Gods and The City

by Steve Statham

  "Leave that to me," Mik said, calling up the glorious inventory of weapons with which Tower had blessed the ship.

  "What do you propose?"

  "If it's being enslaved, it may not really care about hurting us. We aren't its true enemy. If aliens had me chained to the deck forcing me to do their blood-letting, I'd want to bash their brains in."

  "That assumes much, Mik. The relationship between the two species may be more complex."

  "Maybe, but I don't think so. At the most basic level, the Otrid are simply trying to steal something of ours—the secret of Divine Space. They're happy to kill us all in the process to remove the competition. That hardly sounds like some great metaphysical mystery to me. I doubt that chaining down this alien is part of a complex symbiosis between species. I think this situation is just what it looks like—an enslaved alien being forced to work against its will."

  Maelstrom did not offer a counter-argument. At length he said, "Move us closer. If we are going to free this creature, I need to be within range of its influence. But Mik, you are going to have to trust me with some of the ship's abilities. To speak with this alien, I need access to the Hightower's communications net. I can no longer project my thoughts as I once could."

  "Good—it might not respond well to being yelled at," Mik said before he could stop himself.

  "What do you mean by..."

  Before the wounded god could finish expressing his indignation, Faraway's hijacked sphere ship abruptly shifted course to intercept the Hightower.

  "It appears they've discovered where you've gone, Maelstrom. Either that, or they've figured out the Hightower is the last target left. I expect they'll be firing on us in the next few seconds."

  "I can already perceive the contours of the alien's mind," Maelstrom said. "Even here, I can feel the connections that hold my consciousness together weakening. Can you feel it?"

  A cold stab of fear ran through Mik as he perceived a numbness in his mental links to the Hightower. The ship responded sluggishly to his course correction command, a shock after the taut responses from the vessel that had already become second nature.

  He now understood on a personal level Maelstrom's description of the alien's power: "It dissolves the bonds that tie together complex systems..."

  "Maelstrom—prepare yourself. This is going to happen quickly or not at all. I'm going to see if I can baffle the Otrid with some of the Hightower's beautiful weapons, and find a way to breach the outer shell."

  Mik initiated a rotating barrage of fire from eleven of the various beams, projectiles and energy waves in the Hightower's arsenal. Faraway's sphere responded with a defensive fusillade. As the space between the two ships filled with the violent clash of energies, Mik directed the remaining microdrones from the swarm to converge on the sphere, approaching by random vectors and varied speeds.

  Some were detected and vaporized, but Mik guessed that many of the tiny machines would register on scanners as debris, not actively piloted craft.

  It's not gonna be the biggest tool in the box that wins this fight.

  He tracked their movements on the Hightower's screens. The drones appeared as burning points of light swirling around the sphere-ship like fiery asteroids orbiting a planet. They winked out, sometimes by twos and threes, as the former godship's defenses identified and eliminated them.

  But the swarm continued its downward rain, and it did not take long before one of the microdrones weaved its way through the chaos and attached itself to the surface of the great sphere.

  Mik immediately initiated the sequence that turned the drone's weapons on its own propulsion system. The microdrone briefly blazed with a molten hot intensity, melting through the transparent skin of the sphere ship, leaving behind a hole no larger than a fingertip.

  Even as the internal atmosphere spewed from the tiny opening, Mik sent the remaining drones rushing toward the hull breach. A handful slipped inside and immediately dispersed throughout the interior.

  Through the lenses of the microdrones Mik could see the sphere-ship's automated servitor bots scurrying to repair the breach in the hull. His perspective tilted crazily as he switched from drone to drone. Far fewer microdrones survived the infiltration attempt than Mik had hoped, but he now had eyes and weapons inside the ship.

  "We're inside," he told Maelstrom. "Show me what we're looking for." Through the Hightower's neural network, Maelstrom shared a murky mental image of the strange alien. It reminded Mik of a giant seed of some sort, with a roughly textured shell and a large eye on top. It was restrained by a series of cables, each presumably linked to Otrid masters. How the primitive-looking life form could possibly be exhibiting the powers it possessed was beyond Mik.

  He sent the remaining drones scattering across the interior of the sphere in a search pattern.

  The interior was vastly larger than any starship Mik had encountered. There was essentially a massive city in the center—kilometers across—but not a city ever populated by ordinary humans. The structures and layout were unfathomable in purpose; some objects sprawled outward on a grand scale, others were nearly as small as one of the microdrones he directed. It was a city bent toward the purposes of a single entity.

  What did Faraway do in all this space?

  Once more the scale, the immensity, of the gods of mankind filled him with a sense of awe. Mik had spent so little of his life contemplating the gods and the implications of their existence. Except for Tower, they had been real to him only in a distant way, far-off beings more legend than actual.

  Not any more.

  The fear inside him burned a little brighter when he considered that most of these uplifted human gods, no matter how vast and powerful, had been defeated. A crippled one cowered in the Hightower's neural network even now, and here he was mentally soaring through the husk of another dead god's former home.

  He pushed these thoughts aside. There was no time to dwell on it.

