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

by Steve Statham

  “Why should I trust you? Faraway betrayed us, and killed the god I served.”

  If the Faraway voice could tell that it was surrounded by powered-up weapons, it seemed not to notice.

  “That Faraway was captured and remade into a tool of the enemy,” came the gravelly, slurred words. “Before the end, she/I collected the last thoughts of her/our true self and hid them among the systems of the enemy, so that they might be returned to human space. You must know the nature of the threat we face.”

  “Then tell me, Faraway fragment, and do not delay. I have no time for word games.”

  The microdrone sensors revealed a new surge of energy from the area where the orb was lodged in the late administrator’s brain. The dead eyes glowed an intense shade of orange before fading to a milky whiteness. Talia could perceive a sensor sweep playing across her Aspect and the microdrones, and even into her communications net beyond.

  She could see that the sensor sweep was probing the patterns of thought that linked her Aspect and the microdrones to The City at large. Talia let it continue without interruption.

  “All very human, as I said. Do I pass your test?”

  “Elevated human thought patterns confirmed,” came the ghoulish reply. The voice of the dead administrator was barely intelligible as the jaw dropped open once more and words poured out in a jumble. “New portals will open. The Otrid will return, and with them a fearsome new foe. They will seek to subvert any gods they find, thus leaving the greatest stronghold of humanity defenseless.”

  The orb inside the man’s skull emitted one last pulse of energy and an enormous file emerged in her secure cache, a virtual mountain of information.

  The final memories of a god.

  21

  The First to Fall

  Memory/Thought package: Final log before corruption

  Encryption Level: Godvoice Access

  Source: Faraway of The Seven

  The faint light from the star barely reached this small world. Sheets of dark ice dominated the surface of the planet, giving the landscape a mottled appearance. Any species sending a probe for a quick survey mission would find nothing of interest, no signs of life.

  Faraway knew better.

  The planet was utterly unremarkable, a rocky, frozen world out on the fringes of a largely desolate system.

  And yet…

  A voice at the very edge of perception had been calling out to her from somewhere in this region. She had tracked it relentlessly. Something was here, something unknown, and it was her function to uncover any potential alien threats that could imperil humanity.

  She brought her ship into orbit.

  The reflected starlight glowed softly on the ice fields below, shifting from deep blues to cool purples. She viewed the panorama with every sensor at her disposal. Her ship was a transparent sphere, practically a small moon in its own right. The lower half was sheathed in semi-living ceramics that concealed the mechanisms that housed her physical body, along with the biological ecosystem that sustained it. A fleet of specialized probes and instruments she had created orbited the ship in a diffuse cloud.

  Her instruments detected no life and no electro-magnetic activity that would indicate advanced machinery. No lights shone in the darkness.

  But the whispering background noise continued.

  There were really only two possibilities; either she was going mad and hearing hallucinatory voices in her head as her divine powers failed her, or there really were voices in the dark between stars, corrupting her thoughts.

  Faraway searched her systems again for signs of defect. She had been growing increasingly worried about her mental health. She had been so long in isolation, longer than any being derived from human stock. Faraway’s explorations had taken her so far out beyond where any human had traveled that she sometimes wondered if she could ever truly find her way back. Contact with the other gods had become more infrequent in recent years as her companions drifted further away and deeper into their own interests. When you’ve been bouncing around the galaxy for a millenium, a gap of ten or fifteen years between meetings was nothing.

  And so she entertained herself with the nearly infinite supply of memories locked within her core, and other diversions such as a god might pack for an endless journey. She created shadow versions of herself with which to converse, endowing each with distinct personality patterns, mostly hers, but some culled from ancient works of fiction or modeled on others she had known before the destruction of Earth.

  Increasingly she found herself reliving her years as the girl Susanti, running along sunlit Indonesian beaches back on Earth, always trying to escape her family and capture a few precious moments of blessed solitude where the waves lapped against the shore.

  As the centuries unspooled, however, it was becoming difficult to untangle her true self from those happy memories. Sometimes her spirit ran on those long-lost beaches and she briefly forgot who she was���an artificial deity floating through the outer reaches of the galaxy in search of dangers to mankind.

  Not for the first time, she regretted not bringing along a small contingent of people to keep her company, another small human community. She knew they would not thrive in such a limited environment, yet there were still times when she was furious with herself for not conscripting some anyway. Was she or was she not a higher power, raised above the common concerns of simple biological organisms?

  A god without worshippers is a pitiful creation, she ruefully reflected.

  No, do not go down that path. I am here for them, not the other way around.

  That was another perspective she was having trouble maintaining.

  Faraway was readying a series of probes to launch toward the icy worldlet when every danger signal from every sensing device in her arsenal lit to shrieking life.

  Analysis routines ran at light speed on parallel networks and in less than a second she realized with astonishment that whatever the danger was, it was happening right here within her sphere.

