He’d never been able to figure out exactly what that weapon would do.
It winked out of normal space and reappeared almost simultaneously inside the shield of the Otrid formation. The resulting explosion could have atomized a small moon.
Too bad I don’t have another one of those.
The expanding wave of radiation and debris followed shortly, and even the godship’s shields wavered under the assault.
The effect on the remaining Otrid ships was more pronounced. The vessels split off on seemingly random courses.
Their guidance systems are compromised, Apollo realized, and swung his ship around to pick them off individually.
The reckless joy with which he hunted the scattered Otrid ships surprised even himself. Some of the Otrid weaponry even managed to get past his defenses, scarring the hull of his ship and costing him some lesser functions.
But they all fell to the power he harnessed from the star.
With the sixteen ships from the farthest group eliminated, he raced back toward Skyra. A fierce, close-quarter battle was in progress between a trio of Otrid ships and Faraway’s old godship. It reminded Apollo of broadside clashes between ancient sailing ships that he dimly recalled from historical novels and videos.
Maelstrom was slow to respond to Apollo’s hails.
“Hang on, old friend,” he transmitted to the diminished god. “Our time is now. The day is ours.”
With the enemy ships so close to the great sphere, Apollo dared not use his array-boosted weaponry. But even without the enhanced power, his godship was more than a match for any individual Otrid warship.
He maneuvered in closer than he normally would have. At this distance, he could see the markings that identified the Otrid ships, although whether they were numbers or letters he could not tell. He targeted the rearmost ship, and slammed it with a barrage of missiles. He followed with a focused primary beam aimed at what appeared to be the bridge.
Its shields, evidently already weakened in the ongoing conflict, flickered briefly before collapsing. The primary beam burned a gash across the hull, exposing the ship’s interior to the vacuum of space. Lights dimmed, then died as the ship went adrift.
He turned his godship toward the next Otrid vessel, only to find that the weaponry from Faraway’s godship had finally penetrated its shields. The invading craft exploded silently, its fractured parts glittering in the starlight as they spread outward.
The remaining ship peeled off from its attack, but Apollo chased it down easily. His godship hovered over the invader like some great golden eagle as he cut it into pieces, beams raking its surface like talons of lightning.
The comm system aboard Apollo’s ship crackled to life. Normally the godship’s communications array flawlessly buffered and filtered every message, but the energies loosed during the battle around Skyra stymied even his godship’s capabilities.
At last the static subsided and a voice whispered in his ear.
“Thanks for the assist, Apollo. But I could have handled them on my own. Faraway kept a damn impressive collection of weapons stockpiled here.”
Apollo let Maelstrom’s chatter pass without comment. “I’ve scanned the interior of your ship,” he said. “I’m detecting Otrid life-signs. Do you want me to send over an attachment of drones to hunt them down?”
“We’re close to mopping up the dregs. The militia troops stationed here were remarkably effective, although we took losses. It’s amazing how quickly the fighting instinct returns, don’t you think? It’s been centuries since anyone had to organize to fight…”
“Maelstrom, stop. You’re babbling.” Apollo watched as his scans told the story of what was happening inside the giant sphere. Systems flickered on and off, and some areas of the ship were without power. There were two hull breaches that servitor bots were frantically trying to repair. Even Maelstrom’s responses over the comm were painfully slow, by god standards.
Maelstrom is barely keeping it together. But then again, so am I. The raw power that Apollo commanded, the information overload that danced through his brain, the killing of his enemies, had activated a predatory instinct that made it hard to slow down for any hand-holding.
“If you’re in control, I’m off to help Mik’s fleet,” Apollo said. “Your primary job now is to get your ship ready for the big leap, Maelstrom. Sweep any Otrid corpses aboard your ship out into space. Once we’ve destroyed the last of the Otrid, I’m ripping open the largest doorway into Divine Space the human race has ever seen. We’re not waiting around for another wave of attackers.”
With that, he altered course and piloted his godship away from Faraway’s former home. The sphere diminished rapidly behind him as he raced outward, every sensor on his godship constructing a fresh picture of the clash between Mik’s ships and the first wave of Otrid invaders.
The dominant feature of the battle sector was an expanding cloud of debris mingled with flaring pulses of energy as wounded ships clung desperately to life. The normal electronic tags that differentiated human ships from Otrid were either offline or flickering erratically.
“Mik, report. I’m inbound to your position but can’t untangle the lay of the land from here. Feed me some targets and identify the friendlies, and hang on. This will be over soon.”
Mik’s voice came in faintly over a low-power frequency from the Hightower.
“It’s just me, the Red Dagger, and a couple others, and we’re all in sorry shape. But we’ve disabled or destroyed the Otrid attack force. Sending new ID codes now.”
Apollo watched as the positions of the Hightower and the three others firmed up on his screens.
He altered course to intercept the faltering energy signatures that could only be Otrid ships.
Apollo was methodical in the eradication of these last enemies. He moved in close enough that he could see the scorched hulls and twisted spines of the Otrid warships, then sliced them apart with his primary beams.
