Gods and The City (Gods and the Starways Book 1)

by Steve Statham

  The rows of large eyes stared at the humans before them. Then the eyes slowly faded to a milky white shade, a reaction that Talia guessed was the equivalent of eyes closing.

  Vance slowly stood and took tentative steps toward the monstrous living ball. He looked over his shoulder and motioned for his reluctant squad to move in. He raised his gun again, but tentatively.

  An insight raced to the forefront of Talia’s mind. She opened communication pathways from the microdrone to the squad’s net.

  “Vance! They’re surrendering. See if you can capture one.”

  He glanced around, trying to find Talia’s observation point. His gaze fixed on the drone as his helmet’s readout gave him the location.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I have a lot of information at my disposal, Vance,” she patiently replied. “It’s a submission posture. It’s like they’re retreating back into a hole, an instinctive response.”

  “If you say so, Lady, but I’m not walking up there to peel one off the pile. Any ideas?”

  Talia channeled her image through the microdrone and materialized her warrior goddess Aspect between the squad and the ball of alien creatures. Vance jumped back in alarm. “You really should give a little more notice before you do that.”

  Talia’s Aspect glided up to the bronze-colored ball of twisted limbs and fish-shaped bodies. The leathery armor they wore was battered and scratched. With her new senses she could detect the faint pulse of the undersuit as it fed them a mix of nutrients and methane-tinged air.

  A single eye on one of the creatures slowly resolved from white to gray-green.

  Talia stared into the alien eye, commanding its attention.

  The sensors under the dome had followed the movements of the creatures since they had first burst through the portal into the administrator’s office. From this surveillance Talia assembled a record of the clicks and grunts the aliens used to communicate. As the militia spread through The City she had been running a pattern-recognition subroutine. It had now stitched together a basic translation program. It had not been as difficult as expected. The language of the invaders appeared to be a primitive one.

  She emitted a series of staccato clicks and bass rumbles through the drone. The translation played through the link to Vance’s fighters. “You will stop fighting us or you will be destroyed.”

  A tremor ran through the bunched aliens. “If we fight we die, if we do not fight we die,” came forth a reply, echoing off the walls like wooden sticks clattering to the ground.

  “Explain yourself.”

  “One of the large ones… like you… came to our world… It said it would take us to a place with food. It said we must come, or pain would follow.”

  “Tell me about this large one.”

  “The large one deceived,” The clicks and rumbles dragged out, like a whine or moan. The pupil of its eye flicked away, scanning Vance and his squad. “It said to destroy the large one that guarded this habitat, and then feast upon all who remained. But these are not food creatures! We tried to eat them, but they do not nourish, and now they bring pain.”

  “Listen to me. I protect this place now. I will not allow you to harm my people, even if it means killing you all.” She paused to let the words sink in. “My people were surprised by your arrival, but they are warriors by nature, and are now organized for fighting. They will no longer run. They will bring pain.”

  A clattering arose from inside the ball, several alien voices at once. One coherent thought cut through the noise. “Send us home, great one!”

  “It is beyond my power.”

  A low howl emerged from the massed creatures. She didn’t need a translator to grasp the meaning of it.

  A surge of anger raced through Talia. She had been uplifted by a god, raised just high enough to shoulder the burdens of her weakened people and perceive the shadowy movements of higher powers. Her senses were greatly expanded, remote mechanisms responded instantly to her command, and the information at her disposal was immense.

  But at her core she still felt like the young woman who had spent her life in the temples digging up scraps of ancient knowledge. From that perspective, viewing these pitiful creatures dragged from some distant world to make war on beings they never knew existed, she recognized a dark theme from antiquity. Their situation was like some all-too human tale of ancient gods from Earth using lesser creatures for their own inscrutable ends, oblivious to the carnage left in their wake.

  Her Aspect turned to face the troops.

  “These creatures are mere thralls, enslaved to do the bloody work of our true enemies,” she said brusquely. “Gather them up and take them to the Sixpoint Arena. We’ll collect them there until I figure out what to do with them.”

  The troops moved silently to comply, casting guarded looks at the image of the goddess. The men seemed subdued, their earlier bravado dampened.

  And I bark orders, holding myself as far above them as Faraway or Triton did with these creatures.

  I am not them. I am not Tower.

  Whatever I am, I am not a god. Just a human being wired and twisted and reborn so I can protect our people. That’s good enough.

  That thought seemed to lift her. She called out to Vance. He turned, an inquisitive expression on his face. “Vance, you’ve done well. All of you have done well,” she said. “You’ve secured our first victory since this whole thing began. The City owes you its gratitude.”

  He nodded and glanced toward the men in his squadron. Some unspoken message passed between them.

  The tension seemed to evaporate as they surrounded the bunched aliens, who were gingerly disentangling their limbs.

  This will do, she reflected. A thousand other functions hummed in the machinery that fed her mind, but her focus was on the flesh-and-blood human beings around her, the last remnants of a scattered race. The people of the dome needed not just external protection, but inspiration, inner motivation, hope. They needed to feel they controlled their own destiny and were not just pawns of higher powers, no matter how well-intentioned those powers might be.

