by Zachary Adam
“Any port in a storm, Detective Clayton.”
Prince double-took, glancing at Malvolio for a long pause, before the man encouraged him with a hand on his shoulder to step through. Seamlessly, with only a slight disorientation at the change in gravity, Niles hauled himself out of a hole in the ground, stepping out onto a dim plateau. The light – a cold blue-green – seemed mostly to be the glow of a great city on the far side of a river. Among the familiar faces was someone new - a man with an unusually young face for one whose bearing, dress, and size would have placed him in his midtwenties, and with whom Scion seemed to be holding a close conversation.
Niles’ arrival snatched the newcomer’s attention away immediately, to the point that Scion had no choice but to introduce them. “Ah, Prince, good. I’d like you to meet one of our… sponsors, Aaron Cluny.”
The young man’s grip was firm, but somehow cold, in spite of the fact that both men were gloved – Niles in the usual leather, the other man in what seemed to be driving gloves. “How do you do, Mister Cluny?”
“Mister Cluny is my father, Mister ‘Prince’,” clearly, Aaron had no taste for Aliases. “Welcome to Hell.”
Niles looked, sharply and questioningly, to Scion, who merely shrugged. “Any port in a storm, Prince. Aaron, we need to arrange a return ticket.”
“Impossible, currently, for Kraterburg. I might be able to arrange for a Special Egress Permit to Anfangsburg, but it will take some time.”
“At present, time is something we have a surplus of.” “Excellent. I have arranged for a Chartered Charon to take you across the River into the Freeman District. Would you like a few recommendations?”
“No,” Banker said, interjecting as he tucked his phone back beneath his coat. “We’ve already made arrangements.”
Scion stared at the other for a moment, and Prince guessed correctly that some form of mental exchange occurred, for a moment later, Scion was nodding his understanding. “I agree. We need some time to collect ourselves.”
“I understand. I would mourn his passing as well, if I was prone to mourning.”
--Death had a price. In a very real sense, each one suffered was costing Vidcund a piece of himself, and while knowing what to expect in the final moment of an individual body had lessened the blow that had been so strong the first time around, the fact remained that they were blows, inflicting pain every bit as visceral as the actual wounds themselves.
He was tired, lost, and confused. It seemed he barely had time to occupy a new body before the latest assailant would appear, dropping from the sky or bursting from the ground to run him through with a strike so swift Vidcund registered no part of the event until after he had been slain. It was growing taxing, frustrating, to the point that he was unsure, spare bodies or no, he could bear many more defeats.
One thing was clear, however – this new figure, with his impossible agility, strength, and speed, was after Vidcund with a vengeance, a determination matched, if at all, only by Vidcund’s own professionalism and vision. In spite of not having the first clue how, or even anyone to advise him, Vidcund was certain that the Union could be saved and this new threat defeated, even if Kraterburg itself was a lost cause.
Scenes of his own repeated deaths blurred past, as he left bodies almost as soon as he arrived, lingering only long enough for his intuition to suggest something was wrong before he leaped to another body clear across the country, and another, and another. It was in one of these leaps that he realized the truth.
Kraterburg was a lost cause, and the lack of a need to save it liberated the most powerful weapon Vidcund could think of. He paused, long enough for the inexorable attacker to run him through from behind, and forced a smirk onto his latest face before again attempting to split his attention, to linger longer than was otherwise necessary in the space between minds. He could brave the attention of the things that lived there for the time being. There was nothing he wouldn’t give for his country – not his life, nor limb, and so why should sanity or soul be any different. Gumption would win the day, where lack of fear might fail.
He could see the god, of whom his assailant was but a finger, pause in his Squamous horribleness. Some rule of this Tweenland world prevented the great, impossiblyscaled being from striking out at him directly, and the minute hesitation of deciding which of the many new Vidcund Därks to attack bought Vidcund time, as it would continue to do. He held in his mind some dozen selves, each with their full suite of senses and awarenesses, each armed as they were when they were independent minds free from the power of his influence.
His only comfort was the understanding that he was doing all that he could, else these men would likely have died regardless, and what further harm could befall them than that? If he was defeated, it would not be for lack of trying.
One such self, however, had his priority, held the greatest amount of an entire mind. It was a supervisor at the largely-overrun Agency base beneath the College of Judges complex… and now, it was bestowed with Vidcund’s plan.
Moses had parted the Red Sea, they said. Could Vidcund, like his apparent namesake, be a man who made the impossible possible?
--Stamatia Dowd could not recall the last time she had used an Agency Control Room herself, but it was the one place she could have thought of which could afford her some semblance of sufficient information. As a White Agent, she had a reasonable claim to the leadership of the entire Division with the loss of contact with the current AgentLiaison to the Executive Council, and was using it to her advantage, trying to consolidate her influence by bringing an end to the current crisis.
Instead, however, she seemed to spend most of her time focusing on swatting flies. The computer and its operators were busy trying to parse the latest development – a supernatural entity thus-far unrecorded in the database was rapidly transporting itself all across the union, trying and succeeding to kill a large collection of seemingly unrelated agency staff members as quickly as possible.