  His view raced along with the microdrones through the corridors and avenues of this massive "city."

  The ship was packed with Otrid. He examined their odd four-segment physiognomy, momentarily forgetting the fear and hatred he felt for them. Areas of the interior were partially disassembled, exposing the machinery that powered the great sphere. The Otrid had clearly been modifying the sphere-ship for their own purposes.

  As the drones raced further inward he lost contact with several of them, but whether that was a consequence of their destruction or the hidden alien's strange power, he could not say.

  Mik shifted his viewpoint through the drones from the purely visual, employing several other spectrums. The picture cleared as one of the drones displayed the signs of enormous amounts of energy surging through the conduits to one particular section of the sphere. He directed a drone to the convergence of this energy web.

  When it arrived he found hundreds of Otrid encircling a small covered chamber that was open on two sides. They were huddled together in groups of sixteen, motionless. A slender wire ran from each into the chamber. To a human eye these filaments were nearly invisible, but in the infrared they pulsed with unknown forces.

  Despite the battle going on outside of Faraway's sphere—certainly visible through the transparent shell—the Otrid in this section stood placidly, unconcerned about the scorching weapons fire that threw shifting red and purple shadows across the floor and walls. They appeared completely focused on their task, unaware of the small drone that floated above them.

  Mik let the drone slowly drift inside the walls of the chamber.

  At the junction of all the filaments floated the mysterious alien.

  Hundreds of kilometers away, ensconced in the Hightower's command center, Mik's breath caught in his throat.

  The pod-like creature was encased inside a network of the hair-like wires. Viewing it now, the creature was even stranger than what Mik had seen in the blurry image Maelstrom had shared. It was larger than Mik had expected, and even restrained by the filaments it projected a powe
rful presence. Scars of varying depth and color crisscrossed its hide, markers of what looked like a long and violent life.

  Unlike the Otrid, the hovering alien noticed the drone instantly. The multiple concentric lenses of its great eye contracted and spun as they focused on the tiny intruder.

  Mik activated the limited sensor array in the drone, but the scans could not deliver much on the way of information. There was no way to read the strange creature's body language, but Mik got the distinct impression of curiosity from the alien, if not bemusement. He could detect nothing in the creature's demeanor that obviously shouted "hostile."

  So far, his intuition regarding the relationship between the restrained alien and the Otrid still seemed reasonable.

  Mik sent the other microdrones rushing to this location.

  There was a stir outside the chamber among the assembled Otrid. The motion of the thing's eye seemed to have awakened the Otrid minders, or perhaps they could somehow read their captive's state of mind.

  "Maelstrom, now! Tell this thing we're going to free it!"

  Mik heard the voice of the wounded god rumble across all the Hightower's communication channels. "Accept this gift, ancient one. Let there be peace between us."

  Mik activated the cutting beam in the drone's arsenal. The weapon was not powerful by itself—it was designed to be used in coordination with thousands of other beams in a swarming tactic—but it was powerful enough to slice through the thin tendrils that restrained the alien. The strands burned away as the beam played across them.

  The remaining drones swooped in and added their beams to the assault. Within seconds, a third of the restraining filaments were severed.

  Mik, his concentration divided between fending off the missiles from Faraway's sphere-ship and directing the drones inside, could not quite follow Maelstrom's next actions.

  But it seemed one moment the diminished god was still inhabiting the Hightower's neural network, and the next there was a great emptiness in the machinery.

  The Hightower's sensors detected a new pattern of energy forming in the space near the sphere-ship. It was smaller and far less dynamic than the Maelstrom that Mik had first encountered, but the organization of the magnetic field lines was unmistakable. It did not slow as it reached the sphere, instead expanding until it engulfed the artificial globe like a thin atmosphere around a world.

  "Maelstrom? You going to let me know what you're up to?"

  "Maintain your physical assault, Mik, while I deal with the invisible chains that restrain this creature. If it is not the ally you hope it to be, this will likely be my last communication."

  Before Mik could reply the link was coldly severed.

  In the next instant there was a violent disruption of the electro-magnetic signature of Faraway's hijacked sphere. Lights dimmed and holes in the ship's defense shields opened.

  Through the lenses of the drones, Mik watched as the Otrid convulsed in apparent agony, the bio-electric impulses of their bodies interrupted.

  All the time the one-eyed creature floated, almost serenely—until the last filament was cut.

  What happened next was horrible to behold, but Mik could not look away.

  The freed alien drifted out of the chamber where it had been restrained.

  Once more the concentric lenses of its great single eye rotated, each at a different speed, some rings in a clockwise direction and others counter-clockwise.

  The affect on the Otrid was immediate.

  They fell to the deck en masse. Screams issued from each of the four different segments of each of the hundreds of Otrid, a chorus of agony. The four bodies that made up a single Otrid had once been autonomous creatures before the alien evolutionary impulses of their homeworld bound them together into a unified whole, and each segment had retained the vestigial mouth and vocal apparatus that now issued the horrible cries.

  Mik knew he would never forget the bone-chilling sound of their pain.

