The Stars Like Gods

by G. S. Jennsen

  “Palmer, it’s time to go.”

  “Not until this monster is dust. Navigation, pull back to maximum weapons range. Weapons, keep firing.”

  Now left unattended by the Rasu vessel, the wormhole began to contort. The Dauntless lurched, halted in its reversal by an increasingly unstable tear in the fabric of space.

  “Navigation, full reverse, maximum power.”

  Against the hypnotic gleam of the wormhole vortex, two dark pinpricks flickered and vanished. Small ships being drawn into the vortex—but theirs, or Rasu?

  Their hull shuddered as the engine struggled to counter the pull of potent cosmic forces. The leviathan jerked around erratically, now itself caught in the convulsing forces of the wormhole.

  Twin solar flares reached out across space and snatched another three hundred Rasu vessels in their grasp. Flares now danced freely along the photosphere, resembling the spindly arms of an octopus as they were drawn toward the deluge of electricity still churning through the inner stellar system.

  The hull of the Dauntless abruptly quietened, which Dashiel hoped to hells was a sign they had escaped the wormhole’s grasp.

  “All stations report.”

  “External sensors are down. All the energy surges overloaded them.”

  “Hull breach on Deck 5, starboard aft section. Safety doors have sealed off the exposed area.”

  “Radiation shielding at 121% capacity. Failure in eighteen seconds.”

  “Noted. Weapons, continue firing.”

  Even as Palmer issued the order, the hull of the Rasu leviathan began to deform and warp before breaking into a dozen pieces that tumbled into the wormhole and disappeared.

  “Radiation shielding failure in nine seconds.”

  “All non-essential power to engines. Depart for Rendezvous Point Bravo on my mark.”

  Commander Palmer (OpFlare): “All vessels depart for Rendezvous Point Bravo now.”

  “Mark.”

  The last sight they glimpsed was the fragmenting wormhole being devoured by a monster solar flare.

  53

  * * *

  MIRAI ONE PAVILION

  I fall….

  Nika’s eyes jerked open, but all she saw was a blinding flame of violet light imprinted on her retinas.

  She bolted upright and flailed wildly for anything solid to grasp onto as her mind swam through overlapping realities and an endless parade of death. Pain, searing into her bones even as she ran straight off the edge of the universe and tumbled—

  “Hey, hey, Nika. Breathe. You’re safe.”

  The voice echoed down a long, dark hallway that twisted and morphed and became Rasu. She knew she should run toward the voice, but she could only run away, hyperventilating until the last of her oxygen abandoned her and she was falling once more, falling forever….

  A soothing coolness radiated from the base of her neck and out through her veins, slowing her pounding heartbeat or possibly restarting it.

  She breathed air into lungs that had in fact not been shredded by a Rasu blade. Her eyes began blinking of their own accord, and shapes began to emerge from the light.

  A face stared down at her intently, concern carving deep lines around shining blueberry irises. Perrin.

  “Nika? Can you hear me?”

  “I—I—was—I’m not—I can’t—where—”

  Hands supported her shoulders as a familiar voice murmured in her ear. “You’re at the Pavilion. You’re safe.”

  Perrin’s features blurred and almost faded away, then gradually came into focus. But they remained off-kilter. Upside down? No, but….

  The hands steadying her from behind lifted, and a soft surface welcomed her. She blinked again, this time of her own volition, as genuine awareness began to take hold in her mind. She’d fallen off the cot and half onto the floor, only to be caught by…she cautiously turned her head. Maris? Behind her friend, a stranger she’d seen before stood watching. The med tech, an empty syringe in her hand and dubious scrutiny on her face.

  Maris moved to her side and grasped one of Nika’s hands in both of hers. “Be calm. Be still.”

  It sounded like excellent advice, and she attempted to follow it. Breath by breath the raw visions and brutal sensations began to recede. Not gone, but fading into memories rather than stalking her in a waking nightmare.

  She was in a room. Not really, though…a temporary room carved into a much larger one. Beyond the illusory wall of a shoji screen, voices and sounds echoed in urgent beats.

