by Shay Zana
She continues to search through the endless galaxies, none of them familiar, none of them striking her nostalgia. She feels cold, alone, small and insignificant. Her heart suddenly feels as though it is draining of blood and she is left with emptiness and sorrow. Is she all alone in this universe? The only sapient being?
Altair makes a soft and deep moaning noise from behind her, and for the first time since exiting, she notices that its large whale-like body is resting within the liquid nikita, the liquefied material melding with its skin and nourishing it. Its symbols change from a vibrant blue, to a pale white-blue, to white, to white-yellow, yellow, orange, and now red, glimmering with the beautiful hues of the many stars that exist.
"We are no longer with the Zodiacs, are we?" she speaks softly as she slowly approaches the closest of its leathery fins. Her hand reaches out and gently strokes its tough hide, feeling the comforting warmth of the star energy flowing within it and the solidness of the nikita beneath that can morph over its body, just like the vitasuits of the Paragons. Altair gives a quiet murmur, purring at her touch, and now the noise grows louder like great drums beating together, vibrating her bones, and she smiles at the thrumming sensation.
"You have taken me to another dimension. But why? You odd space whale..." she asks fondly, asking herself the questions more than asking the vessel, knowing it cannot understand her.
Strangely, Kitera longs for Deo. Not Boone, who she would always seek for company, but Deo. Just the sight of him would bring her the sense of safety, just his nearness would comfort her, and if his large arms were to wrap around and hold her, she may even be able to wash the panic, fear, and loneliness from her mind. But the sense of extreme isolation overwhelms her and the soothing thought of Deo is overtaken. She has never been without the presence of the Zodiacs before. They have been distant, yes, but never absent, never completely out of reach. This hole has left her feeling empty and without purpose. Godless.
Sensing her distress, Altair shuffles its body subtly, enriching the texture of the liquid nikita around itself. The pearl shade fades to an even paler ashen colour, before the liquid shifts entirely, cascading over with the deepest black Kitera has ever seen. She gasps in astonishment, watching the black sphere reflecting space and the seven stars surrounding it with a sharp clarity. It is as if she is walking through space, floating within the deepness of it, surrounded by dustings from the stars.
Ahead, on the multihued horizon where three stars light the metallic lands, Kitera can see something stirring, a pointed figure emerging from the flat surface. Many more soon join it, figures or structures that cannot be of human design, curved and alien. Some lands dip deeply, while others rise like perfectly symmetrical mountains, merging together with liquid movements and sending ripples of activity all over the lands.
A rhythmical throbbing generates beneath her bare feet, and as the Cipher looks down to investigate, a rupture of entity strobes through the black fields, the very ground of the sphere igniting from within. The entire sphere is translucent, powered from the core with the light energy of entities, or one conscious super-entity.
Kitera watches with eyes full of wonder as the cascading hues of entity journey beneath the surface of the liquid moon, uniting within the city of growing structures on the horizon. The reflection of stars under her is overtaken by the brightness of the speeding particles as more and more hurry to reach this meeting point. A river of light beneath her feet.
The woman feels her heart flutter as the liquid ground gives a shudder underfoot, the entire skies seeming to groan with movement, or is it the ground? Everything is so crisp and symmetrical that she is suddenly disoriented about which way is the sky and which is the sphere’s surface. This feeling only subsides when the ground lights up with entity to pulse to the growing mountainous structures.
Abruptly, a blinding flare of light blazes across the skies, originating from within the sphere’s core and sweeping upward through the distant structures like an erupting volcano, bringing terrible memories of Olympus. She sees the light fade just as swiftly as it ignited, before stunning her with a new burst of light that sears her into blue blindness.
She shelters her eyes with no effect, the light too intense. She is standing on a star.
