The members of the conclave looked at each other for a long moment. Then as though placing the seal on a decision that they had all come to, however reluctantly, the Patriarch nodded to the fleet master, who rose from his place by Onesimus. He called for his attendants who lifted Onesimus, and placed him between themselves, locked by their arms. The Patriarch gave a long glance at Onesimus who for the first time in his life, did not look away. Then the Patriarch turned, and accompanied by the two priests strode out of the room. The fleet master barked commands and his attendants followed him out of the room, dragging Onesimus with them.
Moving rapidly they approached they hanger of the worldship. An enormous host of shuttles and landing craft moved into and out of the great bay, the darkness of space held away by an invisible shield of force that distorted the air briefly as craft entered and exited the bay. The fleet master approached the craft reserved for his personal use. As the shuttle bay dropped open a runner wearing the robes of the priests came and knelt before the fleet master. In his upturned hands was a roll of parchment. The fleet master unrolled it, read it briefly, then nodded at the runner and handed the parchment to Onesimus. The text was in the ponderous style of the priests with numerous arcane references to their theology and gods. Onesimus did not trouble to retain any of it, but let his mind wander as he pretended to commit it to memory while the shuttle boosted up and out of the hanger, the Tribes’ traffic control scrambling to route other craft away from the fleet master’s personal shuttle.
Once clear of the worldship, Onesimus looked out at the dying planet as it steadily enlarged itself on the viewing screens in the hold. The fleet master bent over to whisper something to the pilot and the shuttle vibrated as the engines shifted to a higher pitch, accelerating them all faster toward Vermillion.
The shuttle touched down in front of an Imperial installation, abandoned but surrounded by black metal fences and barbed spikes. The fleet master’s guards swarmed out of the shuttle ready for automated turrets or defensive drones primed to suicide themselves into any attacking force, but the installation was silent. After the guards gave the all clear, the fleet masters attendants hustled Onesimus out of the shuttle and into the shadow of the main doorway. As they ventured deeper into the building it became apparent that something was still active deep within. Emergency lighting was still flickered, and some wall displays were still active, showing the status of arcane systems none of them could decode. They came to a final locked door and the rest of the party stood back as the guards forced the doors.
A quiet hum permeated the room as the group entered, displays flashing and fans whirring, keeping whatever machinery was housed in the room cool. A helmet stood on a table next to a chair, with wires running into a massive gray slab of steel. The fleet master’s eyes narrowed. “Is this it?” he asked Onesimus. Wordlessly Onesimus nodded. It was almost time now. He could feel deep within himself that his plan would work. He felt a deep sadness, but no regret. The attendants hustled him into the chair, and placed the helmet on him. The machine it was plugged into lit up, hidden status lights beginning to flash, slowly at first, then more frantically. Suddenly Onesimus felt the connection click, his mind clear and cool like ice. He let his thoughts fill with the things he had seen, with the vision of the destruction of the three worldships, with the suffering the Tribes of the People had inflicted on the universe, with the horror he felt at the torment they spread like cancer, worshiping the dead gods. “End this.” he thought desperately. “Make us mean something. Don't let them survive to expand this evil across deep time.” He felt the connection end. He removed the helmet from his head, and looking at the fleet master, he smiled. There was a roaring, that only he could hear.
Chapter 11
There was a white room, with a table and two chairs. A pitcher of ice water with a tired looking lemon floating inside stood on the table. Clement pulled out a chair and sat. After what seemed a brief time, someone else appeared in the room and sat across from him. He poured some water into a glass, sipped it, then set it down awkwardly across from him. “Hello Clement,” he said, “Don’t ask who I am; you always ask. It gets so boring explaining it again and again.”
“I finally don’t need to ask,” Clement replied. “I think there's something different about this time. This iteration. You are me, and I’m you, just slightly out of phase temporally. You are the me who looks down time to try and understand where it all goes wrong. Who sent the messages and login credentials back to me, to try to converge toward a firing solution for the Weapon. You are the me who wants to preserve the people from the consequences of their innermost desires. We’ve created The Sun of the People, and we’ve elevated the servants of the dead gods, and there must be countless more that I don't remember, an infinite variation of death and overthrow.”
The other version of Clement nodded thoughtfully, “And don't forget, across all versions of time, the Messengers, the ultimate unavoidable extinction. It appears that no matter what choices we make, the Messengers cannot be defeated by human weapons.”
