“But it wasn’t unknown causes. It was you, LeaMarsa. You may have been in the midst of a psychic blackout and didn’t know what you were doing. But I doubt that mattered much to your parents and the forty others who died.
“In a fit of anger at what your mother and father had done to you in the womb, you sent some kind of superluminal shock wave four hundred thousand kilometers into space, killing the crew and everyone onboard. You used a power that neither you nor anyone else even dreamed you possessed. You used that power to murder your own parents.”
Her gyrations became more frantic. “Why are you doing this!”
“Because for all our sakes, you’ve got to face the truth.”
“No! Go away! Let me alone!”
Her eyes rolled up in their sockets. He grabbed hold of her shoulders to keep her upright as she crumbled into a faint.
In the center of the pool, something broke free from the depths and erupted through the agitated surface. Defying geonic forces, it elevated two meters into the air.
Ericho gasped. The creature hadn’t metamorphosed into what he’d been expecting, a full-sized version of Baby Blue. It had changed into something adult all right, but far more unsettling, a grotesque variant of a familiar figure.
It was Rigel Shaheed.
Or, more precisely, a doppelganger that had pilfered Rigel’s DNA to assume the contours and musculature of the tech officer. Its skin was identical to human flesh but closer to that of a newborn, dripping with a pale fluid reminiscent of a shattered amniotic sac. Only the creature’s head was different, more elongated to make room for that additional sensory organ between mouth and nose, a mirrorlike node.
Eerily familiar eyes glared down at Ericho. He backed away from the pool with LeaMarsa unconscious in his arms. The Rigel creature moved too, floating slowly but menacingly toward them.
“The warrior pups will arrive in twenty-five seconds,” Jonomy said. “Your only chance is surrender. Assume a submissive posture to let them know you pose no threat.”
That wasn’t an option, Ericho thought, not with a monster gliding toward him with unmistakable hostility. If he had any chance at all it was with the woman in his arms.
“Wake up!” he hollered. He shook LeaMarsa like a rag doll, using the full force of his shieldsuit motors. But there was no response.
Wherever she’d gone, it was far from this place.
CHAPTER 39
LeaMarsa’s eyes were closed yet she remained cognizant of the world. She could sense the creature in its Rigel guise coming toward them, ready to offer her permanent liberation from the reek. She could feel the captain’s grip holding her upright, hear the distant echo of his words urging her to awaken.
A barrier protecting her from a reality that she’d buried more than a decade ago had collapsed. Consciousness was no longer shielded. The reek, which she’d often thought of as originating from outside herself – a foreign aggressor – was just the opposite, a thing fundamental to her nature.
The captain had outed her secret torment. It stormed through her, shredding the very fabric of her being, redefining and reshaping the person whom she thought she was. A phantasmagorical abyss opened at her feet, its air colored by the terrible truth.
I killed my parents.
She fell into the abyss. It smelled of death and decay, the same vile odor she’d come to associate with the reek. The odor was symbolic, a repressed memory of her murderous rage, and what it had done to two guilty individuals and forty innocent ones.
The sudden death of the crew at a critical moment in the flight had caused the shuttle to crash into the wall of a lunar crater. Engines and fuel tanks had exploded, incinerating the evidence of how those forty-two people had actually died. Like the hapless souls on the raft in her vision of the Avrit-Ah-Tay under attack, their bodies had been consumed by that icy fire. But in this instance, it was not the Quad that had been responsible. LeaMarsa had unconsciously reached into neurospace to access the same terrible power utilized by the creature, a power given added fuel by her rage.
She perceived the breadth of the event from beginning to end, from the actualization of her rage into a potent superluminal force to the crash itself. She perceived it with a clarity that no longer could be suppressed or falsified.
An even grimmer truth achieved focus. Had her actions on that terrible day in the fourteenth year of her life been wholly the product of her subconscious mind, the awfulness of what she’d done might have been bearable. But that wasn’t what had happened.