  And then, as the one-eyed, teardrop-shaped alien floated silently above, whatever bonds held the four segments of each Otrid together dissolved.

  Mik focused on one Otrid as the effect spread.

  The wedge-shaped eye segment tumbled off the great mass of the central stalk. The stumpy sail along the back of the stalk, through which so many Otrid senses flowed, was crushed as the four-legged trunk rolled over, legs kicking slowly.

  The black lump that was the dominant intelligence for the four segments scuttled across the floor, its strands and appendages twitching in distress.

  The same scene was repeated throughout the ship hundreds of times as the complex mental and physical bonds that held Otrid individuals together eroded. The same brutal power that had broken down and fatally wounded Tower and Faraway was now turned on the slave masters with devastating effect.

  Mik directed one of the drones to ground level to look into the strange eyes of the disassembled Otrid. He could never be sure, but he thought he could read the emotions of the visual segment as it slithered across the deck, seeking to rejoin its lost host body. Mik read panic and despair in those four eyes as they internalized the reality of the segment's new status as a lower life form.

  Their agony was short-lived.

  The freed alien drifted up toward the nearest inner surface of the sphere where it hesitated for a moment. Mik sent his drones up to follow. He watched from several angles as a blur raced across the surface of the sphere until it stopped in front of the creature.

  It was a circular hatch made of live-glass, transparent like the outer shell. It was engineered into the material and slid across its surface like a living organism—yet one more piece of the gods' astonishing technology, but a techno-marvel that the alien appeared to control easily.

  The hatch opened and the alien drifted out into space, never once looking back or communicating with the Hightower or The City. Its body undulated as if swimming in water, and not hard vacuum.

  The disassembled Otrid were sucked through the hatch and out into the airless void in its wake.

  The microdrones also tumbled through the hatch into space. Mik's perspective shifted crazily before he brought one of the drones under control. He swiveled it around to watch the creature that had brought so much destruction to the shrunken human universe, even if it had not been acting under its own will.

  It had already moved a great distance, heading up and out of the plane of the ecliptic, its destination and motives unknown.

  Mik watched it recede in the distance until Maelstrom's voice shook him from his reverie.

  "The god-ship is mine, Mik. This vessel once embodied the will and power of Faraway. It is more than adequate to contain my being."

  Mik acknowledged the message without comment.

  I'm hardly in a position to argue, am I?

  Mik recalled the microdrones to the Hightower. He scanned for any signs of Otrid activity and, finding none, began the process of evaluating the damage to his ship. He saw with satisfaction that the Hightower's wounds were slight. Messages poured in from The City's administrators begging for news, which he delivered in short, factual reports.

  It only slowly sank in, a realization as warm as a shot of whiskey, that they had won.

  The magnitude of it dazed him. He opened a channel to the wounded god that now inhabited Faraway's sphere ship.

  "Maelstrom, I admit that I'm not sure what I should be doing right now. I feel like I'm forgetting some important thing."

  For the first time, there was a hint of compassion in Maelstrom's voice. "After a fight such as we've had, that is not unusual, Mik. You've done well. I suggest you confer with the demigod Talia on your next move. It is she who controls The City now."

  At first the words did not register. Then the meaning sank in, and his heart began to race.

  "Talia...the what?"

  24

  All Must Rise

  How do you plan a funeral for a god, let alone two?

  Talia didn't know and neither did anyone else, as s
uch a thing had never happened in human history. Even Maelstrom could offer nothing useful. The deity that had once been at the top of the pantheon was now a lesser power after his clash with the Otrid and their alien slave. She had attempted communication with him several times but he answered in a distracted way each time. Working to integrate his essence with Faraway's sphere ship seemed to require all of his concentration.

  She could see it up there now, a small disc floating several hundred miles above the dome, once a symbol of enormous power. It now hung in the darkness like Skyra's own artificial moon.

  Ultimately, she kept the formalities to a minimum when it came to memorial services for the lost gods. Talia prepared and recorded a speech that talked about Tower's love and sacrifice for the people, available for any who wished to hear it. She activated beams of light that rose from the temples of Tower and Faraway, bright columns that rose to the inner surface of the dome itself. People surrounded the temples in a great ring, and Talia could sense the sadness and uncertainty mixed in with the joy of survival.

  She could feel it herself. Talia was still being buffeted by the clash of emotions in the wake of the events of the past weeks.

  A melancholy feeling dominated now after the most personal of encounters.

  When Mik had visited her in her underground chambers and seen her nearly unrecognizable body for the first time, a pale, frail thing tied into The City's control network in a thousand different ways, his grief had been palpable.

  He maintained a stoic stance, but nothing escaped her notice. She could read the despair that dragged on his body like a weight, the sorrow from deep inside that was written in his eyes.

  He spoke then, holding nothing back, expressing his love and the hopes he had maintained for so long of the life he had wanted to share with her.

  The hardest part had been unspoken—the loss of the children they would never have together, the almost unbearably high price required for her transformation into The City's protector. The invasive connections to The City's many systems had suddenly seemed unclean to her, poisonous needles leeching away her life. It had taken her full concentration to calm herself.