  She spread her consciousness across all her shadow Aspects and throughout the ship’s systems. Her orbiting cross-spectrum eye flashed to life, instantly locating and fixing upon the breach.

  Some entity had opened a portal right through the shell of her ship, smashing through the passive defenses that were always activated.

  A cylindrical portal of exotic energies, existing half within and half outside of local space, stabbed into the sanctuary of her starship. A fierce wind swirled near the opening as the ship’s internal atmosphere rushed toward it. Data flooded in through her sensors, telling her the other end of the portal was linked to some distant region of space.

  The voices were louder now.

  On the planet below, radiation signatures flickered to life beneath the ice sheets. Sections of ice vaporized and unknown ships began to rise, drive engines lighting the ghostly landscape. She detected energy buildups from the ships that could only indicate weapons powering up.

  It had been four hundred years since Faraway had last engaged in combat with an unknown enemy fleet, and she cursed herself now for her lax defenses. She activated the Surabaya-class fighting drones and directed a flood of stored power to them. They rained lances of charged particle beams onto the ships rising from the surface. The thin upper atmosphere of the planet rippled as the beams met the umbrellas of shielding around the ships.

  Her beams cut through the shields and slashed open two of the first ones off the ice. Through the magnification of the giant floating live-glass lens that slid across the surface of her sphere ship she witnessed the spray of gasses from the struck alien warships. With shocking speed the other ships closed together and generated a much stronger energy shield that deflected her next blasts.

  More portals opened in the space surrounding her sphere, disgorging a second layer of vessels.

  These ships did not advance, but hung back. Attuned to every surface of her own ship, Faraway could sense the waves of probing beams that flooded local space with a to
xic stew of radiation.

  She targeted the new arrivals. Sixty fresh enemies. In micro-seconds she calculated the energy distribution required to hit all the targets and readied her primary weapons….

  Something emerged from the portal inside her ship.

  Too late, Faraway realized the ships were not the primary threat.

  Hair-like filaments were snaking through the opening, too fine for a human eye to see, but not invisible to a god. They plunged into the ship’s machinery closest to the opening and flared to glowing life, colors shifting as they worked their insidious assault.

  Faraway could feel a distant corruption spreading through the neural network of the ship.

  Her servitor robots were already rushing toward the breach. They hacked away at the invasive filaments, tearing some loose. Instantly the filaments glowed white-hot, and the next thrusts by the mechanical servants resulted in sliced metal and ceramic limbs scattered across the deck.

  With a thought, Faraway altered for offensive capability one of the personal drones that served her inside the sphere-ship and send it through the portal. It slipped past the filaments and disappeared into the other side.

  She smiled when she detected a ragged pulse of energy erupt from the portal, and saw the colors of the filaments fade.

  It was a temporary reprieve.

  More of the strands emerged from the opening, as if commanded by some creature reaching in to pull itself through. They slithered across the floor, losing themselves among the machinery that kept her ship’s systems in balance.

  And then she felt something new���a pressure building against her essence, intruding on her thoughts, assaulting her inner defenses.

  Translation glyphs formed in her mind.

  “Human abomination, submit!”

  The message echoed through her soul. The language patterns were unmistakable. The danger incalculable.

  The Otrid.

  After a thousand years mankind’s oldest enemy had finally revealed themselves once more.

  The portal opening that violated the shell of her ship expanded rapidly.

  From inside, a large figure, the nightmare of the human race, emerged.

  It was a lone Otrid, although Faraway knew that it had always been hard for humans to think of them as a single being. An Otrid consisted of four separate entities forming an individual consciousness. The four life forms had evolved together on the Otrid’s homeworld, joining by way of an alien symbiosis that fused four specialized creatures into one unit.

  According to every human study of the creatures ever conducted, plus the limited input of the Benefactors, this biological characteristic of the Otrid had colored their every encounter with other species. They looked with contempt upon intelligence singled around a lone individual, whether Beh’neefazor or human. It seemed to outrage their sensibilities that such lower creatures would dare to attempt to meet them as equals on a galactic stage.

  They especially resented the technological breakthroughs of such lesser beings that they could not duplicate. It had been the reason for their war against the Benefactors and their human allies.

  Fear and rage swirled in a toxic dance inside her.

  The Otrid were the murdering monsters that nearly exterminated the human race, and now they were coming for her.

  She would not go quietly.

  She appeared before the creature, coalescing an imposing Faraway Aspect that matched the Otrid’s twelve-foot height.

  The eyes of the Otrid pulsed as they focused on her. The segment on top was the visual center, evolved from a blunt, wedge-shaped night creature that must have originally scurried through caverns or ocean depths. Its four large eyes were spaced in a band across its face. The eye segment sat atop the towering central stalk, a thick, four-legged muscular mass that, like some great fleshy tree trunk, was the source of physical strength for the creature.