She’d blacked out, yes. Yet even as the real world lost its reassuring contours, even as neurospace blinked into existence, a part of her had known what she was doing. Vowing to avenge her parents’ manipulations, she’d accessed that realm of luminous dark, specifically the stars representing analogues of her parents and, by their proximity, those forty other luckless souls.
Not subliminal. Not accidental.
Premeditated murder.
My own parents.
The reek came into being in those moments to keep her mind insulated from the horror of her actions. It was a safety valve, one of such efficacy that it had even twisted the timeline of events to keep her oblivious of the facts. Now that she could no longer suppress the truth, questions surfaced that she’d been too blinded to ask earlier.
Why was the creature so intent on making her its ally by offering her sanctuary from the reek? Certainly not for LeaMarsa’s benefit, to spare her emotional pain. And it didn’t need her assistance to overwhelm human civilization in the real world and as well as attacking the analogues of intelligent beings that existed in neurospace.
And how could she have first experienced the reek at age five when the events that created it didn’t occur for another eight years?
Answers were suddenly obvious. Her psionic consciousness – her Quad consciousness, the latent part of her that had always been able to touch neurospace – wasn’t bound by the commonplace. As with neurospace, it wasn’t limited by notions of time flowing in a single direction. And she understood the reason behind the creature’s manipulations, why it sought to offer her sanctuary.
It’s afraid of me.
The psionic powers that were her genetic legacy made LeaMarsa perhaps the only intelligent entity in the galaxy capable of interfering with the Quad’s plans. Offering her sanctuary was nothing more than an attempt to neutralize her powers by making her a confederate.
But why not just kill her?
The answer surfaced even as she parsed the question. If she died, a part of her would continue on in neurospace, an immortal entity just like the creature – and a possible threat to its dominion.
She was indeed the transhuman her parents had designed her to be.
The flood of insights occurred in an instant as the captain continued his retreat from the creature. But those insights were mainly a product of intellectual understanding, the highest form of human tripartite consciousness. Beneath that was a layer of pure emotions that required its own acknowledgment in the form of grief.
Her eyes flashed open. A scream erupted, a thing of pure torment, so intense and all-encompassing that she barely recognized it as arising from her own throat.
Within that abyss, the scream breached a storehouse of pains. Wretched sobs exploded out of her. Her body shook as she wept for a fragile young girl who, in a moment of foolishness, lashed out and ended the lives of the two people who had brought her into this world.
CHAPTER 40
Ericho could barely hear Jonomy’s words through the shrieks of the writhing woman cradled in his arms. With LeaMarsa’s face mere centimeters from his helmet, her screams penetrated even his thick visor.
“Captain, the warrior pups are fast approaching the natatorium. They will be on you in less than fifteen seconds.”
He continued backing away from the Rigel creature, an imperious predator floating slowly across the pool. He estimated he would arrive at the farthest wall and run out of space to retreat at about the sam
e time the warrior pups reached the natatorium. What little hope he still had for his own survival trickled away. He would die at the hands of either the creature or the warrior pups, maybe both acting in concert.
Ericho had accomplished part of what he’d come here to do. He’d ejected LeaMarsa from the fantasy she’d constructed to hide from herself. He’d subjected her to an unorthodox salvation. But it wasn’t enough. Now he needed to finish the mission by doing something that only minutes ago he’d had difficulty even contemplating.
“I’m sorry, LeaMarsa.”
He wasn’t sure if she heard him through her screams. It didn’t matter. He released his grip on her shoulders, wrapped his gloved hands around her throat.
“Forgive me,” he whispered, clenching his fingers and squeezing hard.
He didn’t know if killing her would matter. Maybe it would save billions of lives or maybe it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. But he couldn’t take the chance that she and the creature working together would bring about June’s nightmare. For the crewdoc and for the rest of the crew; for his parents and siblings and friends back on Earth; for the future of humanity, he had to commit this horrible act.
