* * *
LXII
Again, around the sacred peak Jsalm gather the gods of Aurore. They assemble themselves for the second time in less than a standard year, the frequency in itself a remarkable occurrence.
The Regency gathers all its Fleet against Aurore. Laughter suffuses the group.
Where are Thor and Dian? For surely Thor should stand in the forefront to defend us against the Empire, since he has caused this expedition of vengeance. And Dian should stand for Martel, who is no more. Laughter again rains upon the assembled gods. Apollo and the Smoke Bull cross glances, if Apollo's glance at the insubstantial substance and infinite depths of the Minotaur can be considered a crossing of glances. Still, the meaning is plain, for each suspects the other. No one answers the anonymous question. No one knows. First, Martel has gone. Then Thor and Dian/Emily. The unseen danger may be more threat than the Empire, offers Thetis, green and wet. The Smoke Bull nods. After a time, Apollo agrees.
But first Karnak must be smashed, taught a lesson to end all lessons. Then we will seek out the unseen danger.
The gods and demigods find Apollo's summation to their liking, and they repair to where they individually repair and begin their preparations for the Grand Fleet of the Empire.
A sleeping woman turns over in silksheen sheets, where she has dreamed what has transpired, and sobs, but wakes not, and will remember nothing of what she has dreamed.
A man in black watches from a distance, and smiles a grim smile, and begins his preparations.
The Fleet Commander touches a switch, and the Grand Fleet swings to point toward a relatively ordinary star which is circled by an extraordinary planet.
The twenty-third Emperor of the Empire of Light shakes his head as a shadow passes before his eyes, but continues his play with his latest mistress.
A man in red addresses silent prayers to an undeclared god, while the Marshal of Strategy makes sure his laser is fully charged.
A goddess watches a demigod exercise with shield and sword, trying to hold back a vision of a leaden shield wreathed in black. She shudders and turns away.
* * *
LXIII
For the importance of the mission, the ship is termed a cruiser, but, in reality, is nothing more than a corvette with a cruiser's drives and screens. The Captain, uniformed in Imperial blue, is a recently promoted full Captain looking toward a complete and distinguished career. “Range?” he barks.
“Point five, closing at point two per stan, sir.” The Captain settles himself back into his padded command seat. Another two stans must pass before he can start the deployment. In the meantime, the main Fleet should be arriving near outsystem Aurore.
“Not for a while yet, I suspect,” a strange voice intrudes. The Captain bolts upright, grabs for his sidearm, and points the laser at the man in black who has appeared beside him.
“My name's Martel, Captain Ellerton. You can use that if you want, but I can assure you it won't work.”
The Captain, his belief in visible technology supreme, thumbs the firing stud. Nothing happens. “Now that we've gotten that out of the way—”
“Marines! Imperial Marines to the bridge!” Martel smiles.
The Captain looks at the rest of the bridge crew, who proceed with their routine as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring. For them, nothing is… mad, going mad… mad… “No, you're quite sane, Captain. Quite.” Martel waits again, waits until the Captain is ready to accept his presence. Then he lays a hand upon the man's shoulder to emphasize his physical reality. “What do you want?”
“Your understanding and your cooperation.”
“Maybe the first, but never the second!” blusters the officer. “Both, I think,” Martel contradicts, “once you understand. You see, very shortly, in about one stan, I imagine, I'm going to appear out in empty space on your screens, and as you release the components of the Suntunnel, I'm going to blast them and their boosters out of existence. Now, without a record of that, Captain, you are going to be in very deep trouble. Even with such a record, you'll probably face a court-martial. So I would suggest two things. First, that you use the next stan to arrange to get a permanent record of what will in fact appear on your screens. Second, that you do your absolute and total best to destroy me.”
“Sounds like that's what you want. Why should I?”
“Look at it this way. If I'm just a figment of your imagination, you'll have a perfect recording of your successful deployment. If not, you're covered. And if I do destroy all your hardware, and you don't make an all-out effort to destroy me, where does that leave you?” The Captain wipes his suddenly damp brow.
“All right,” the skipper concedes, “but tell me what's in it for you.”
“That's simple, Captain. It just might save me the difficulty of having to destroy three or four successors to you.”
The Imperial Captain looks away. “I don't understand. Who are you?”
“I'm Martel. I told you that. I don't like destroying ships, and I'd just as soon not. If the Viceroy keeps sending ships with devices to destabilize Aurore's sun, I'll eventually have to do something drastic, and I'd rather give advance warning. Then I won't feel quite so guilty.”
The Captain realizes he is still holding down the firing stud on his laser, and he releases it. The ache in his thumb reminds him how long he has pressed the stud. He looks up at Martel to find the space next to himself empty. The man in black is gone.
As a believer in visible technology, he checks the charge meter on the butt of the sidearm. Empty. He knows it had been fully charged when he took the bridge, and he has only used it once… without effect. He tries to persuade himself that he has seen nothing and talked to no one, but after a few units he touches the commweb.
“Communications? Captain Ellerton here. Send Commander Sirien to the bridge.”
