by David Beers
Once a girl that only wanted to serve her god, she was now a woman possessed of a divination.
And perhaps, there was very little difference between those two people.
Or, perhaps, there was more difference than anyone could adequately express.
Rachel stayed below the Ministries’ radar, even as her numbers swelled. Perhaps the Ministries didn’t understand that the Unformed would return. Perhaps they’d forgotten the message received last time. Perhaps they were too arrogant to think they could miss something growing beneath their foot.
Or, a better analogy, something growing inside of them.
The Ministries would have thought it cancer, something to be cut out, excised.
Rachel Veritros considered it evolution—an organism that eclipses its host, and when it finally happened, the frailties of humanity and their false gods would fall away.
Leaving only perfection.
The five years after her return were ones of rapid change for Rachel Veritros, in which her faith abounded and her conviction knew no bounds.
She was the righteous.
She was the harbinger of the universe’s rightful God.
She was what would end this world, and begin a new one.
Those five years ended, though, and just as it would for the one who came after her, war began for Rachel Veritros.
One
Raylyn’s transport was 500 yards from the platform. Scores of militarized transports floated in front of her, all waiting on her command to attack the compound. They’d all come to a stop minutes before; Raylyn’s gut was a block of ice.
She couldn’t take her eyes from the man on the platform. He hadn’t moved, but stood still in the predawn darkness, his eyes like stars guiding Raylyn to the correct place.
“He knew,” Raylyn said to the others in the transport with her. Her second in command, Lynda Minson, and the Disciple—whose name was Rogan, though the man resembled few other human traits outside of his name. “He knew we were coming.” She looked to Lynda on her right. “Was it the informant? Did they tell him?”
Lynda shook her head. Feeling the same thing Raylyn did. Fear. Terror. All of it like ice, freezing them immobile.
“Yes,” the Disciple said. “They did tell him. They folded, and that’s why they’re going to die today with the rest of them. Are we ready?”
Raylyn didn’t know if she was or not. The informant’s thought came back to her: If you come, and he’s here, we’ll probably all die—all of us but him.
Was this a mistake? Because Raylyn, despite her faith in Corinth and the Priesthood and everything else holy, saw something she didn’t understand. Perhaps she hadn’t actually believed it was possible, not until it was right here in front of her. All of it had been a myth, just another cult she would stomp out and then move on in her service to Corinth.
But now she saw the truth.
A man who stood without bowing his knee or turning to run, but stared down a force strong enough to destroy his compound—one that would send it falling to the depths below as nothing more than a flaming wreck. He didn’t move, though. He was daring them to come.
“Raylyn?” the Disciple asked, his voice as harsh as she’d ever heard it. It snapped her from her thoughts, all of them threatening to drown her beneath their sheer number.
“Yes. We’re ready,” she said. “Launch the attack.”
A second passed, her message flowing from her lips to the artificial intelligence systems controlling the ships. Her transport’s screen showed information on the top left side, AI readouts from around the compound. A high density of people in the upper floors close to the Earth’s surface. Military grade ClearViews floating up and down the building. No digital coating was detected over the structure, though, which Raylyn took some comfort in. These people might have some defenses, but they lacked true heavy power. They were technologically inept for this battle.
Is that so? Does the man with shining gray eyes look inept? Does he look worried?
The transport formation split. Sitting in long rows, half moved up, and half down. The pattern was every other one, so that if one transport went higher, the next lower, with about 50 feet separating them.
They paused for a second, and Raylyn divided her attention between the actual transports and the data displaying on the screen. Another second passed, and then the transports moved, half heading toward the mass of people at the top of the compound, half heading toward the man on the platform.
Raylyn thought it surprising, the AI thinking the singular figure such a threat that it would send so many toward him. Half would handle the group near the surface, while the rest dealt with the gray-eyed demon.
Raylyn’s transport hung back, not venturing forward. She felt the Disciple move closer to the front of the transport, in between her and Lynda.
Two hundred and fifty transports swung upward, forming an arch as they did. The other half went in a straight line, their angle not as sharp.
The gray eyes didn’t move, not forward nor backward. He remained steady.
“What’s he going to do?” Lynda asked. “What can he possibly do?”
And Raylyn understood the sentiment. There were just too many transports. Five hundred and all swarming forward like deadly insects, knowing only to kill anything not their kind.
“Go forward,” the Disciple said.
“No,” Raylyn answered. She didn’t look at him as she said it, and felt no fear either. Because the man in front of her scared her worse than the man behind her, and she’d stay right where she was until she better understood this weapon’s capabilities.
The Disciple said nothing.
The transports heading toward him were only a hundred feet away now. Raylyn’s hands gripped her knees, her knuckles turning white and the muscles in her forearms flexing.
“Why aren’t they firing yet?” she whispered.