Altair gives a loud wail, piercing through Kitera’s insides like cold air hitting a flame. She cringes at the pain in her eardrums, but when she hears the return call from another ikamanu, she freezes, stops herself from scolding Altair, and opens her eyes to a faded environment. A dark object plunges up from the structures in a boom of speed, swoops downward, past the structures on the ground, and toward her and Altair as it glows intensely.
Again, Kitera hears it wail back at Altair. It is another ikamanu, birthed from this liquid nikita sphere. Has she just witnessed their origin?
It passes over them with a drawn out hum that beats down in waves of sound. As she stands and stares, entranced, Altair releases its entity to gesture for her to step back inside. She obeys quickly, feeling the black liquid beneath her suddenly turn slippery, toes sinking.
Once she is aboard, Altair automatically seals the airlock behind her and lifts itself from the liquid with a burst of luminescence. It ascends quickly, travelling toward the structures as they begin to melt downward again and flatten out the lands.
From the portside observatory, Kitera watches as the structures reform with smooth liquidity. This sphere just gave birth to an ikamanu. Is this how the ikamanu reproduce? By simply growing from this organic material? This makes her wonder if this sphere was perhaps created by an alien species, and the ikamanu are an artificial species, engineered from their original biological forms and merged with this bio-engineered metal. Have the Zodiacs been wrong about other sentient life forms existing on the same level as humanity? Or are they still right, just only in their own dimension of existence...
The Cipher remembers the legend of Scattered Planet, and how the galaxy was a part of no dimension, in the centre of existence. Is this how the ikamanu can seemingly shift dimensions at their own will? Because they were born, or created, in no specific dimension, but all?
As Kitera ponders endlessly, a sudden light within the structures below catches her eye. Altair swoops around more, giving her an ideal angle to view the liquid lands. Now that she can see them closely, the structures appear like a city, not of just mountains and deep cave-like tunnels, but actual towers that are thriving with entity particles. Not only is this city biological, it is an alien city!
TO THE SEA
Deo quickly loses sight of the three Paragons as they are impelled out to space and sucked down to Kronos. He slams the Blackray’s thrusters to max propulsion and dives after his men, snaking out through the chaotic mess left of the guardian station’s D sector and trailing in behind the falling path of the Olympian.
The steep descent into Kronos’ atmosphere has the Blackray’s armour plating whining in cruel sounds. With his speed picking up, Deo can begin to make out the three intense orbs of entity falling toward the planet’s surface.
In the troop hold, Neal and his marines strap themselves into their seats once again and swallow their fear as the Paragon wildly dives after his men, no visible hesitance, like an animal driven purely by instinct. Neal thinks that all Paragons are crazy cyborgs who think they are invincible super heroes, and this Paragon at the helm seems to be proving his opinion right. He has not encountered many Paragons throughout his military career, they are rare to be seen outside their own operations given by the Ciphers. But he respects them greatly, and admires their sense of brotherhood. If three of Neal’s men were to be blown out into space by an explosion and propelled toward a planet, he is not so sure that he would go chasing after them in a half destroyed dropship. Holy warriors? Hardly. But paragons to humanity? Indeed.
Deo pushes the Blackray to its absolute limits, increasing velocity in hopes it will enable him to catch the Paragons in time before they make impact with the expanding ocean. Below the clou
ds that are tinted from the distorted nebula around the planet, Deo can see the Olympian make impact with the ocean, diving deep and generating a wide tidal wave that spans in all directions. He concentrates on keeping his trajectory steady as he slips in beside the falling Paragons. From the view out his windshield, he can see all three of them.
Their entities are dull, weakened from the previous inferno, but at least they are conscious.
“This might not be fun!” Deo warns them through their link before diving the nose of the Blackray deeper and bringing her down beneath the Paragons.
Slowly decreasing speed by reversing the propulsion thrusters, Deo eases the Blackray beneath his men to catch them on the hull. As they enter the troposphere of Kronos, they hit sudden turbulence, and Deo is forced to pull away to prevent from slamming the Paragons.
