Unless he was wrong. He had been wrong about so many things already.

  At last Rachel came and opened his cell. She knelt beside him and turned him over. “What the void happened to you?”

  “The void … the void happened!” He shook himself, then rolled to sit and stare at her. “Is there time? Is there still time to stop them?”

  Rachel nodded. “We hope so. Knight plans to use the Adversary against them. By now he’s destroyed the last seal. It should give the angels something new to worry about.”

  W-what?

  No.

  No, he couldn’t have heard that right. Caleb was still in the nightmare. Not even that Gehennan fool could be so stupid. It was a dream. Everything was fine. The Adversary was still tormenting him. But he was on to it. He giggled. Fine, he’d play its game. He’d play along. He laughed.

  “Make a fool out of me, will you?” he said. “Yes. Very amusing. Hmmm.”

  “Caleb? Have you gone completely off rotation?”

  He chuckled again. “No, no. You have. I wanted to warn you, but it’s a dream. I’m on to you!”

  Rachel slapped him.

  The impact stung. The sound rung in his ears. That was new. He didn’t usually get slapped in his dreams.

  “Pull yourself together. I don’t have time for this, Caleb.”

  Dear God. Did that mean … it was all true.

  He took a shuddering breath, but he couldn’t calm himself. “You haven’t understood anything, have you?”

  Rachel rose. “Caleb. I have to go.”

  He looked up at her, willing her to call it all a trick. But he knew it wasn’t. “I’ve tried to tell you what you face, but you didn’t hear me.”

  “What, Caleb?”

  “You can’t make an alliance with the Adversary, Rachel. You can only serve it. You don’t make deals with the void … you feed it. And it eats and eats until nothing is left. Don’t you understand what it is?”

  She shook her head helplessly. Like he was the one who’d gone off rotation.

  Caleb pulled himself to his knees and stared up into her amber eyes. “The Adversary, Rachel. It’s our Adversary too.” He nodded his head as her mouth worked into a puzzled frown. She should have listened before. He’d thought she understood the words he’d been too afraid to say. And now it was too late, but he had to say them anyway.

  “The Adversary … is hell itself.”

  30

  “Go on, you sinners. Admit your folly! From where you stand, you ought to feel its flames baking the skin of your face, smell the fetid slime of its depravity, hear the unending cries begging for mercy that will never come. If not, then heed those of us who can. Tremble in the wake of chaos, lest hell should be unleashed.”

  The Codex, Book of Muriel

  APRIL 19, 3097 EY — MILKY WAY GALAXY

  Rachel sat on the floor in her quarters, all the lights turned to maximum. She hadn’t been willing to face darkness since
her conversation with Caleb.

  Raziel had once told her she didn’t understand hell.

  Tremble in the wake of chaos, lest hell should be unleashed.

  The Codex said that.

  And she had told Knight to … to release it.

  She fumbled with a teacup at her side, then set it back down. It had grown cold anyway.

  Raziel was so right. She had understood nothing. They were children playing with grown-up tools. And she could have stopped Knight … she should have stopped him. But she’d thought anything would be better than another three thousand years of angel theocracy.

  She’d been wrong.

  Except that … she feared hell because the Codex told her to. And she had readily dismissed the other so-called truths it brought with it. Perhaps her fear, her reaction was ingrained in her by the angels. Just as people’s reactions to the angels themselves was.

  People feared hell was where the wicked went when they died. They had thought it was a place, not a living force. But it was both. A sentient universe. Never had the angels let on that the Adversary was the same hell mentioned in the Codex. Maybe they had thought to spare mankind the horrible truth.

  Or maybe it was just another way to try to hide their sins.

  Angels had built … hell.

  She had seen it herself. A fleeting glimpse when she breached the Conduit. But she hadn’t known that was the Adversary. Maybe, maybe it would only turn on the angels.

  Mankind Shall Adhere to the Bounds of the Conduit.

  Because beyond it lies hell. Waiting for the chance to reach back into this universe. And if Caleb was right, they were not content to merely destroy the angels. They would devour all creation. One universe at a time. Had others fallen—other universes not protected by angel seals?

  She wrapped her hands around her knees. She had brought about Armageddon. Nothing she could think of would fix this. Nothing would change things back to how they had been. She had to get Raziel. And Knight and Phoebe. They would have to make a stand.

  “Mazzaroth,” she said. Her voice sounded cracked and dry. She swallowed. “Contact Galizur Blake.”

  When he filled the screen, the shadows were gone. His wings were spread, glimmering in pale light. “What have you done? You allowed your creature to breach the final seal, Rachel! Do you have any idea what you have unleashed?”

  Her creature? Had Raziel not deliberately made Knight who he was? No, that no longer mattered.

  Rachel nodded, helpless to refute Raziel’s accusations. She’d thought … she’d thought angels were mankind’s greatest enemies. Still, after all that had happened, she’d thought the Codex mere lies. Rules to force humanity into subservience. And it was—even Raziel admitted that.

  “They know, Rachel. They know what he has done. They have declared him the Pariah.”

  Knight … outcast from all human society and blamed for the woes of mankind. The angels would spread the word, and nowhere would be safe for him anymore. In days, he would be the most infamous man in history. The man who had unleashed hell itself onto an unsuspecting populace. People would never care what his motives were, what misconceptions he’d acted under. And Rachel had warned him he would be hated … but he said he had to do it for future generations.

  “Can you tell them it wasn’t like that?”

  “I cannot. He has brought this on himself, Rachel.”

  “Please come back. Let us pick you up.”

  Raziel slumped his shoulders. “Child, I can do little now. My hopes of overcoming Apollyon rested on that last, hidden seal.”

  “What can we do?”