And as if the AI heard her, the transports’ weapons rose into place—all 250 at once. The transports split again, half dropping up and half down, though spreading themselves further out this time to avoid friendly fire.
A moment, and then the sky lit as if the sun had been dropped beneath the Earth’s crust.
Brilliant orange streaked from each of the transports’ weapons—a combination of self-generating nanotech and AI powered lasers. Orange flames blazed through the sky, billowing out behind the lasers that zeroed in on the only man before them. They shot straight forward, simultaneously directing the orange flames to spread up and out, creating a wall of fire around the bottom platform. The fire pulled away from the lasers and slowly pressed down on the platform, creating unbearable heat across it.
Raylyn’s screen bypassed the ships and the wall of fire, able to see past the battle and focus on the platform.
The man still hadn’t moved, though the True Faith’s full power was upon him.
Lasers streaked across the sky, countless in number. She only had a second to think it, but Raylyn knew he was dead. She knew that her earlier doubts had been silly, ill founded, and that she should pay consequences for thinking them. She would gladly do so, giving herself over to the Priesthood for whatever punishment they deemed necessary.
The lasers never hit their target.
The flames didn’t touch a garment on his body.
His eyes blazed out, the gray in them flying forward like electrical spiderwebs, creating wispy tentacles that spread across the area in front of him.
The lasers were within an inch of striking, and there they stopped. They simply halted as if the universe’s physical laws no longer applied.
“No,” the Disciple whispered, leaning almost all the way into the front seat now. “That’s not possible.”
The man stood with fire raging around him and innumerable orange lasers pointing at him, ready to obliterate his body, but not quite touching him. His hands remained at his sides. Raylyn had forgotten about the transports moving upward; her mind was paralyzed on the screen in front of her.
The spiderwebs continued spreading from the man’s eyes, encountering the green lasers now, and as his webs crisscrossed their brutal light, they began changing. Gray cut through them, spreading the same as it did through the air. Eating the green and replacing it with gray, electrical currents—if that’s what it even was, how could Raylyn know?
The man raised his arms, and they seemed to move faster than the lasers had.
The stillness ended.
Everything rushed upward. The transports, the fire, the lasers, all of it moved with reckless abandonment. Transports slammed into each other, glass and metal breaking as they ripped apart. The flames caught hold of the transports, the nanotech no longer driven by AI, but by the simple need to continue burning. The lasers sliced through fire and steel alike, twisting and turning as they wound their way up the outside of the building.
Raylyn’s screen pulled back, and she watched the disaster blow upward as if a wind carried it. The transports tossed and turned over one another, the green lasers twirling with streaks of the man’s gray eyes flittering through them.
“No,” Lynda said, echoing the Disciple’s words.
Because they saw what was going to happen. The wreckage flying upward was aiming at the other group of transports, the ones heading to those near the surface.
“They’re not going to make it,” Raylyn said, understanding flying wreckage would reach the unharmed transports before they could attack.
The upper force was slowing, its weapons locking into place, but the fire from below roared over them all. The lasers came next, slicing through machine and fire alike—all of it the same to the unfeeling light.
And finally, the tumbling transports smashed into their brethren. The AI was finally reacting, some of the above transports trying to maneuver away, but it was too late. Not a single shot had been fired at the upper levels of the compound. Transports were falling from the sky, rolling over and over with fire burning across their metal skeletons.
Raylyn’s eyes went back to the man at the bottom.
His arms had dropped but the spiderwebs branching out from his eyes had now surrounded his body. He stared up at her, even as hundreds of ships fell down in front of him. It was the True Faith’s power, now raining down, dead.
David could feel his followers above him, their exhalations almost palpable. His blood burned and he knew theirs did too, but also that while it might hurt, there was immense pleasure in it as well.
Blocks of steel tumbled before him.
He couldn’t feel the fire’s heat, though he could see it rising off the falling transports.
Hundreds, all falling like rocks from the sky, as if an avalanche had somehow started from the Earth’s crust.
Another transport waited in the distance. One that looked like all of those he had just destroyed, but humans flew in it instead of the artificial intelligence that had just so woefully failed. The people who were in charge, having come to kill him. And behind them? David saw larger transports, huge things, each holding many, many more people.
He couldn’t reach them from here; they needed to come closer, and then he would show them how foolish they were.
David saw her in his peripheral vision.
He turned, his eyes ablaze and continually shooting out webs that climbed the air around him.
David’s head cocked slightly. The girl stood next to him. The one that he’d sent Rhett to find. She looked back at him, her head mimicking his. Then, she turned to the sky and watched as two more ships lost control and tumbled through the hot air, falling thousands of feet until they smashed against the rocks below.
She didn’t look back to him, but her eyes went up, to where the mixture of flames, metal, and lasers still warred with one another. She wasn’t fully there, but ephemeral. David could see through her, see the building behind her—yet, she still stood next to him. Short, blonde hair. He could see her dark green eyes, her thin body. Not quite boyish, but not showing many women’s curves. Pretty, elegant, if not beautiful.
