The soldiers of Warrior Group 240 saluted with proper respect as they lined up in front of Lord Kwed Fighting Sea, but their eyes and the flush of their sail segments betrayed their curiosity.
The news of Kwed's rapid elevation to Otrid Lord had spread quickly. Never before had an Otrid soldier been promoted to Lord in so short a time. It was an unprecedented change that bordered on being unsettling.
But the tales of Kwed's actions on the day of the human large one’s execution were already solidifying into legend, and the warriors wanted to see what manner of segments had managed such a feat.
Kwed betrayed no inner thoughts as the procession passed. The implements of command had already changed the new Lord's perspective as well as Kwed's bearing. One cannot be a commander of warriors unless one acts the part, and one cannot be a leader if one is also part of the herd.
Kwed's Harness of Lordship made all the difference. Kwed had never before understood how a Lord's garment was not merely ornamental, but a technological device that enhanced the powers of the wearer. The Harness bound Kwed's segments more tightly than ever before, eliminating lesser distractions and bouts of indecision. It felt as if a fifth segment had been added, so great was the increase in Kwed's abilities.
There was more. Just as Kwed's mind had become more focused, so too were the passions of its male-primary makeup more keenly felt. Kwed took this as a lesson. Even the most basic experiences should not be forgotten, and primal urges should not be dismissed so readily. Such primitive fires motivated most life in the galaxy, and an Otrid Lord must be ready to analyze and comprehend the motivations of all potential enemies.
So, upon Kwed's elevation, the new Lord had summoned the female-primary warrior, the one called Sixteenth Day of Storm, with whom Kwed had shared the bathing chamber.
They performed every sexual act of every segment-species known in the long history of the Otrid. They performed individual couplings between matching segments and even simultaneous couplings between all segments at once.
Few things were forbidden to the Otrid Lords.
The Harness of Lordship had kept Kwed's mind unified during this feast of flesh, but Sixteenth Day of Storm had devolved into four babbling segments, a stack of lost singletons stumbling through the darkness of blunted intelligence. It had taken a full watch for her to regain her unified mind.
Kwed had observed her intently, missing nothing. All knowledge was good.
And forceful action triggered knowledge.
When Warrior Group 240 was fully assembled in squadrons of four each, Kwed issued a brief command.
"You are to root out and exterminate the higher life forms along this northern shoreline. Consider it practice for the coming conflicts. The creatures congregate in the shallow caves beneath the cliffs. They have built their dwellings into the sandstone inlets carved by the waters. Soon we will leave this place, so practice a variety of infiltration and elimination tactics while you have the opportunity."
With that, Kwed turned and left, mind already working on the larger problems of the Otrid abandonment of this world.
If there was one thing the newly elevated Kwed had internalized, it was the potential for disaster these native life forms posed. The long-legged sentients, the swarming invertebrates, the deep-rooted trees—all had been easily manipulated by the captured human large one. They had been bent to that creature's will, or, worse yet, they had voluntarily responded to his call. And that "god" had not even been whole and healthy. Other human large ones still survived, and who knew what strange abilities they possessed? It was conceivable they could turn an entire planet against the Otrid. It was intolerable.
The only solution was to kill them all.
Kwed's subcommanders were waiting at the shuttle that carried the Lords to and from the planet. Kwed did not have to share the vessel. There had been few enough Otrid Lords on this world when the incident with the Triton creature occurred, and there were even fewer afterward. The remaining Lords were shamed by the debacle and were not inclined to supervise Kwed with any great enthusiasm. Kwed had seized the initiative without hesitation. It was obvious that speed was always better than hesitation.
The subcommanders waited respectfully for Kwed to speak.
"The Warrior Group 240 has been dispatched to eliminate the higher life forms in this sector," Kwed said. "The larger enclaves we will bombard from orbit as we leave this world. Your task is to prepare the autonomous predator quad-mechs to hunt down and eliminate any survivors after we leave. We have not the time nor resources to track down every last target, but our actions should set back the natural evolution of this world by millions of cycles."
The subcommanders waved their whip arms in assent. Kwed observed their sail segments flutter in anticipation. Their excitement was expected. This was a planetary action, the last step before leaving this sad world for the final time as they made their next assault upon the humans. The planet's use as a staging world was at an end. They had extracted every resource they needed for their jump gates, and no longer required slave soldiers, especially proven failures like these.
If only earlier Otrid Lords had been as thorough with the human homeworld. It was an un-Lordly thought, Kwed knew, but that made it no less true. Unfinished work was like an unfinished Otrid, a freakish collection of incomplete actions that serves no purpose. This was especially true when dealing with alien life forms.
He would not make such a mistake.
Lord Kwed dismissed his subcommanders and strode up the ramp of the shuttle that would return him to War Vessel 84.
****
Kwed spent two watches examining his challenges from all angles and formulating plans. He had connected his Harness of Lordship with the warship’s central mind-core, allowing him to access nearly every scrap of information hoarded by the Otrid since the time of the first segment joining. Even for an Otrid Lord it was an overwhelming volume of data, and exploring it led him down many unexpected paths.