The younger Clement said, “We’ve seen that if the Empire falls by our hand, the destruction is almost incalculable.Yet they took something from us. Our friends are dead, their lives wasted. We swore to protect the people, and they took that and turned it into something mean and squalid. They took our sense of duty and used it to create a monster. The only reason they won’t get their eternal war is that the universe itself conspires to prevent it.”
The other Clement looked away, his eyes clouded. “The Empire is destroying itself. It was our mistake to think we should hasten or delay the processes. Nevertheless, they cannot be permitted to continue to consult the Oracles, and the Weapon must never fall into their hands.”
They both nodded and rose. They knew they were seeing each other for the last time, but there's no need for ceremony when you are with yourself. The white room disappeared forever.
Chapter 12
Clement came back to himself on Blade-Falling-Through-Shadow. The emergency lighting was still flashing, but the sirens had either gone off, or else reached a pitch of such agony that Clement could no longer still hear them. The requests for orders from the Warmind were filling his HUD, and scrolling off into the digital ether. Clement reached up and removed his helmet, tossing it aside with a thunk onto the metal flooring. A terminal flashed in front of him. Without fear, without dread, without sorrow, he walked toward it. If he had learnt one thing from his personal crusade across time it was this: One cannot use augury to back into the future. There is no warding off of death forever. The Weapon allows one only to choose the manner of your passing. Extinction is coming, so make your life a message that will flare across time, even to the last passing.
Clement reached the terminal, and chose his targets. He fired the Weapon for the first/last time.
This is the deep strike. The one that moves across and through time. This is the one that no one can tell about because the only ones who could ever have imagined it or seen it coming or thought to defend against it will die instantly. They will be as if they never were.
Picture reality as a vine flowing up and out through four dimensional space, looping in and out in fractal patterns that illuminate any scale the observer cares to focus on. Roaring out, the Weapon burns through the vine, ripping out any nodes that carry across all scales and times, the nexus that attempts to gather all time to itself, the genesis of the Weapon and its own death. In an instant that raced under the Planck time-scale, but surpassed all eternity, the Warminds flared and died, their prediction engines going supercritical and burning out entire solar systems built to hide them. Weapons engineers, mathematicians, cybernetists, all those who tended to the orders of the Warminds and dreamed of eternity as machine, died with them. Across all iterations of reality, the very concept of the Weapon ceased to exist.
The fleets poised to cleanse the barbarians from the planets designated as key to the development of the Weapon faltered as the war nets of the fl
eet hard crashed across Imperial space. Most of the Harmosts died with the Weapon, their command structure crushed by a foe they’d never understand. Those elevated in the midst of the debacle, began to think again. The quest for convergence sometimes requires orthogonal search vectors their now insane sub-AIs told them. Confused, they ordered a halt to all operations until clearer counsel could prevail.
Puzzled by the failure of their hereditary foes to join battle, the barbarian hosts circled their countless depots and fortified systems in confusion. Could the Empire be reasoned with? Had armageddon been delayed? Perhaps the priests of the dead gods had been deceived and total war was not inevitable. The thought of another path could be felt deep within one's bones.
Blade-Falling-Through-Shadows in all paths through time was struck by the antimatter weapons launched by the reinsurance fleet and vaporized into the eternal night.
Epilogue
Around Vermillion, the fleet of the Terran Peoples rose up like a giant shield, pouring out from the nightside of the planet. Upon Vermillion, countless people looked up into the darkness, knowing that the hour had come. The long peace of the Terran nations was over. The Messengers were coming.
Without division, without rancor, without fear, the Terran fleets wheeled to face the blackness that soared across the sun. Like wings of midnight that blocked the stars the Messengers rushed forward, surrounding the Terran fleet. Breaking into the Battle Pean, the command was given and the fleet weapons went hot, targeting systems spinning up, missiles flaring up out into the darkness, virus datagrams sent out, seeking any opening to corrupt the blackness encircling the Terran fleet.
Suddenly the entire fleet seemed to shudder, its weapons’ going dead. On every ship, the terminals flickered, no longer displaying the information expected. Instead, there was a message scrolling continuously across every screen, in a multitude of languages.
GREETINGS TO THE TERRAN PEOPLE. WE BRING A MESSAGE ACROSS DEEP TIME. LET THOSE WHO CAN UNDERSTAND KNOW. THERE WILL BE A NEW THING. ECHOING OUT ACROSS ALL PATHS THROUGH TIME REMAKING THOSE WHO DO NOT PERVERT THE STARS INTO DARKNESS.
END
Note from the author
Dear Reader,
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Vision: A Story of Deep Time Page 6