  The mission! “Did it work?”

  Perrin slid a pane in front of her. On it, brilliant explosions rippled across platform after platform after platform. They cascaded inward and outward as Rasu material plummeted into the star and the star swelled hungrily. Lattice scaffolding tore and fractured as new explosions erupted, tiny against the star’s vast surface but spreading like ants driven from their mound.

  All the air left her lungs as she sank down onto the pillow—and instantly bolted back up. “Dashiel?”

  Maris’ gaze drifted away. “They haven’t departed the system yet.”

  She swung her legs off the cot and tried to rush for the War Room past the screen, forgetting she needed to stand before she could run. Vertigo sent her perception tumbling in and out of realities—one second she was back on the platform, in thousands of places at once and dying in most of them, and the next she was fixated on the cushiony softness of a blanket that had somehow become clutched in her hand. She felt agony, she felt loss, over and over and over….

  “Nika?” Perrin’s hand was at her elbow. “Come back to us, okay?”

  Right. This sole version of her had not died at the stronghold. She was alive, with her dearest friends at her side. She nodded shakily. “Yeah. I am. I just…tell Lance to get his ass out of there.”

  “As if he would listen to us.”

  “What’s the comm channel?”

  Maris sent it to her, and she sent dual pings to Lance and Dashiel.

  Don’t fry watching the show. Get out of there.

  Palmer ignored her, but Dashiel’s response came swiftly.

  Nika, you did it. The stronghold is disintegrating. I love you.

  Then get back here so you can demonstrate your appreciation in person.

  She exhaled and let her feet touch the floor, then gingerly tested out weight on them. When she didn’t collapse to the floor in a tangled pile of limbs, she reached out to wrap her arms around Perrin and Maris. “I’m so glad your faces were the first ones I saw when I woke up. Thank you so much for being here for me.”

  Perrin squeezed her tight. “Always.”

  Maris gave her a mysterious half-smile. “As she says.”

  Maris’ definition of ‘always’ was doubtless more expansive than Perrin’s, but Nika valued them both equally, and beyond what she could measure.

  But her work wasn’t yet done. “Also, never tell anyone what a disaster I was when I first woke up.” She withdrew from the embrace and motioned toward the gap in the screen. “Let’s see what we can do to help.”

  She spotted Cameron and Terry huddled together in front of a chaotic bank of panes at the far end of the War Room. “What’s the situation?”

  Cameron looked her way in surprise. “Nika, you’re awake! What was it like in there?”

  “Hell. Tell me it was worth it.”

  “Right.” Cameron studied her briefly then motioned to the panes, which appeared to be displaying the same scene Perrin had showed her moments earlier, multiplied many times over. “Our close-range sensors have been destroyed, which is a good sign. It means the stellar activity is taking out everything in a close orbit. Here’s the last visuals the Dauntless captured.”

  The scene on one of the panes shifted to reveal a vortex similar to the one that had nearly eaten the Wayfarer during their trip to the stronghold. Only its cohesiveness was breaking down, flinging little whirlpool eddies out to rip holes in space. Rasu ships large and small tumbled into the convulsing wormho
le—

  —a wave of plasma, light and energy swept across space to consume everything. The pane went blank.

  “Gods….” She spun back to Cameron. “You said the ‘last’ visuals. The last before what?”

  “They cut it close, but they’ve escaped the system and are headed home.”

  A wave of relief-fueled dizziness washed through her, and the fading remnants of her earlier vertigo spiked to join it. She placed a steadying hand on the wall. “Good. What about casualties?”

  “At last count, we lost twenty-three ships, with crews ranging from one to five each. The Taiyoks are being typically tight-lipped regarding the health of their fleet. We know they lost a minimum of twelve vessels, but the number is probably higher. Elder Zhanre’khavet says their surviving ships have departed the stellar system and are returning to Toki’taku.”

  “I’ll talk to him later. Express our appreciation and see if I can get out of him whether they need any assistance in their recovery.” She gestured to the panes. “The fireworks show is marvelous, but what do we definitively know about Rasu losses?”