  Tower, I love you for what you were. But if we survive I’m going to take this city in a very different direction. Very different.

  19

  The Hightower

  Mik felt like a stranger on his own ship.

  He had started thinking about it that way���“his” ship, even though it was anything but. He was well-aware that the unnamed starship was a desperate gift from a dying god to his people, piloted by a man who just barely had the ability to operate it.

  But even in the short time it had been his to command he had felt a kinship with the vessel, a connection that was almost personal.

  The arrival of Maelstrom had crowded him out, however.

  The essence of the god occupied every circuit of the ship, every power cell, every quantum sliver of computer memory. Even that was insufficient���the power of Maelstrom extended even beyond the confines of the hull. Strange objects orbited the vessel at a distance, positions shifting as they danced to unfathomable commands. A glowing magnetic field surrounded the ship as it streaked across the subspace region that people referred to as Divine Space, for lack of adequate words to describe it.

  If only they knew.

  Divine Space had new meaning for Mik now. As far as he could tell, Maelstrom had no physical body, although Mik was no longer allowed access to the central habitat where some core of the god apparently resided. He wasn’t exactly sure how he felt to find out the stories of the gods were true���Maelstrom had indeed left all flesh-and-blood connections behind and now existed as some sort of intelligent array of magnetic fields and organized particles. What it was doing drifting in the gravitational embrace of an unnamed star and a doomed planet in this unlikely stellar cluster was anybody’s guess.

  It made Mik wonder how such a being could maintain its connection to humanity, and why it would even try.

  That had been reinforced during Mik’
s first and so far only conversation with the god. Maelstrom was no warm and fuzzy deity. Even grim Tower, protector and guardian of The City, could flash a sense of humor and seemed to understand the needs and motivations of people.

  When the god had finally responded to the ship’s hails, it had been a blunt and chilly exchange.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  “My name is Mik, of the Tralee line. I have been sent to find you, um, great Maelstrom,” Mik said, bowing his head slightly and instantly feeling ridiculous for doing so. “The City is besieged by alien forces. “

  WHERE IS TOWER?

  “He fights, but was dying at the time he sent me. He asks that you return and help us repel the invaders.”

  DYING? WHO ATTACKS THE CITY?

  “Tower did not know at the time I left,” Mik said. “But there were ugly long-legged aliens pouring through some kind of portal inside The City, and then a fleet of ships from another group of aliens in orbit around Lodias. There are images and reports in the ship’s memory.”

  Maelstrom had somehow reached out and enveloped the ship, taking command of every function. He had been silent since then, lost in godly brooding for all Mik knew.

  His head was still pounding from the exchange. More than the exchange, he at last determined. The attributes of Divine Space were amplified now, pressing in on him.

  It was the speed.

  During his trip to the stellar cluster Mik had been in awe at the apparent speeds the ship had attained, but that was nothing compared to now. Maelstrom rode the ship like a beast out of legend, propelling it across distances like some ancient deity might have commanded a winged horse between the realms of gods and men.

  Mik had attempted to monitor the progress, but the effort left him disoriented and queasy. He disengaged from the sensors and closed his eyes, reclining his seat in hopes of enticing sleep.

  He let out a deep breath. It was an immense relief to be simply human again, alone with his human thoughts.

  Even after being separated so briefly, however, he realized he did miss his union with the great ship. It would take him a lifetime to truly understand the complexities of the starship that Tower had created. The engineer in him marveled at the complexity and genius of its design, which he had now thoroughly experienced in action.

  Even without a ship’s mind to command it, the vessel was remarkable, probably the most advanced ship in human history. With a god powering it, the starship should be well-nigh invulnerable.

  In that moment the ship’s name came to him.

  The Hightower.

  MIK.

  He jerked to alertness as the voice resonated in his head.

  “Yes sir! Er, yes, Great Maelstrom.”

  ROUSE YOURSELF. I WILL SOON RETURN CONTROL OF THIS SHIP TO YOU.

  “You will? Why would you do that?” Any thought that his role in this fight was over, that the god would shoulder the burden and that life might soon return to normal, was crushed.

  WE ARE ALMOST BACK TO THE CITY.

  “Already?”

  PREPARE FOR WAR, AS BEST YOU CAN.

  20

  The Administrator’s Secret

  The Sixpoint stadium was steadily filling with the captured aliens. They bunched together in sullen defeat, shivering under the glare of the hostile light spectrum that poured down from the river of light along the inner surface of the dome.

  Talia’s Aspect walked among them, a small fleet of microdrones hovering above. Her presence seemed to cow the aliens further. She was a visible manifestation of larger powers, the kind of powers that had scooped them from their own world and flung them to this unfamiliar place. Their eyes turned that sickly shade of white as she passed close by them.

  She tried to bear them no malice, pawns that they were, but found whatever magnanimity lived within her soul had not exactly reached divine levels yet.

  Anger smoldered within her.

  The total of the dead was two hundred and seventy-eight across The City. It could have been much worse, but that was still a horrifying loss. The pain of their deaths would echo into the future, precious lives culled from a nowhere-near-recovered human population. Never since the founding of The City had so many people died in such a short period of time.