  Running down the back of the stalk like a narrow, semi-transparent slug was the stumpy sails through which the other senses of the Otrid were focused���hearing, smell, temperature reception and air pressure differentials. It, too, had in eons past been an independent creature, a highly sensitive predator that hunted the volcanic plains of the Otrid homeworld.

  The higher guiding intelligence that linked and dominated the four segments was a rough-textured black lump that reminded Faraway of an oyster shell. It was wedged for protection between the eye-segment and the top of the central stalk. It trailed dozens of web-like strands that wrapped and connected all four bodies into one individual, cohesive unit. Two whip-like appendages spilled from either side of the lump, grasping limbs for the ungainly alien.

  Faraway did not wait for the Otrid to speak. “Vile creature, patched together from refuse dredged from the cesspool of life, leave my ship or be destroyed!”

  The Otrid’s eyes shifted color, and the sail along its back undulated. “Abomination in human form, ship, yours, already ours, is. The singleton mind lacks perspective, but serve us nonetheless, it will.”

  Faraway laughed as she destroyed the creature using nine of the twenty-seven internal defense weapons at her disposal. She made a point of using the cutting beams to slice away and separate the four segments, leaving the individual components flopping on the deck.

  “Ridiculous puzzle creature, we are not so weak as when you attacked our world without warning, slinking in like vermin through the cracks of the universe.”

  She issued a command to her Surabaya-class fighting drones. They unleashed lances of focused plasma at the surrounding ships. The flares of light and radiation shone through the transparent shell of her ship, casting the interior in a purple glow. Debris clouds silently spread through local space as the outer hulls of the five nearest ships were peeled away.

  The portal expanded once more, and a phalanx of four Otrid surged through, this time shielded by a unified defense net. They screeched a furious cry as they stepped around the segments of their fallen comrade. The low sails along the creatures’ backs flushed a bright red.

  Faraway activated ten more of her ship’s internal defense systems, probing the energy net that shielded the Otrid. The beams and projectiles were deflected or absorbed as the net adapted. This sector of her sphere was now awash in radiation, yet the group of four Otrid continued forward unhindered.

  Faraway allowed herself a moment to be impressed.

  But only a moment.

  She altered the density and physical characteristics of her primary Aspect and rushed the Otrid. The ship’s higher elements channeled additional powers into this body, allowing her to project localized spatial shifts that briefly warped the fabric of space-time itself. She deployed them with a ferocious will, despite the danger the reality distortions would have on her own ship.

  The defense net of the Otrid invaders flared and crackled under the strain of her assault. The Otrid moved closer together in a square pattern, reducing the area their defense net needed to cover. The deck buckled beneath them as the spatial distortions undermined the integrity of the ship’s structure.

  It was at the moment Faraway began to believe she might actually repel the attack that she perceived a new feeling inside her neural chambers. It was a numbing sensation, as if part of her very essence was fading away.

  She diverted a substantial fraction of attention from the fight to examine this strange phenomenon.

  It was as if some force was separating the component pieces of her divinity, peeling away the human biotech from the higher powers of the Benefactors. She even perceived a separation from the uplifts she had engineered herself over the centuries, whereby she had incorporated bits of alien technology she had discovered in her lonely travels.

  The feeling accelerated as another wave of Otrid emerged through the portal. This group trailed some sort of energized cables behind them. They seemed to be straining, as if pulling a great weight.

  And then Faraway saw what those cables were attached to.

  Something else came through th
e portal, something definitely not Otrid.

  Faraway felt an immediate ripple through the connections that bound her consciousness to her ship. The sensation intensified as the creature fully emerged. She found she no longer could summon the spatial shifts she had employed only moments before. Her grip on her powers was loosening.

  And the new creature was the reason why.

  Faraway had traveled a great distance across the galaxy in her explorations, methodically expanding the inventory of safe zones and known hazards to the human race. But she had never encountered a being like this.

  Its body was a simple shape, a flattened teardrop with no visible limbs, yet it floated above ground as if swimming through the air. It had a single large eye on the top, but faraway was sure it was more than just an eye���whole worlds of intelligence and power swam in its depths.

  Many of her sensors proved worthless at probing the creature, but she quickly determined that it was something old beyond measure. Its skin was rough and dense, nearly petrified like some ancient fossil, even though it moved with a supple ease that belied its outward appearance.

  The thing radiated energy in strange wavelengths that she could not decipher. The cables that linked it to the Otrid glowed as if they contained the power of stars themselves.

  There was more. Despite it clearly being controlled by the Otrid, she could sense a dark and independent spirit. Within its probing eye was a malevolence that enjoyed her discomfort.

  Faraway had always considered the Benefactors and the Otrid as older powers in the galaxy, but now understood that there were even older beings, and darker things, than the Otrid.

  The energy emitted by the creature rose sharply as if focused its eye on her Aspect. The pressure against her increased exponentially. Some force was marching through the links that comprised her essence, like ants crawling down wires, getting closer to the core of her being. Invading programs probed her data core for information on her fellow gods, but especially Maelstrom.