The old saying from the Pannis command school again coursed through him. The captain needs to master that the master’s not the captain.
For perhaps the first time in his career, the phrase was utterly untrue. At least for these next few moments, Captain Ericho Solorzano of the starship Alchemon was indeed the master of his vessel, taking action that might well determine its fate.
His choking grip ended LeaMarsa’s screams. A part of him wanted to get it over instantly, utilize the shieldsuit’s full amplification to crush her vertebrae and snap her neck. But her eyes, brimming with terror and fixated on his, prompted hesitation. He gazed back at her, fingers momentarily frozen, wondering if she was relieved or even gratified to know that a thing of such paralyzing dimensions as her emotional pain was about to end.
CHAPTER 41
The old adage was wrong. It wasn’t your life that flashed before your eyes when you were dying. It was the spaces between the events of your life, the paths not taken, the choices not made, the feelings unacknowledged.
That’s what LeaMarsa saw, reflected back in the grim determined face of the man strangling her.
She sensed those things in an instant of suspended time amid a swarm of feelings. Foremost among them was guilt. What a contemptible and shameful trade she’d been about to make, accepting the creature’s offer of sanctuary from the reek and all her pains in exchange for participating in the annihilation of her own species.
It was now clear that any pain could be borne, even the special hell of having murdered one’s own parents. Repressing such pain, as she’d done all these years, had fueled her unconscious torment, provided the reek with a limitless source of energy, making it into a thing so powerful that she would have traded the universe to keep the truth at bay. The opposite tactic, simply allowing herself to feel the awfulness of what she’d done, had already served to deflate much of its energy.
The pain was still there. A century of sobs wouldn’t eradicate it, not entirely. But she could live with its presence now, live with the scars. She could survive.
Or, at least survival would have been possible were she not experiencing the real-world version of the reek’s final symptom.
Being strangled.
She sensed blackness settling in. Even now, her lungs desperate for air, moments from the end, she found herself acknowledging the irony of her own demise.
Her physical self was being murdered for having been a murderer. A circle was being closed, a circle of life and death. There was something appropriate about leaving this world as a helpless victim, mirroring the extinction of those forty-two souls who had died at her own hands.
A helpless victim. The phrase resonated. That was what she’d been for most of her years. Buffeted by psychic forces, isolated by society, manipulated by parents who should have loved unconditionally rather than using her to further their scientific ambitions. A helpless victim, one whose life had been structured around trying to ensure that the reek stayed buried.
Yet in these final moments, as that blackness smothered consciousness, she gained insight into a deeper truth. It too was something she’d kept hidden from herself since that darkest of days as an emotionally devastated thirteen year-old reeking of vengeance and lashing out.
She’d been a victim, yes. Nothing could change that. It was an essential reality of her life.
But she was not, and had never been, truly helpless. A power existed within her. Once before she’d used that power, back then to carry out a malicious and terrible act. Now it was time to take the next step. Her alien mentor, Nanamistyne, had provided a set of instructions. All she had to do was follow them.
But first things first.
She grabbed hold of the captain’s gloved wrists. Alone, she lacked the strength to free her neck from those crushing fingers backed up by the mechanical power of a shieldsuit. But similar to what she’d done a decade ago, she psychically reached into neurospace and located the analogue of Ericho Solorzano. Not driven by rage this time, she was able to control the amplitude of the summoned power. She didn’t want to kill the captain, merely move him out of her way.
His face registered astonishment as an icy thermal force entered his gut and began to spread through his body, layering its way upward and outward through the interwoven breadth of his tripartite consciousness. He had no choice but to release her neck and lunge away. She sensed that he somehow knew that she was the cause of his sudden torment, and that he needed to put distance between them if he was to survive.
She gulped down precious air, filled her lungs with it until she regained the strength to mouth words.
“Implement Synchronicity.”