  Two hundred and seventy-eight people.

  And one god.

  She had not had time to dwell on it, however. Most of her attention had been required elsewhere. The fury of Tower’s death throes still echoed through the systems that kept The City alive. The explosion that had wiped out the invading fleet and silenced Faraway had not left The City untouched. Many sensors had been lost, and the outer coat of radiation shielding protecting the dome had degraded severely. Hospitals were overrun, and ever since her first appearance, people had been flooding the temples beseeching her for answers and aid.

  She found her thoughts often turned toward Mik as well. Despite her newfound powers, she had been unable to contact the ship that carried him across the void on his desperate mission.

  I need you, Mik. Come back in one piece.

  There was another loose end���the Outward Administrator. Clearing up the mystery of his actions had taken a lower spot on the priority list, with life-and-death matters requiring her full attention. But now, she could not shake the feeling that he somehow had played a larger role in everything that had happened.

  Talia had not been able to access any live remote images or data from his office atop Spire Eight, as it had been largely destroyed during the first few minutes after the portal opened and the aliens poured through. The last she had seen of the office was when she had flung herself through the shattered window opening and into the wings of the axis flyers.

  The look on the man’s face had been terrifying, an inhuman grimace that could never be mistaken for an actual smile. She could recall the memory perfectly, of course, fleeting though it was. She replayed the images in her mind. The man’s sickly grin had never wavered while invaders poured through the alien portal. He had clearly been compromised in some way.

  Talia dispatched one of her microdrones to the top floor of the building. When it arrived in the office she materialized one of her Aspects around it.

  The administrator’s body still sat propped up in the chair, motionless, the sickening grin she had witnessed earlier frozen on his face. His flesh was pale, his eyes red. A trail of blood ran from his nose, over his lips and to the bottom of his chin.

  His golden hair, however, was perfect.

  Normally, the presence of a dead administrator in his office would initiate a scene of chaos, with constables and lab robots swarming over every surface as they conducted their investigation. But the appearance of the aliens had upended all normal activity in The City. Other bodies lay scattered on the floor in the same places they had fallen in those first minutes of the invasion. What law enforcement The City employed was engaged in the effort of rounding up or eradicating the spider-legged aliens. Everyone else was in hiding.

  Here, all was silent. The dead were unmourned.

  Talia accessed the administrator’s personnel record and travel log from The City’s overfile. As a Radiant Acolyte she had known vaguely of the man, as his position was high-profile enough that he was occasionally seen on news feeds. Now, his entire life was open to her. She scanned the information in less than a second, and saw nothing out of the ordinary for a man in his position.

  She opened the files on his recent travels and examined the patterns.

  He had been off-world recently, inspecting one of the power-generation platforms that drew energy from the stormy upper altitudes of Lodias. There had been a five-hour window when Skyra and the power-generation platform had been on opposite sides of the gas giant world. And by odd coincidence, the polar satellites that could have relayed communications from the far side had been off-system for command protocol upgrades.

  A five-hour block of silence.

  She pulled up surveillance images of the administrator from the spaceport’s records
and from the internal logs of Spire Eight, both before and after the trip.

  The difference in his appearance and mannerisms was obvious.

  So. That’s where they got him.

  Talia called from around The City more microdrones into the shattered office building. Through the drones she focused every sensor in her arsenal upon the misshapen heap in the chair.

  As the sensors did their work a picture emerged of the body down to the molecular level.

  She found the corruption instantly, and wrinkled her nose despite herself. There was an almost microscopic hole in the back of his skull. Inside the head was a small orb of metal. From it, tendrils spread throughout the brain. Dark areas indicating cellular necrosis surrounded the tendrils.

  There was nothing left of the man who had been the administrator. At the end, he had been as much a puppet as the strange creatures being herded into Sixpoint Stadium.

  Are we all so small to be manipulated and used this way?

  The administrator’s mouth dropped open suddenly and a hissing sound emerged as air was forced from his lungs. The body jerked as it spastically drew in abbreviated breaths. Then its head turned in a gruesome approximation of life and stared directly at Talia’s Aspect.

  She felt a chill in her natural human body, buried so far under the surface.

  The corpse emitted a wet-sounding gurgle that carried barely recognizable words. “They are gone.”

  At first Talia was too stunned to respond. Seconds ticked by. “Yes.”

  “They will return.”

  “What are you?”

  “Female projection, what are you? I carry a message for the gods of mankind only.”

  “I am a creation of one of those gods. With his dying breath, Tower bestowed upon me the powers necessary to defend The City.”

  The body was silent as whatever guiding power that animated its movements processed the information.

  “I will speak,” it said at last. “I am the remnants of Faraway, uncorrupted, hidden from the Otrid and its allies. I bear knowledge you will need, City protector.”

  As soon as the name “Faraway” emerged from the bloody lips of the administrator’s corpse, Talia pulled the full focus of her attention into the room. She powered up a series of weapons in the microdrones that surrounded her Aspect and called every nearby battle drone and servitor robot to her side.