One particular path held him transfixed. It was highly classified information, shared solely among Otrid Lords, and it explained much about why so much attention and so many resources had been spent to eradicate the humans.
It wasn’t just their rediscovery and the appearance of the large ones, as Kwed had assumed. Those factors were troublesome, and required action, yes, but the response had seemed to him out of proportion for the threat. The humans were still weak and would not be able to challenge Otrid territory for many cycles, if ever.
No, he discovered, there was much more behind the Otrid Lords’ fixation with humans.
The small two-legged singletons possessed a tremendous prize—a new way through space, a method of travel that shaved countless cycles from traveling between the stars.
The archives revealed that for many long years the Otrid Lords had assumed the humans to be extinct. Occasional debates arose as to whether the attack on their world had eliminated the species, or if the Beh’neefazor had somehow aided them, allowing some to survive. The Beh’neefazor, after all, had disappeared shortly after the war against the humans, which had never been explained. And not just the alien themselves, but the entire planet had vanished. Might they have taken humans with them?
But these were all academic topics of debate—there had been no evidence of surviving humans since the Otrid victory on Earth.
Then, one day that version of history was shattered.
It was only by accident that watchful Otrid Lords had encountered evidence of the human large ones and their ability to bypass the understood laws of physics.
The ship belonging to the large one known as Faraway had suddenly appeared in a system that the Otrid had recently explored via probe. The Otrid Lords watched silently and undetected as Faraway surveyed the system. At first the Otrid had no idea what manner of beings piloted the remarkable ship. But then Faraway briefly departed her vessel to land and walk upon the planet she was studying, and her undeniable human form became clear.
Faraway retur
ned to her ship, and her vessel disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
Even more shocking, none of the Lords from the technological division could explain how her ship had been able to perform this feat.
When she was next detected, it was in a system at the opposite end of Otrid territory, a vast span of light years. She had traveled the distance in what the Otrid Lords maintained was an impossibly short period of time. She used no visible jump gates and left no wormhole signature.
The discovery had roiled the Otrid Lords.
The Otrid leadership of that time had considered their jump gates to be the most advanced method of travel between stars that had ever been devised. The Otrid had never, up until then, discovered technology that exceeded it. There had been speculation that the Beh’neefazor used unknown methods to travel the stars, but as one of the few species capable of resisting Otrid incursions they had been able to shield their activities.
And now, apparently, humans possessed these abilities.
The course of action was clear—the Otrid must have this technology.
This realization caused the Lords to shift every available resource to the capture of Faraway. It had taken many cycles, but at last she had been lured into a trap, and forced to fight the Otrid armada as well as one of the loathsome parasite beasts harvested from the corpse of a First One.
That confrontation alone had destroyed far too many ships and experienced crews, yet it had allowed the study of these human large ones. The Otrid Lords learned much, but the large one resisted, and maimed herself to destroy her most valuable knowledge. By the time the strands of obedience had finally subdued her, she was a useful tool, but did not provide the breakthroughs the Lords sought.
Shortly thereafter, the human outpost had been found. They were far removed from their original home. The humans were now polluting the holiest of the four spiral arms of the galaxy, on an outpost orbiting the fourth planet in the system, on one of its eight moons.
That glorious numerical symmetry could not have been a coincidence. It was seen by the Otrid Lords as a grievous insult, a taunt from an inferior.
Between the humans’ valuable secret and their indirect taunts, the Otrid Lords had thrown themselves into the problem of eliminating the infuriating species, leading to the most recent attack.
The righteous indignation of the Otrid Lords had not helped them, of course. The humans had been hurt, but the cost in ships, jump gates and warriors had been far too high. Even the parasite had escaped.
Kwed studied from all angles the plan that the previous Otrid Lords had devised to eradicate the humans. He examined their assumptions, reasoning, and resource allocations.
It all seemed an overly complex plan for a straightforward mission.
The Lords had used the power of the corrupted large one named Faraway to in-turn corrupt the mind of one of the human outpost’s primary administrators. This was done to smooth the way for a deception, to lure the physical form of the large one into an enclosed space where a tightly targeted portal could be opened, and the beasts of the staging world could attack.
In one regard the plan made sense—to secure victory, the large one who guarded the outpost must first be defeated. But this relied too heavily upon a corrupted human and the enslaved lesser aliens to accomplish their tasks, and underestimated the human space fleet that was spread throughout the system.
All of it was over-thought, Kwed decided. Yes, the large ones needed to be accounted for, but what was truly required was brute force to exterminate the human singletons. The defeated Otrid Lords had valued the prize of secret knowledge above the primary objective of eradicating a competing species, and that misjudgment had cost his people dearly.
The humans will not escape again, he swore to himself, then focused his mind on formulating his battle plan.