His mind was divided as he went about this blood work. A part of him hovered cool and remote, directing repairs to his godship and doing the calculations that would be needed to open the rift into Divine Space.
The other part of him laughed maniacally as he destroyed his helpless enemies.
The truth hit him with blunt certainty—at last, he truly knew what it meant to be a god. He’d spent centuries traveling between the stars, walking the surfaces of suns, composing artistic works that would have required the effort of thousands back on Earth. At the time, it all felt godlike.
But none of that compared to holding the power of life and death in his hands, directly changing the course of events for entire species of intelligent beings, delivering his people from certain destruction. The gods of all the legendary pantheons of humanity had wielded such powers—and the lessons they imparted were both beautiful and terrible.
And yet a small voice whispered in the back of his mind.
No man was meant for this.
It was too late to listen to words of restraint, however. The lust for destruction consumed him, and he raged until the last of the crippled Otrid ships had been atomized.
Some unacknowledged amount of time passed before Mik’s voice broke through the unchained side of his consciousness. “Apollo? I don’t detect any more Otrid vessels. Why are you still firing? Are there cloaked ships out there I can’t detect?”
Shaken, Apollo didn’t answer by voice, replying instead with a coded request for damage reports from the Hightower and the Red Dagger.
It was a new experience, being divided in such a way. He didn’t like it much.
Even with this realization though, the bloodthirsty warrior god was still dominant.
He tried to reclaim his center, reading the damage reports from the two ships to focus himself. He changed course toward the Red Dagger. Its wounds were too great to leave it on its own. He released a small swarm of repair drones from his godship to try to stabilize the vessel.
Yet these actions passed in a haze
, like distant events happening to other people.
As he bounced between rage and reason, doubts about his plan crept into his mind. He knew, in theory, that transporting an entire moon through Divine Space to the far side of the galaxy was possible. In fact, it was the only likely explanation for the Beh’neefazor disappearing. They must have accomplished the same feat, driving one of their worlds through Divine Space to a less hostile neighborhood. Nothing in Apollo’s travels through Divine Space suggested an upper limit on the mass that could transit the subspace realm. After all, he was dealing with forces that drag entire clusters of galaxies across the universe. A moon should be no more difficult to guide across the sea of stars than a godship.
And yet the enormity of the operation still shook his resolve.
The voice whispered to him again, this time with a different message.
Do it. Rip open a hole in space now, while the mad god controls you, and all doubts are buried beneath his righteous fury.
The thought propelled Apollo into decisive action.
This doubt helps no one, and certainly won’t deter the Otrid.
He ran down the checklist he’d carefully constructed these past few days, and executed the items in order.
He released a probe from his godship carrying messages to Apex and Grey Wolf, and sent it soaring into Divine Space.
He informed Talia that it was time to initiate the lock-down procedures in The City they’d worked up over the previous weeks.
The god reached out to the lesser AI that controlled the amplifying array and set it on a course closer in, better aligned with his godship and from where it could make the jump as well.
Apollo then ordered the Hightower and the rest of the small fleet into a carefully calculated orbit that would keep them within the gravitational influence of Skyra, and ensure they made the transit through Divine Space together.
In a final act of spite, with the mad god roaring approval inside his mind, he deployed a fleet of missiles in orbit around Lodias. They were programmed to lay dormant until the human presence left the system, after which they would awaken and converge on any new wave of Otrid ships that jumped through from wherever it was they were staging.
All these actions went into motion, but passed in a fog for Apollo, as if he had stepped outside of the flow of time. He drew in the energy from the array, drinking in the very essence of the star. The taste of the energy signature of the metal-rich, main sequence star reminded him of long ago when he first scouted this system for colonization.
I knew you were a beauty then, and you’re even lovelier now. Long may you burn.
Crackling power flowed between Apollo and his godship, his faculties fully charged as never before. His perception expanded in such a way that the universe took on a new cast, more detailed, more textured. Apollo felt the gravitational pull of mighty Lodias and the gentler tugs of its moons as if they were extensions of his own body. He cast his gaze around, and could see the remnants of the Otrid jump gate exit points, pulsing like open wounds on the fabric of space.
One of them was starting to flicker with new life.
Time to set sail and leave the dragons behind.
He spared a moment to confirm that his commands to the ships and The City had been met, then began the process of shaping the flood of energy to his will. He concentrated on a point ahead of the orbital pathway of Skyra, and spoke the words, like some sorcerer of old, that unlocked humanity’s greatest secret—the door to Divine Space.
A section of the sky dulled, all stars fading from view. In their place a faint glow coalesced. With shocking speed, the glow collapsed to form a great crease that slashed across the blackness like a crack in the universe itself. The cloud bands of giant Lodias twisted out of their long-established patterns as gravitational waves rippled from the breach.
Apollo roared with laughter once more, his mind aflame with the power at his command.
The chasm grew, filling his viewscreens, filling everything. And then his godship, Skyra, Maelstrom’s sphere, and the small fleet of human ships disappeared into the waiting void.