Neurospace mushroomed into view. But now it was no longer a matter of her existing in one universe or the other, or of consciousness blinking back and forth between them. Having fulfilled the instruction, she now existed simultaneously in both realms, as an entity standing in the Alchemon’s natatorium and as a free-floating spirit among those countless faux-stars. From her dual vantage point, the next step was clear.
“Coalesce and Target.”
Within neurospace, she collapsed the past, present and future of every analogue enveloped by those shadowy clusters into a kind of temporal singularity, a state of existence whereby each one was locked into a specific moment, an infinite fraction of a nanosecond. She couldn’t have said just how she accomplished such a task. It was simply a matter of giving free rein to her latent instincts.
Coalescing those timelines enabled her to target the clusters with a stream of untethered superluminal impulses. Within the confines of that singularity, she vaporized those polluting shadows, restoring the realm of luminous dark to its pure and natural state.
As she wrenched neurospace from the creature’s influence, simultaneously in the real universe she whirled around to face the Diar-Fahn in its Rigel form. It was right behind her. She could sense its rage at her insurrection along with its growing fear of what she was becoming.
Everything was clear to her now. Despite its immortality and immense powers, the creature had an Achilles’ heel. Although it could never be destroyed, Nanamistyne and the remnants of her destroyed civilization had provided the template for how it could be contained.
LeaMarsa was distracted by a sound like exploding fireworks. Half of the pups forming the makeshift barrier against access to the natatorium burst into flames and blew apart. Fragments of their shattered bodies whizzed through the air in a rain of shrapnel. She felt the heat of a glowing piece shooting past, missing her face by centimeters.
Ericho whirled toward the commotion, hollered something about “mag projectiles.” The rest of his words were lost as a second round of explosions destroyed the rest of the robotic wall.
Two warrior pups floated into the natatorium, projectile guns and Higgs
cutters sprouting from their compact bodies. They realigned weapons on their new target, the captain.
“Sentinel Obey!” LeaMarsa commanded.
It was a peculiar sensation, linking the superluminals she controlled in neurospace with the ones ruled by SEN. But with consciousness synchronizing both realms, the task was not especially challenging.
She was in charge of the Alchemon now, with SEN just another aspect of her control. A logical next step would have been to order the warrior pups not to fire on the captain. But there was a more efficient way to have them do her bidding.
She allowed the Sentinel controlling the deadly robots to access her mind via its superluminal pathways, enabled SEN to learn in a fraction of a nanosecond the extent of the Quad’s manipulations and its threat to the ship, and ultimately to the Corporeal.
Six Higgs cutters ignited in unison, three from each warrior pup. The whining beams lanced into the Rigel creature. Five beams burned into its torso in a pentagonal pattern. The sixth nailed the center of its forehead, just above the eyes.
The stunned creature lunged backward, flailing its arms and legs. The warrior pups’ second volley severed those appendages below the shoulders and above the knees.
Round three of the attack decapitated the creature. Torso, severed head and appendages fell into the pool over which it hovered. In seconds they were swallowed up, leaving no trace.
The creature wasn’t dead, of course. No power, not even LeaMarsa’s, could ever destroy it, for an essential aspect of its consciousness would always exist in neurospace. And that would enable its physical remnants within the incubating pool to regenerate eventually into a new form.
But there was a window of opportunity before that happened. LeaMarsa hoped it would be long enough for her to embark on a new and unanticipated future, one far removed from what she’d envisioned nine months ago upon boarding the Alchemon.
CHAPTER 42
Events had occurred with such speed that Ericho was still trying to comprehend their meaning. He’d been strangling LeaMarsa, certain it would be the last act of his life. The next thing he knew, some unbearable combination of intense heat and freezing cold was emanating from deep within his guts, forcing him to release her neck and scamper as far away from her as possible. And then the warrior pups were in the natatorium, turning their fierce weaponry on the Rigel creature and cutting it to pieces.
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