  “The Dyson lattice has been annihilated, and the nodes along with it. We recorded catastrophic damage or confirmed destruction of 6,815 of platforms and over 30,000 vessels, but the numbers are without question far higher. We have every reason to believe every single platform orbiting the star has been destroyed or will be within the next hour and the outer orbit of satellites in the next two hours, but it will take our long-range sensors a day to confirm this.

  “A Rasu leviathan was trying to escape through the wormhole you saw on the visuals. It broke apart as it was entering the vortex and disappeared. We obviously don’t know the terminus point of the wormhole, so we can’t confirm if the vessel traversed and exited the wormhole, or its state if it did so.”

  It was a complication, but if they got through this with nothing but pieces of a single Rasu escaping obliteration, they would have succeeded beyond her wildest fantasies.

  It had never been more than a desperate shoestring of a plan, cobbled together with the fervor of the doomed. And it had worked.

  She took a deep breath and did her best to inject authority and encouragement into her voice. Gods, she was tired. She felt as if she’d run a thousand marathons today…because in a way, she had. But the people in the room looked to her for guidance and inspiration. Their leader, their beacon.

  “Everyone, you’ve done an incredible job today. This week, this month. The details will take a little while to sort out, but I daresay you’ve saved the Dominion. You’ve saved all of us. Congratulations.”

  She smiled and acknowledged the cheers that broke out, then turned back to Cameron and lowered her voice. “Stay on full alert…if nothing changes, for another four hours. Ping me immediately if anything does change. After that, it’ll be time to start thinking about how we protect ourselves from the longer-term consequences of what we’ve done today.”

  NAMINO

  This time, Nika was waiting on him at the spaceport. A different spaceport, one busily managing a fleet of returning military ships. A victorious fleet.

  The hull of the Dauntless bore dozens of scorch marks and a ten-meter-long gash beneath its aft section. It was supposed to be a command vessel, but Lance hadn’t exactly played it safe, had he?

  She lurked off to the side of the ramp, hopefully hidden from view, and waited until Dashiel had descended the ramp to leap out from the shadows and wrap him up in her arms.

  “Nika!” He lifted her in the air to twirl her around. “You did it.”

  “We did it.” She kissed his lips, then his nose, then his eyelids, then craned her head back to meet his gaze. “It looks as though you had an exciting time of things.”

  “There might have been a few tense minutes, and a few more of utter terror. But nothing compared to what you endured. Will you tell me what it was like for you?”

  Her gaze dropped to study the woven fabric of his shirt.

  “It’s okay. If it was painful, you don’t have to talk about it. I won’t make you relive it.”

  “It was. But it was also incredible and world-altering and…I’m still trying to figure it all out. I will tell you about it, but not just yet. Is that all right?”

  “Of course. We have time now.”

  She nuzzled his nose as he eased her to the ground. She thought she saw Lance disembarking in her peripheral vision, but he could wait his turn. “What’s the status of the d-gates?”

  “All destroyed. We dropped sensors on our way through, then watched as they exploded one after another. Any Rasu who survived will have to find us the hard way. But we need to be able to protect ourselves when they do.”

  She nodded. “Yes, we do, and we already have some ideas on that. Want to head to the Pavilion with me and hear about them?”

  He groaned. “I don’t get to sleep now?”

  “Soon, darling. Soon.”

  54

  * * *

  MIRAI ONE PAVILION

  Nika studied Parc with a healthy dose of skepticism. “And this is really feasible?”

  “The ceraffin think so.”

  She sighed as they strolled beneath the canopy of the snowbell trees outside the Pavilion. Yes, the ceraffin had played a number of important roles in helping them to destroy the Rasu stronghold. They’d sifted through the science and the numbers in novel ways on the KA bombs and the Rasu programming code; her own ceraff had made it possible for 8,000 copies of her to work together to navigate the maze of a city-sized Rasu platform and disable the stronghold’s safeguards. They were poised to revolutionize Asterion society in ways no one could yet fathom.