Below, the ocean is not the only thing that is rapidly approaching.
“What the hell is that shadow!?” Neal yells to Deo as he tries to peer outside. All he can make out is a dark shadow sweeping slowly over the ocean below.
Deo clenches his jaw beneath his visor, deepening the frown that already dominates his expression. “It’s the skycity,” he answers the major bluntly, hearing a curse in response.
As the Blackray continues to plummet through the thick blanket of cloud cover, Deo beats at the controls and tries stubbornly to catch the Paragons without killing them, all the while conscious of the fact that they are mere minutes away from impacting the skycity as it travels lazily across the ocean, straying from its original position.
"We're gonna hit!" one of the soldiers yells helplessly.
"We're not gonna make it!" another yells in unison.
"Shut the fuck up!" Neal barks at them in response, though he is also fighting to contain his fear that the Paragon will not be able to pull up and dodge the skycity in time. Images of making impact with a towering building and then ricocheting into others plagues his mind, but he pushes that aside and takes a hold of hope with a deathly grip.
Deo swears in agitation, his heart rate beginning to pick up and a light sweat seeping through his pores within his vitasuit. His squad's lives depend on his ability to stay calm and focused, and to get this lug of a battered stingray-shaped ship to work! "Come on," he growls to the Blackray, and as if in response, the controls finally respond the way he wants them to, and the confirmation of three figures impacting lightly against the upper hull chimes over the kinetic controls.
"Pull up!" another of the marines in the back wails with a shrill terror.
But before Deo can adjust the controls accordingly, the left wing makes impact with a protruding skyscraper, shattering and ripping its way through a glassy portion of the building. The impact jolts savagely, birthing flames and glass to rain down on the warring platforms and streets below.
Deo tries desperately to steady the Blackray from its erratic spin, but another impact against another building sends it spiralling off the edge of the skycity. The gyrating has Deo clinging at the helm, nausea climbing up his chest, eyes unable to pinpoint reality until he can see their fate just ahead.
They slam into the water like a flat stone skimming the surface. The vessel’s shields finally burst, the armour caves in, rupturing hull breaches and clashing with the froth of thick water. The cloudiness of impact trauma rushes into all who survive. Water billows through the cracked hull of the Blackray, spilling into the small fires that had broken out in the aftermath of losing the left wing. Many lifeless bodies float through the gushing water, marines whose shields and armour failed to protect them. The only survivors are Neal, Pelevin, Carter, and Reed.
Deo swashes through the flooding water, half swimming, half pulling himself along by the support structures of the vessel's upper hull. He reaches a body, face down in the water and unmoving. The Paragon rolls the body over, only to find his visor cracked and blood draining out with the water that had filled it. He pushes the dead man aside and continues pulling his weight toward the aft, unsurprised.
Already at the troop hold doors, Neal and the surviving marines try desperately to open them, but the water pressure is battling against the pressure inside the ship, and the doors will not budge until the Blackray is fully submerged and filled with water, allowing the pressures to be similar enough for the doors to open obediently.
Neal sees Deo approaching and struggles his way over to him. "Can't get the damn bay doors open!" he informs the Paragon loudly through the sounds of a drowning ship.
Deo peers past the major at the men bashing and kicking at the doors. "Save your energy!" he advises them. "Wait until we've filled up with water. We have a big swim ahead of us.”
The marines all stop and nod nervously to the Paragon, many of them youthful and still unhardened by a lengthy military life.
Deo directs his attention back to Major Neal in front of him. "How many dead?"
Neal looks around in hopelessness, as if counting the bodies around them, though he knows the number off the top of his head. "Too many," he answers coldly.
"Status of visors?" Deo now asks the soldiers, checking his own.
All of them remove their helmets and perform thorough scans of their visors and helmet seals, checking for any damage. Only Reed announces that his visor plate has a minor crack.