  He shook his head. “Maybe nothing now. You should have … it matters not anymore. There is more than enough blame to go around for the state of this universe. I wish you well, Rachel Jordan. Find what solace you may. Mazzaroth off.”

  The screen went dead.

  Just like that. Her last hope, severed.

  Rachel trembled. She fell forward and vomited. She heaved out what little was in her stomach, then stumbled to the washroom.

  There she rinsed her mouth and her face in ice-cold water. Her actions had led them all here … but Raziel was right. It was not her alone. And one way or another, she was going to save mankind.

  Be it hell or angels or Asherah … she was a Sentinel now, like David before her, and she had sworn to protect humanity against any threat. Any foe.

  Water streamed from her face as she rose.

  David had given his life for the people. As much as she missed him, she knew he’d done what was right. He was a true Sentinel, and his legacy was hers now. She couldn’t let him down.

  A Sentinel held the line against the night.

  And that was what she was going to do. For David. For Knight. For everyone.

  31

  “Five cadets line the ledge. I instruct them all to look down. It’s a five-hundred-meter drop to the courtyard below. None of them has used a grav-net before. I can smell the fear coming off of them. They’re not going to jump; they’re waiting to be pushed. I walk the line behind them, making sure they keep their eyes down. How are we supposed to have the bravest warriors in the universe if they’re still afraid of heights? I pick one with trembling knees and listen to the scream as he plummets. One by one, I push the rest over. They all scream, even after seeing the others walk away without a scratch. I’ll have them back up the lift and on the ledge again in five minutes. A week from now they’ll be whooping and hollering on the way down. In a month, they’ll be doing mid-air maneuvers and landing on meter-wide targets.”

  Excerpt from Memoirs of a Sentinel Academy Grav-Net Trainer

  MAY 4, 3097 EY — EKRON, MILKY WAY

  With his helmet up, even the cold of Ekron didn’t really bite at Knight. Sentinel suits were true marvels. He crouched atop a building, looking down on another Redeemer patrol, ten stories below.

  Phoebe kicked one of the dead magog. “Not as much fun invading the world now, is it? Big, dead, dumb shit.”

  This was the third Gogmagog outpost they’d taken out in Ekron City. The planet was too cold for the gog to use their natural camouflage—even they needed parkas when outside. It worked to his advantage. Made them so much easier to track.

  “Knight? What are you—”

  Knight leapt off the building, pulling his kyoketsu as he fell. He triggered his grav-net seconds before landing in the midst of the Redeemers.

  “What the—” one began.

  A whip of his kyoketsu severed the man’s head. Knight continued the arc, slicing through another man’s leg, then flicked his wrist backward to open a man’s stomach.

  A Redeemer charged him, waving a stun lance. Knight sidestepped, caught the man, and doubled him over his own pain stick. An elbow to the face dropped a fifth man, and an upswing of his kyoketsu split another’s face from the chin up. The last Redeemer faltered and turned to run.

  Knight spun, flinging the kyoketsu in an arc that decapitated the man.

  Another heart of Redeemers taken down.

  Phoebe landed beside him, the distortion of her grav-net fading in an instant. “You could have waited for me.”

  “I can handle it. Besides, I don’t want to place the baby in danger.”

  Phoebe snorted. “Wasn’t any danger. I’m a badass, remember.”

  Word had come of angel ships engaging the Adversary fleet. Neither side seemed to care much about human casualties anymore. Planets, even entire star systems had been swept away in the chaos. The Adversary had used some form of black hole generators to swallow suns.

  The hell Knight had unleashed now devoured the universe.

  The death total had grown beyond all measure—the NER couldn’t even guess the state of most of the former Mizraim Empire. And thousands upon thousands of ships had invaded from Asherah, apparently under command of the Adversary. Knight had thought a bold move the only way to stop the angels. It seemed he’d vastly underestimated the threat posed by the Adversary.

  He and Pho
ebe had agreed the turmoil was their best chance to drive the Redeemers from Ekron. It was clear the angels no longer cared about conquest. They made no attempt to aid their beleaguered followers. So for more than a week, Knight had been helping the remaining Sentinel units in the systematic slaughter of Redeemers and Gogmagog. In a way, it was a relief. A clear enemy to fight.

  A foe that could be killed.

  “Excuse me, ninja boy. I’m a Sentinel. Spec ops. Very special ops. I’m a big ass hero, you know?”

  “Yeah.” She was his hero, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. She was the person he should have been his whole life. A warrior, for certain, but one fighting for a cause that mattered. Not an enforcer—a soldier. “You do have a nice ass, hero.”

  “Obviously. We should get off the streets. I—” She held up a hand, then tapped her comm. “Dana here.” After a pause, she nodded. “Thank you. We’ll be right there.” She looked back at Knight. “Team Seven found another group of refugees holed up beneath a restaurant. Maybe my parents …”

  Knight had helped her search for them since arriving here, but their apartment had been empty, with no word on where they’d gone. “How far?”

  “Three blocks. This way.” She trotted down the street, sticking to back alleys and avoiding patrols. She might not have been the ghost he was, but she knew something about going unseen. Sentinel spec ops training at its finest.

  They paused at the edge of an alley, watching a Redeemer heart run by. The seven men and women passed at a trot, casting glances back over their shoulder. No doubt fearful of the constant Sentinel ambushes they faced in this city.

  “Looks like someone’s in a hurry,” Phoebe said.

  Hard to watch a city if you were too scared to patrol.

  “That it?” he said, pointing to a building ahead. It was seven stories tall—small for this city—and lit with shimmering red lights proclaiming the place the Lion’s Den. The lights seemed to come from within the crystal of the building itself, creating a bleeding reflection that filtered up several stories and formed into the shape of a lion’s mane.