  But ceraffin were simply a bunch of Asterions in intimate mental proximity, and she refused to abandon valuing the individuals behind the collective.

  “What do you think?”

  “Yeah. It’s feasible. It’ll be expensive as all hells, and it’s going to require the invention of new materials, new ways to combine them, new programming and so on. It’ll be a gargantuan undertaking. But we can do it. We can create planet-scale cloaking shields that will hide us from the Rasu.”

  “Then let’s do it. Do you want to be in charge?”

  Parc grunted. “Hells, no. Being in charge means responsibility. I’m already on to the next revolutionary idea.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ll let you know when we think of it. Possibly large, deployable weapons based on the archine blade, or a family of smart worms designed to fuck up Rasu systems. Oh, and we’ve already got a theoretical model for a variation on d-gates that won’t require a fixed terminus point to use. It’ll revolutionize space travel.”

  “Seriously?”

  “So seriously. I’m recommending we call it a Sukasu Gate. Don’t worry, you’ll be hearing a lot about it in a few days. As for the planetary shielding? Honestly, your sweetie should be in charge of the initiative. Maybe it’ll distract him from developing a counter to kamero filters once he finishes designing a commercial ceraff node.”

  “We’re not rebels any longer, Parc.”

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t have a passing use for a kamero filter from time to time. Or, I mean Ryan does.”

  “Uh-huh.” They reached the entrance to the Pavilion, which finally looked as good as new, and she patted him on the shoulder. “All right, I have to go meet with some people. Keep the ideas coming.”

  Grant was waiting on her in the first-floor lounge. She gave him a hug, though it felt weird for a thousand reasons. “Thanks for agreeing to come by.”

  He withdrew from the hug quickly, as if he shared her discomfort. “I told you before—you ask of me what you need to.”

  For the millionth time since all this began, she wished she could remember every second of the last 700,000 years. They had been frequent friends over those aeons, and lovers somewhat less often. His declaration, and the weighty yet resolute sentiment adding conviction to his words, hinted at the complexity of that history, forever lost
to her.

  She smiled hesitantly and leaned against the table behind her. “Funny you say that, because I am going to ask something of you. I wish I didn’t need to—you have a great life, and I don’t want to disrupt it—but the time has come for all of us to dedicate ourselves to something greater than ourselves. Grant, it’s time for you to rejoin the world and step up, maybe in a way only First Genners can. Step up to fight for not just our way of life, but our lives, period.”

  “I know it is.” He stared at the floor for several seconds before nodding thoughtfully. “It was a nice 100,000 years while it lasted. What do you need me to do?”

  She exhaled in relief. She’d worried he’d require a harder sell. “Use what you’ve learned in those 100,000 years and apply your clever, crafty psyche to some new initiatives. I want you to work with Lance Palmer and Dashiel to design new warships. Design modifications to existing warships and whatever other crazy ideas you can devise. We need ships that play to Asterion strengths and incorporate new tech the ceraffin are developing. Ships that can use Taiyok stealth capabilities and better weapons to match the Rasu on the battlefield.”

  “Is that all?” He winked at her, and for a moment everything was okay between them again. “I can live with those directives.”

  “Wonderful. Come upstairs with me and join the team.”

  Couches and lounge chairs had taken the place of tables and workstations in what had briefly been the War Room. Even if they couldn’t relax as such, they could act as if they were relaxing while they worked.

  Then Cameron wheeled in a cooler stocked full of beer and cocktails…so perhaps they were relaxing.

  Nika settled in next to Dashiel on one of the couches and watched with a trace of amusement as Grant was welcomed as an old friend by Lance. Because of course he was.

  She dropped her head onto Dashiel’s shoulder, murmuring in contentment when he kissed her hair. They’d slept for fourteen solid hours the evening, night and morning before—then made love, cooked breakfast and gone back to bed for another four hours. On waking the second time, she’d almost begun to feel like herself. It had been a decadent luxury to indulge in and sorely needed, but they couldn’t afford to laze around any longer.