Like a lightning bolt, the penny dropped, and she stood up quite suddenly. “Cross reference the list of known victims to the most recent Project Moses II subject listing.”
It was such a bizarre request that there was a lengthy pause before the search could be completed, and in the end, she had to input the command herself, being the only person in the room the computer system decided would have sufficient clearance to actually know that project existed.
One by one, she saw the background of the list of victim’s names change to green as they matched, and she was entirely unsurprised to find, without exception, that every single victim had been a Moses II test subject – a clone of Vidcund Därk.
She moistened her lips, considering her next move carefully. “I want a status update on the current whereabouts of the surviving subjects. Start with those nearest us.”
She was entirely unsurprised to find she had one in this very facility, and gave a tired sigh. Vidcund, what the hell are you doing?
Quietly, she gave the command back to the facility supervisor, and made her way down to the Gate Room.
--Vidcund’s primary focus hustled himself down the corridor as quickly as his legs would carry him, a misappropriated P90 sub-machine gun tucked under his arm, as yet unused. He knew, as the previous occupant of this mind had, that parts of lower section of the facility (in which he found himself) were overrun by those threelegged five-armed creatures he had seen earlier, and he had no desire to waste time trying to fight one with batons.
He had to split his attention enough to keep grabbing new bodies as the Waking God culled the old ones, in order to keep the other busy long enough to complete his work. This facility, which had been intended to be the ultimate bastion of the continuity of Government and Agency both, had a unique power source, and that beating heart could be the key to ending all of this.
As he reached the room he wanted, he was irritated to hear a familiar voice in his ear. Why now, of all times, did
his supervisor choose to distract him?
“Agent Därk, just what in the hell are you doing?” “Your favourite colloquialism is ‘saving the world’, Ms. Dowd.” Fingers flew over keys, disabling safety interlocks in a way only this body knew how, perhaps only this body was authorized to do. The modularity of his knowledge and abilities was startling. He didn’t know what he knew anymore, until he did it, as though his mind could passively index the brain it was currently using.
He was out of time. He could do nothing, now, but spring the trap, and all at once, he let his focus crash back into this body. He barely had time to realize there was a rather distant body he could jump to from here, before he felt the presence behind him.
This time, perhaps impending victory bought him a few seconds. The God which Slept favoured him with a charismatic smile from the far side of the console. “I have not had a hunt as spirited in some time, Vidcund Därk. Were you not the Gate, I would keep you alive to learn of your true nature.”
“I am the Gate,” Vidcund affirmed, speaking idly and without thought of his words, looking not behind him, but up and forward, into the Antimatter Containment Chamber, and its flickering, failing field. “… But you aren’t the Key.”
This death was the most painless so far, so quickly had it come. --Einstein stumbled upon a consequence of the nature of the universe when he was doing the early work on Special Relativity, and this was a deadly consequence, as the Kraterburg Incident would prove. Agency, through their nearly omnipresent front companies, had diverted truly enormous amounts of energy from the national grid for decades, in order to power the production of antimatter at the Kraterburg Facility. The reason, on paper, was to provide a suitable storage for energy all but indefinitely. Kraterburg facility’s containment held some sixty-five kilograms of the stuff – enough to power the entire country for five years. Since it was intended only to power the facility itself, it had might as well be an indefinite supply of clean, emission-less energy.
What Vidcund had seized upon was the only downside of the project – antimatter, unlike ordinary fuel, didn’t give a good goddamn what it reacted with or the rate at which it did so. It found matter, annihilated at the most fundamental levels of physics, and released massive amounts of energy thus stored into the immediate area. Didn’t matter what the matter was – it didn’t even really matter how it was distributed, when the relevant order of magnitude is considered.
The resultant explosion was unquestionably the largest such event in human history, quite possibly in the history of the world. In terms of energy released, it was a drop in the bucket of such mundane events as the sun’s daily output absorbed by the earth. In this case, it was the rate of release.
By some miracle of chance, Vidcund had escaped, his telepresent ego gravely wounded, by fleeing the body he’d occupied in the last half-instant before the event had begun. He had no idea if the god, too, was so lucky, but privately doubted it. He had an ideal vantage point, far above the tenebrous upper ceiling of the sky as defined by hidebound scientists who needed such things as boundaries to feel comfortable.
His consciousness lingered, each and every sense fuzzy around its edges. The stars on the ground winked out, consumed in a blast the computer feeding him images told him was sixteen kilometres across. As with most of these things, the true damage would be felt far wider – it was the equivalent to some 280 of the largest nuclear detonation ever recorded – the Tsar Bomba of the Russians – occurring simultaneously. There would be no radioactive fallout, apart from whatever was blown asunder in hospitals and laboratories in the affected area. A winter of sorts was almost assured – weeks or not months of perpetually overcast weather, unseasonable cold, and perhaps years of economic downturn not just in the Union but worldwide.
Vidcund’s fading consciousness couldn’t have cared for any of that. The Union had been spared – at least some remnant of it. The menace had failed to chase him, and was therefore no doubt defeated.
He faded into the blackness that was encroaching on the edge of his vision, and could not have cared if he was to return.