Chapter 16
A Man Apart
Mik decided that this time, when passing through Divine Space, he was perfectly content to admire the interior walls of the Hightower. Last time, he’d spent hours, days maybe, mesmerized by the bizarre environment beyond the hull.
This time, the mighty subspace ocean could rage on to its heart’s content. He didn’t need to watch.
He’d narrowed down the navigation readings to a minimal display, one that approximated tracking a journey through normal space. He’d set regular intervals to check and make sure he was still on course. Apollo had loaded the ship with a course setting that was supposed to take him directly to the new world, so Mik figured he wasn’t in danger of plunging through the heart of a star.
Not his finest moment as an admiral, he admitted, but keeping his sanity intact had to be worth something.
And so that left him with ample time to read. Apollo had also left him with extensive historical archives and analysis of Apex, the kind of material he’d never taken the time to search for during his years as a Fixer. Reading biographies of the gods had never been his preferred leisure activity.
He settled in with his reading slate and called up the first overview of the early life of Apex. It was written by one of the early Acolytes, and its informal tone was very different from what was presented at the temples.
The man who would become Apex was the sole surviving human pulled off of Mars following the Otrid attack.
That such a figure would come from Mars was unlikely in the extreme. Development of the Red Planet had stalled at this juncture of history. With the Benefactors so recently opening up the stars to the human race, why expend so many resources to terraform such a marginal world, when the possibility of discovering habitable worlds around distant stars was so tantalizingly close?
Nevertheless, a handful of Martian colonies were already established at that time. Unfortunately for these pioneers, they were extraordinarily vulnerable. The Otrid discovered them, and found that bombing the settlements from orbit was more than sufficient to eliminate the human population on Mars. The inhabitants that somehow avoided the bombardment soon found themselves without air, water, and food, and quickly succumbed.
With one exception.
Nathan Godwin was the chief architect of the plan to Terraform Mars, and when the attack came he was far below the surface. He’d taken a well-supplied mechanized walker into a series of caves in the Tithonium Chasma, scouting a vast underground deposit of water ice. His plan was to evaluate the possibility of placing a small nuclear reactor there to slowly melt the ice, thus creating a steam vent, as part of his long-term plan to thicken the atmosphere.
Nathan was lucky once to be under the surface when the settlements came under attack, and was lucky twice when, much later, the surviving human fleet and Beh’neefazor ships parked in orbit in search of survivors.
He was the only one they found.
His was a remarkable story of survival. Nathan lived on Mars, alone, surrounded everywhere by the desolation following the attack, cut off from Earth, not knowing if he was the last human being in all the universe. It is a sad footnote in human history that he did, in fact, turn out to be the last Martian.
There is no record of his reaction when he was rescued from his lonely vigil on the red planet, so one can only imagine how that experience affected his outlook, how wandering across the blasted surface of Mars shaped his soul. It is said he was a religious man, but he kept no journals and kept his council to himself.
Nonetheless, as the only surviving member of the human race with any experience in Terraforming other worlds, his elevation to godhood was largely uncontroversial, although the fact that a man named “Godwin” was in line to become a god caused no small amount of amusement. There were even some who took it as a sign.
The Benefactors shared what knowledge and world-transforming technology they possessed with Apex, and altered his body to be at home in a variety of marginal environments, much as they had done with Triton.
Although Apex has not visited The City since the early days of the founding, his temple has always been revered, and his worshippers are m
any.
Of all the gods, he represents the best hope for the future.
Mik shut down his reading slate. He didn’t know much about Mars in Earth’s old solar system, and decided he’d read up on that too, to see just what kind of project Apex had undertaken.
One of the passages in the biography nagged at him. The part about how the Benefactors had “altered his body to be at home in a variety of marginal environments.” His mind wandered, wondering what kind of god he would find on the new world. He’d seen Maelstrom, a magnificent tangle of disembodied magnetic fields, and Apollo, in his giant golden glory, and the many Aspects that Tower chose to employ.
What new strangeness awaited?
Chapter 17
Sky Above, Dirt Below
Mik held his breath as the Hightower materialized out of the phantasmagoric strangeness of Divine Space and into the system that was supposed to contain humanity’s new home.
If he was going to get blown out of the sky, now would be the time.
The Hightower’s communication net blasted out a series of codes and messages that Apollo had supplied him with. The seconds crawled by in agonizing slowness until the first confirmation reply came through.
He eased back into the command chair and let out a sigh of relief.
Might live long enough to meet another god after all.
His moment of relief was quickly replaced by a sense of wonder as visual images flickered to life on his screens.
In the distance the crescent of a beautiful blue and green world jumped out from the blackness of space. Even from the Hightower’s distance, it was apparent the planet glowed with the warmth of life. Clouds swirled above continents in a way that for a moment reminded him of the stormy clouds of Lodias, yet less menacing than those of the gas giant that rose and set above The City.
“It’s true,” Mik whispered to himself. “All of it. There really is another world, a world built for us.”
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