Whoever, whatever, Martel is, his logic, flame it all, is unassailable.
* * *
LXIV
germic: ah, what's the bigger mystery?
That man ever was, Or that he'll always be?
joris: some say one night a thousand ships
Fell across a thousand skies, Like hope, which always flies.
germic: Dear lady, from whence we came, Either from the thousand ships and skies.
Or from a single orb of fame, Matters not when each man dies.
—Excerpt from Act II, Home Divided
Yves N. Dorben
* * *
LXV
Martel paces across the porch, one quick step after another.
Both the problem of arrogant gods, himself among them, and an arrogant Viceroy, whom he has created, remain.
The real Empire is the Regency, not New Augusta, and its power lies in the Viceroy. The time of the Brotherhood has come, but unless both the Empire and the gods are vanquished, one will re-create the other. “Gotterdammerung,” he whispers, and it is a promise. Not only to himself, but to his followers, for he can no longer escape them. Declared or not, gods of human societies are created in part by their worshippers, which is what Apollo has known and feared for a millennium.
Martel pictures the thousands who thronged a small black temple on Karnak, and all of the small shrines on Aurore where shadows are cast.
“Perhaps the forbidden fruit is best,” he says to no one, for no one is with him, now or ever. He looks down at the silver triangle upon his black belt, then touches the glistening black thunderbolt pin that holds his cloak. Both are appropriate. Can he do what he plans?
He does not know, for no one has ever tried. At least, it is nowhere recorded.
Colossal arrogance, Martel… colossal arrogance… He agrees with his thought, gathers the darkness around himself, and removes himself to a point in space where he can watch the planet which is not a planet, but which is called Aurore, as if the name were the answer to everything.
First… to remove the base of power of the gods.
Second… to scatter the gods.
Fourth… the Viceroy.
To begin, he looks upon Aurore, looks upon the planet that should not be, in a way that none of the gods before him has. He understands why the forty-nine percent of the human scientists who have studied Aurore and who insist it is not a planet are correct.
Or, rather, why Aurore is more than just a planet. He imposes, for to impose is the only way to describe what he does, the imprint of darkness across the upper reaches of the golden-hazed energy field that is, that surrounds, Aurore. ANGER!
A ray of golden haze gathers itself from the field and arrows out from Aurore toward the point of blackness, within the wider darkness, that is Martel.
Four demigods hovering around a certain sacred peak feel their powers abruptly waning and move themselves to solid ground, their faces nearly as white as the snow that caps the peak they had soared above.
The E. W. officer of the Viceroy's lead scout gulps as his power registers, focused on Aurore, peg off the scale. He hesitates, then jabs the commweb with one hand while defocusing his receivers with the other. He is not fast enough, and the power amplifiers for the last intake screen sag into molten plastics, ceramics, and metal.
Martel calls shadows from beneath the here and now, from beneath the past, and from a future that may never be, drawing as he never has, knowing that without all that he can focus, he will not be able to deflect the raw force that the field which is Aurore has directed at him.
The cold of black fires shimmers around him, both blinding and swallowing light, one and the same. And the black fires build, and build to an intensity that will befuddle astronomers across the galaxies for so long as the energies carry.
“Flamehell! See what I see?” asks the Scout Captain, who is but a subcommander.
“I think so.” That is his navigator, who sees it all through unpowered screens, the forces are so great.
Both know that what they see has long since transpired, and that lends to the wrenching at their guts.
In a series of flashes, one after another, bolts of brilliant yellow flare from the “nightside” of Aurore, each one somehow brighter than the last, until each rivals momentarily the brilliance of the sun unseen by Aurore's inhabitants. Each energy bolt, millennia into the future, will confuse and confound astronomers, those few who are looking as the light recording the phenomena slips through their system, throughout the Galaxy.
Each bolt strikes the black dot, englobed in black fire, which stands in space. Each fails to splash or to penetrate, but disappears. Disappears, and with each disappearance the blackness grows, becomes more deeply luminescent.
With the energy he has summoned, and with that he has gathered, Martel does two things.
The first is a gentle nudge, enough to shake a few buildings, to raise foot-high waves on the stillest ponds, to the celestial body called Aurore.
The second is a cast of darkness around the planet that has not known it in millennia, perhaps in eons, since it was created by the energy field that has made Aurore what it is.
Apollo stands upon the portico of a vacant pale golden and marble villa west of Sybernal, where he seeks some sign. As he stands the sky dims, and dims further, until the gloom resembles twilight.
Martel, he thinks, though he knows not why, except that the darkness itself calls to mind the one whom Thor had thought vanquished, and who, Apollo knows with cold certainty, is not vanquished. Who may be triumphant. Who will triumph, the sun-god fears. STOP!
Apollo reels under the force of the projection. The transmission is not a word, but a massive concept rolling outward from Aurore and bouncing back from the wall of darkness which Martel has drawn around the golden sphere that has been called Aurore. STOP!
Martel knows what he must do, if he can, and girds himself. Apollo watches from the villa as the golden haze above the sky thins, flows in ebbing sheets eastward until it coalesces into a golden ball, a dim second sun.