Epilogue
“The long and the short of it is this – we really don’t know the extent of the damage.” Great Justice Michael Scamwell considered that for a lengthy moment, from his seat. Graciously, Lord Field Marshall Vincent Coultier had allowed the remnants of the executive council and their staff to use the old manor house which stood on the oft-disused Coultier properties as a sort of ad-hoc governmental continuation centre.
It was, so far, three months after the damage, much more like a middle school club house than a proper government cabinet. The Self-Defense Forces and the National Police Force had managed to patch together some semblance of communication with one another, and with themselves. To everyone’s great relief, the border agencies seemed to be intact. The nation was, at least, militarily secure.
That was about all that could, thus far, be ascertained. There was no constitutional contingency for the loss of the Jury of Peers, and now both the physical halls of the institution and the vast majority of its members (and their staff) were either destroyed or out of reach.
In such a situation, there was really only one thing to do. “We need to focus on what we do know. Refugees are accumulating in Terrerra.”
“And Zvanesburg port. And the Deans say they are accepting refugees as well.”
“… The Deans? Have we made contact again with the Agency, then?”
Before the aide could speak, one of the men in the room
– Edward Coultier, the elder son of the Field Marshall and the man who had saved the surviving councilors on Doomsday – sighed. “Almost better if we hadn’t.”
His younger brother, the Professor, took a more pragmatic view of events. “I don’t disagree. However, both legally and practically, they are as much our diplomatic arm as they are troublemakers. Certainly, we shall need better oversight of their activities.”
Michael gave a slow nod. “I agree. I will want a full review of their activities in the near term.”
“Of course,” the aide responded. “I’ve been informed we will be being joined by a new Agent Liaison. Someone who worked on the Kraterburg disaster.”
“I can’t decide if that’s to their credit or their detriment. What’s next?”
A list was consulted. “Agency reports troop movements of the Dean Royal Navy in the… well, I guess we have to call it Kraterburg Bay, now.”
Michael sighed. He’d seen aerial photos of the fens, of the great bay that had been carved into Zaxton Island. Kraterburg, and all the communities around it, and the rail lines, and highways, and so on, had subsided. Whatever the blast had been, and whatever its cause, the end result was a winter in midsummer, bringing with it a season of perpetual rain. Monsoon conditions in temperate Tererra. The South Fens had subsided beneath water rushing in from the strait.
“Kraterburg Bay is as good a name as any. Order the Maritime Self Defence Forces into the Bay. They are to secure its entire edge. I don’t think the new water line intersects the Dean border?”
Vincent Coultier shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. Perhaps the Rangers-“
“I was just going to say, deploy the Ground Self Defence Forces – those not engaged in border control or disaster relief – to the areas near the bay. Let’s learn a bit about our new maps.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Michael’s gaze, slowly, landed on Edward. Edward the popular face, the martial athlete, the security specialist. “An island was identified in the bay. A few, actually, but one in particular we believe may be settled. Part of the old Banking District.”
Edward nodded slowly. “I believe the locals have been calling it Figaro.”
“Something like that.”
The judge rose, wincing at the pain of bearing his weight on his knee. “Edward Orlando Coultier, do you swear to uphold the values of the Zaxtonian Union, its freedoms and protections, and in doing so practice the faithful execution of your duties as a Magistrate of the Colleg
e of Judges?”
Edward nodded, once. “I do.”
“Then I name you as Deputy Marshall of the Irregular Forces, with all the responsibilities and powers of that wartime office, having officially declared a National State of Emergency, and further confer upon you the title of Lord Protector of Figaro. Take with you those good men and women you consider best suited to the task and return law and order to what is left of our once glorious capital.”
Edward drew the sword ever-present at his side with a flourish, and rose it to his brow in salute. Such weapons were not uncommon in Zaxton, these days, with the efficacy of the Firearms Act’s ban on private ownership of such things. “It is my honour to serve the Executive Council.”
“Your first order of business, Lord Protector, once established, will be to undertake an investigation into who is responsible for this mess. I want to know everything.”
--“It won’t be a galloping shock to your sensibilities, Viscount Rainwright, to learn that I was never as taken with your methods as my Father was.”
“God rest his soul,” the noble answered smoothly, following into step with the other man, as the pair of them moved deeper into the halls of Redhall Palace, and further from the public areas that today were thronged with fellow-mourners.
The young man carried on as though the invocation was unheard. “Whatever you may claim in the quiet shadows of the Wheel and Pinion or the Royal Arcane Society, Viscount, remember this – your ‘coup’ in Kraterburg was less victory than success.”
“That we still live to have this argument is all the victory I need, Your Highness.”
Crown Prince Valarian turned. “Know this, Rainwright. Your actions had far-reaching and unpredictable consequences. The Royal Navy reports peculiarities in their survey of the Blasted Bay. Things that make my contacts with the Royal Arcane Society very nervous.” “I will look into it.”
“No, you will not,” Valarian said flatly. “I, Valarian ap Dougal, Firstborn of Hayden and King in Waiting of the Brass Throne, will conduct the investigation myself.” “… Didn’t you mean ap Sussex, your Highness?”