She’s watching me now, he thought. David wasn’t afraid of it, because he was in his element. His God’s power filled him and no woman staring at him or the things he did could cast doubt. Not at this moment. David didn’t know how she was here, but he also didn’t know anything else happening on that side of the world.
It’s not important. Let her watch. Her fate will be the same.
David turned back to the floating transports. Could they see the girl? He doubted it. The two of them were similar, perhaps in some twisted way they were brother and sister. Those people hundreds of yards from the compound? Floating with their weapons and hate? David had no similarity with them.
“Come then,” he whispered. “Come to me.”
“Come then. Come to me.”
The words whispered by Raylyn’s face as if someone inside her transport spoke them.
“What the fuck was that?” Lynda shrieked.
But Raylyn knew the answer. Everyone inside the transport did. Because they had watched the man’s lips move. They had watched him talk on the screen in front of them, and then his words filled their transport.
Somehow, through all the distance between them, he spoke … and they heard.
“Go,” the Disciple said. “Send everything.”
Raylyn swallowed, commanding the screen to zoom out. “Look at that. Look at what he just did without even blinking.” The transports were still falling, the AI malfunctioning and no longer able to keep them flying in the air. Fire burned, the self replicating nano no longer focused on an enemy, but its programming ruptured so that it attacked whatever was near it. “I’m not sending men in there to die. I’m not sending us in there to die.”
She turned around so that she could look at the Disciple’s face.
He was staring forward at the screen, intensely studying the man on the platform.
“Is there someone else with him?” Lynda asked.
Raylyn whipped back around, having seen no one there moments before.
“Corinth! What is that?” she cried.
The electrical webs had spread further, and now they appeared to be forming around someone else, though Raylyn couldn’t tell much. The web revealed a human-like figure standing next to the demon.
“We’re going to him,” the Disciple said. “Now.”
“Rogan, no.” Raylyn didn’t look away from the new figure, it only cementing her desire to stay where she was. To retreat.
“This is a direct order from the First Council. If you deny it, you will face their judgment when you return.”
Raylyn dropped her head and closed her eyes. She knew it was true. The First Council wasn’t to be denied—it would be like denying Corinth Himself.
Raylyn nodded, opening her eyes and looking back to the transport’s screen.
Go, she told the transports behind her, the ones holding soldiers that were probably still watching the first battalion of ships fall from the sky.
It took the larger transports a few seconds to begin moving, but they went forward, flying above Raylyn.
“Now us,” the Disciple said.
Their transport started moving, too, and Raylyn prayed for what she was sure would be the last time.
The girl remained next to David but he paid her no more mind. The transports were coming now, both those carrying warriors, and the one bringing the leaders.
The electrical webs had spread far now, 30 feet in all directions, and David stood fully in his power.
The transports were moving toward him, slower than the smaller ones had flown. Their weapons could be used from further out, though, and he saw them engage on the transports’ outer shells.
Lasers fired, but not at him this time. They shot at the building, and David understood what they were doing. Trying to weaken the structural integrity, pummeling it until the entire thing simply broke off and fell to the depths below.
He watched as green bolts shot against his building, his home.
&nb
sp; Rocks tumbled down behind him, but David didn’t turn around.
The compound’s defenses activated, ClearViews flying up and down the building’s exterior. The transports kept advancing, their lasers larger—more powerful, though slower to fire. They let loose again, and David’s ClearViews fired back, a hundred shots for every one the massive transports mustered. The ClearViews’ red lasers intersecting the green, bolts of both colors bursting into the air as they collided. The sky crackled, but less strikes hit the building behind David. Less stone fell to his platform.
The transports continued forward, and just before they were within range for David to reach out and destroy them, men propelled from the tops. They flew out, hundreds at once, launching through the sky wearing armor and helmets and holding weapons that David didn’t recognize. They wore packs on their backs and air propulsion jetted them forward, flying through the sky as if superhuman.
ClearViews fired on them. Some were tagged easily, their bodies set afire and their propulsion dying. They fell through the sky like insects, going down to meet the transports that had come first.
There were too many for the ClearViews to fully handle, though, and David knew it.
They swarmed down to his platform, landing en masse. David kept his arms at his side, but motioned his hand outward.
The gray web moved, all of the complex shapes it had formed rushing out at once, climbing through the air like a rabid animal. The webs spread across the men, even as they tried firing their weapons. The gray static clung to their faces, hands, guns—everything. The firepower trying to escape their weapons found itself enveloped in the same static field, unable to move and exploding nearly the moment it exited the chamber.
The static swam forward even as more men landed—an almost endless supply. David didn’t move at all. He didn’t even look away from the single transport that still held its cargo. It was slightly further back, but David could see inside. Three people. All watching their soldiers die.