Chapter 29
God and Demigod
The screaming began immediately.
The sky had opened and swallowed Skyra whole. Colors that Talia had never seen before blazed through the dome. Beyond the thin layer of materials that contained the human biosphere, strange energies writhed in unknown agony. Clouds of exotic matter boiled in threatening spasms, then dissipated as if they had never existed.
Dark globes surrounded by pulsing bands of light flickered into existence, winking out seconds later. They were worlds passing in Skyra’s wake, she surmised, or perhaps even stars.
Through the sensors that bound her to The City, she felt the unimaginable power that gravity exhibited in this realm.
Even inside her creche she felt a tipping sensation, which she identified as the result of gravitational waves. She could only imagine what the residents of The City would think as their normal sense of balance was shaken from them.
Apollo’s godship was visible above the dome, pulsing red and gold like some small proto-star struggling to be born. She could hear Apollo laughing like a madman—the entire City could. She felt her own blood riders responding to the shrieking call of the star god, who had either lost control of his ability to regulate emotional control, or was deliberately attempting to induce in the people a new emotion that fell somewhere between joyous panic and terror. Talia suspected the former.
She considered turning the dome opaque to head off the growing hysteria, but held back. This was an historic, unprecedented chapter in the history of the human race. An entire world was hurtling through Divine Space in a mad dash to escape genocidal foes. People would pass down this tale for generations, works of art would celebrate it forever.
If they lived through it.
Talia drew back into herself the large part of her mind that had been dedicated to the defense of The City—energy beams and missiles were of no use now, and this journey through Divine Space was beyond her control—and focused on how to reassure the population.
She accessed her warrior goddess Aspect and prepared to project it across The City. But first she modified it slightly, giving it a less warlike visage. Talia had at her disposal deep files of accumulated knowledge of symbolism and human persuasion techniques. She adopted them now, adjusting the Aspect’s expressions and mannerisms to impart a more resolute appearance.
She took a moment to judge her work. The Aspect came across as, well, not exactly grim, but unperturbed by the surrounding chaos.
That’ll do.
She projected five Aspects at once across The City—her limit—making them as large as she could. She picked the most visible sites where she would be seen from a distance, including the top of Spire 9. There was a brief moment when she couldn’t synchronize the five different views of The City with her image translator, and her brain rebelled. She lost the connections in a blurry haze.
Where am I? What was I doing?
She tamped down her own flash of panic and refocused, removing her consciousness from lesser systems. The Aspects reformed.
Talia had little time to reflect on her confusion. At each location, the people in the immediate area reacted with alarm when the Aspects materialized.
She gathered her strength, and adjusted her voice harmonics for maximum effect.
Her Aspects, as one, pointed to an area of the dome. The maddening colors dulled, and an image that the Hightower had recorded of the new world shimmered to life. The blue and green orb rotated slowly, solid and reassuring.
“Do not fear,” she cried out, her amplified voice rolling in waves across The City. “We have left behind the dangers of the Otrid forever! This is our time, this is our salvation. At the other end lies our new world, and the god Apex. The day we have prayed to see for generations is finally here!”
The noise level across all the boroughs was still high, but the tone had shifted. Through her
Aspects, Talia could see most of the assembled people turning from her to look at the image of the new world, and back to her again.
She had their attention, now she needed to give the people something to do.
She scanned the crowds and, to her surprise, recognized a woman she hadn’t expected to see—the rootless one who had accosted her on the street that day when Tower showed himself to The City. The day of the first invasion.
“You,” she said, then followed with “Rocienda,” as she identified her from the master files. “Take your tribe out of the lower park and lead them to the UnderWorks by way of tunnel four.”
The woman stared back at her, wide eyed.
“Rocienda! Do you understand me?”
She nodded, looking about as if seeking confirmation from the others around her. “Yes, Talia-god,” she said at last.
Talia didn’t bother to correct her. Instead, she issued a steady stream of orders to the people surrounding her Aspects. Much of it was busywork, she knew, but all of it helped tamp down the panic that had threatened to engulf The City.
Even so, the crazed emotions stirred up by Apollo’s manic outbursts had the entire population on edge. She sent him a caustic message across the private link he’d given her, although she had no idea if he was even listening. “Apollo! Tone it down! You’re sending a river of panic through everyone.”
He gave no reply, and she turned her attention back to the churning mass of people running through the streets. She picked out capable administrators from the crowd, along with a handful of Fixers and prominent citizens, and gave them tasks to complete. One of them she recognized as Vance’s wife. Talia was pleased to see there was no panic in her eyes—worry, yes, but it was under control.
Worry also scratched at the back of her mind. Since entering Divine Space, she hadn’t heard from Mik in the Hightower. What sensors she had were useless for scanning very far outside the dome, and she could detect no trace of the ship.
She buried the rising horror at what that silence implied and focused on the hundreds of people relying on her in the here and now.
Gods and the Stars (Gods and the Starways Book 2) Page 21