The western sky is black and starless, and the sungod who was shivers.
The new-formed golden-haze sun contracts, brightens, and elongates into a wedge, pointed against the darkness, finally launching itself toward that darkness.
The sky of Aurore is jet-black where the sun-god stands, and for the First time since man has been on Aurore, darkness falls. Falls like thunder, but with no flash of lightning to break the black depths that are the sky.
Martel smiles as he views the energy field that was Aurore, that created Aurore, flee the planet it built. He parts the darkness to let the golden and white glittermotes flee their planet and the energy-sucking darkness that he has fastened upon it.
From his dark heights, he tosses darkness at the golden wedge, black lightning thrust after lightning thrust. Then, as he chivvies the ancient ones on their way, he opens a tunnel, a tunnel in time, back to when a certain F0 star was younger, and without a planet. The circle is complete. What is, is. The field, the glittermotes, will remember, and when they do, they will build the planet they remember, the one human astronomers will claim is impossible. Which it is, but that's beside the point. Without the field, the place that is now just a planet called Aurore will not be habitable. For that reason, Martel has already nudged Aurore toward its ultimate destination. In the meantime, the cloak of darkness, which will thin over time, will protect it and its cargo until the planet reaches that stable orbit which Martel has planned for it and for the delicate organisms that inhabit its surface.
Martel, drawing on his powers of darkness again, twists time, so that what will be done is done. He withdraws the curtain of protection.
And Apollo beholds the first sunrise on Aurore and weeps. That is, before the shadow of the Raven catches him and before he is swirled back through another tunnel of time to a back-distant place where he will be worshiped. The Smoke Bull, standing upon the heights on the far side of the Middle Sea, observes the approaching sunset and anticipates the darkness that will fall. Before this occurs, another darkness descends upon him and carries him back to the time when he will see sunrises above a wine-dark sea and bring his own darkness to those who will cause his name to remain a symbol of fear for well beyond the years he has left without the energy field upon which he once relied.
In turn, the shadow of the Raven falls across the fallen gods and demigods of Aurore, and they are dispatched to generate the legends from which they sprang. All but two. One is Martel, the Raven, the undeclared god. The second he will deal with later, for now he must meet the third challenge. The Grand Fleet, discounting the reports of the scoutship, draws near, intent upon reducing Aurore to a cinder.
Martel, in his cloud of darkness, sighs, and rises once again into the night. He ignores the genuflections that accompany his departure.
* * *
LXVI
Martel debates but a moment before drifting through time and space to meet the Grand Fleet before it nears the new orbit of Aurore, which is now merely a planet, albeit a technically impossible one with a slightly tilted axis and a too-circular orbit.
Should I have given it a greater axial angle than a mere seven and a half degrees?
He shrugs. For all the powers he has mastered, he has never learned orbital mechanics, nor the mathematics necessary. As for the distance from the sun that should be planetless… that was merely the matching of energy flows. The “year” will be longer, much longer, and the architecture will have to change with the introduction of nights, cold winds, seasons, and chill.
Aurore will lose much of its attraction as the resort of endless day and home of the gods and source of gods and demigods. Two called gods remain, and Martel knows he is not a god, but merely an immortal with godlike powers in some limited areas.
Gods are omniscient and omnipresent, and Martel is neither. That is why he must crush the Grand Fleet before it splits, and before either the Marshal or the Viceroy realizes he is the last defender of Aurore.
Space fleets are not awe-ins
piring. The longest line of battle cruisers, cruisers, corvettes, and scouts, even with all screens flaring, flooding the emptiness of the night sky beyond Aurore with squandered energy, is less than a needle in that sky.
All the energy contained in the metal and composite hulls of the Grand Fleet is less than a small percentage of that represented by the smallest sun, and the combined life spans of the captains and commanders and subcommanders and officers and crews are but a fraction of the life span of the briefest star. And all the energy marshaled by one immortal called a god is insignificant against the total energy of even a small corner of a small galaxy.
Nonetheless, large enough to render a certain large fleet less significant, thinks Martel, guarding his thoughts while recognizing that few are left with the power to monitor them, and none with the power to stop him. Old habits die hard.
Martel waits in darkness beyond the new orbit of the still-impossible planet of Aurore, waits and watches, perceptions extended, as the Grand Fleet emerges from its subspace tunnel and wedges toward the F0 star that is the ships' destination.
A thousand ships, fifty thousand men and women, and all because you play games with the Viceroy you created.
Martel acknowledges the debt, wondering how he can avoid the slaughter that looms before him. The obvious strikes him. What's good for gods…
He waits… waits as the Grand Fleet regroups. Two basic formations, those are the options the Marshal for Strategy must consider: the Force Wedge or the Flying V to a Point. Both formations have advantages. The wedge concentrates defense screens and firepower at a relatively localized point in space, while the Flying V brings all the Fleet elements together at the last possible moment for such concentration, and thus requires any enemy to spread his defensive forces.
Hammer of Darkness Page 26