"Alright," Neal starts. "Private Reed gets top survival priority. His head stays above water the longest, he swims out first when the doors open, and his ass gets picked up first if the Zodiacs are kind enough to send us a goddamn rescue."
All of the marines nod in agreement, placing their helmets back over their heads and sealing them.
Before long, the Blackray creaks and whines louder with pressure, and water spills faster through the broken and twisted hull. Deo and the others position themselves against the troop hold doors, the morphing mechanism too damaged to operate without physical force to pry it open. As the interior of the Blackray finally becomes fully flooded, the men are able to push the doors open with a subtle whoosh. The first to begin pulling his way through the water is Reed, given helpful pushes from behind as he slips past the other men.
The swim upward is disorientating and lengthy. Breaking the surface of the water is a huge relief to every survivor, and it only takes moments for them to reorient themselves. Above, the skycity hovers ominously toward them, bringing with it a wall of ocean water that spills down from the kinetic waterfall at the city's edge. They will be swamped and pushed under if they do not swim from its path.
“Paragon! We gotta move!”
With water lapping at the outside of his visor, Deo reins his splashed view in on the marines, already beginning to freestyle their way out of the skycity’s path of watery death and onward toward the closest of the Fortunate Isles to the west. He must find the others. If they die, so does their mission, and then this entire galaxy may as well be dead, too. Diverting to Kronos to aid against the UEU invasion had been a huge mistake. They should have just stayed on the path of their mission, saving their secondary evacuation orders as a last resort.
Damn Kitera and her apocalyptic discovery.
“Get going!” Deo shouts back to the major, and before any kind of protest can be voiced, he dives deeply back down into the ocean, using the short range scanners of his datakey to hone in on the Paragons’ signals. The sound of the heavy downpour of the waterfall pounds at the ocean more intensely by the second as Deo swims deeper, powering through the water with straining muscles and tired limbs. Already he can feel the burn of overexertion. Even a Paragon has limits.
Amongst the murkiness of the deep, he can see a glimmer of something. The circuitry lights of a vitasuit. Pushing through, Deo heaves his arms and legs to a final stroke, and grasps at the arm of the unconscious Natheus. His biocode is good. He is still alive.
Deciding that time is of the essence, Deo chooses to retrieve all of the Paragons within one dive, instead of taking up one at a time. This, however, means that the load of three fully armoured Paragons will be too heavy
for him to pull back to the surface. But luckily, he has a solution for that.
Linking his arm through Natheus’, he swims toward the east for a few one-armed strokes, following the internal display on his visor. This signal belongs to Boone. Pain begins to bite into his muscles as he pushes deeper, but at least he can breathe within his vitasuit. The pain subsides momentarily as he reaches Boone now, grasping at the young man’s wrist and yanking him toward him. Mazayus can be seen just a few strokes deeper.
Once Deo manages to gather all of his squad, he fumbles around on his datakey to hack into Mazayus’ personal wireless network and override his thruster-boots. The thrusters do the job of propelling the four upward through the heaviness of the ocean and rip up from the surface again, Rhadamanthus blaring off their visors as soon as their heads emerge. Water continues to fizz and bubble around Mazayus’ unconscious body until Deo can switch the thrusters off again.
"You're... bloody welcome," Deo breathes out to his unconscious squad mates as he drags their bodies up to the beach. He plops them somewhat carelessly down within the soft sand.
After checking that they are alive, he flops down next to them, chest heaving. The fact of their narrow survival has not quite hit home to him yet as he just lies flat on his back, arms and legs spread out in the thin sand as he catches his breath. The light of Kronos' red star plays off the visors of his squad mates and terrorises his vision as he sits up to watch the great skycity of King Anzac glide over the skies ahead. A frothing water trail is left in its wake as the artificial waterfall drapes into the sea, pulled up by kinetic energy to flow through the city, and released at the other end to reunite with the sea. The red light of Rhadamanthus that pours over the sea adds to the skycity’s majesty.
