Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  “What are you?” she asked helplessly.

  “There was no one to ask,” Apollo explained. The voice enfolded her and she whirled one way, then another, trying to see through the illusion. “We existed. Pure consciousness. We fed off electricity in the atmosphere. We learned we could increase in size, or shrink and dissipate. We consumed the energy of the new world like young caterpillars. Self-organizing helical structures as your own species has long noted in dust storms and plasma clouds.” The clouds in the vision broke and a hundred of the skycreatures were whirling around an immense, mushroom-shaped cumulonimbus.

  Gethin heard Keiko gasp in his head. He had almost forgotten his channel was opened to her.

  Apollo materialized, humanoid again, on the far side of the room. He gazed fondly at his illusionary creation. “It must have been millions of years that we existed in this childlike state amid a cooling Earth. The rain began to linger on the planet’s surface, sizzling, forming the first boiling rivers, emptying into oceanic basins. As the planet cooled, the atmosphere changed…and our ‘birthrate’ tapered off. It came to pass that no young ones were forming from Mother Storm. No new generations. We were the first, and last, of our species.”

  Gethin noticed Apollo had become Doros again. But thinner, sleeker, an exceptional hybrid of the Doros and Apollo templates.

  A vast onyx sea flowered open below, miles beneath the phantom floor. Some of the skycreatures floated as fireflies, draped their tentacles into the boiling surface and appeared to skate along, creating ripples as they glided.

  “We had great debates in those days,” Apollo continued. “The world was changing. Cooling. Becoming solid. We discussed the implications of this. We speculated on how far it would go, wondered if the same process of creation had occurred on other worlds…the worlds we could see above the cloud towers.”

  “You went into space,” Gethin said without thinking, and then recalled the shuttle footage again. Yes, they can go into space. They swim up from the Earth’s surface to the moon, perhaps even beyond. Gravity doesn’t hold them.

  “We never strayed far,” Apollo said, and gave his impish grin. “Space is terrifying, Gethin. There are no maps there. To enter its domain is to be cast adrift on a wine-dark eternity, a gulf of endless emptiness and cold stars. Earth is the blue mother in a nightmare of isolation. She is the Middle Kingdom, the jade heart, the home turf, and the cosmic womb. Beyond her waits the terror of constellations and worlds.” His grin deepened into a grandfatherly affection. “You are the only species to connect the stars in constellations and imagine friendly, far-distant shores.”

  McCallister muttered something in Gethin’s head. He silenced her with a sweep of his hand.

  Apollo continued. “Fearful of the Void, some of us plunged into the ocean to investigate. We descended into the murk, stroking the softly glowing sea bottom, charting the terrain of valleys and marine mountains, the cones of volcanic activity, the shapes of permanence. How different this was! Permanence! The heavens were a pot of endless protean formation by contrast. And then, after uncounted eons, we realized that the ocean had become infested with tiny shapes.”

  “The first organisms,” Celeste whispered.

  Apollo’s eyes revived into search-beam incandescence. “We had created them. Without realizing it, of course. The touch of our plasma bodies in that mineral stew must have sparked the bonding of self-replicating protein structures. Accidental and beautiful. Word spread, others followed our precedent. For many of us, it brought renewed excitement to a wearied world.”

  “But not all felt that way,” Gethin guessed.

  “There were those among us who considered the formation of life—”

  “The Permian Extinction…”

  Apollo faded away, expressing a kind of grim anguish in the act. “Some of us considered life to be an infection, that those responsible had contaminated the world’s purity. They said we had ruined the natural state of things. That we had brought chaos into the stillness of the universe.”

  Celeste felt cold needles hatch all over her body.

  “It was a suggestion at first,” said Apollo’s voice. “Then a belief that sired conviction that sired dreadful action. The oceans were teeming with life by then. Tendril-weeds, petalled flowers growing on lilypads, fish staring with unblinking glassy eyes. Our debates turned angry. Once again the heavens shook with thunder, and our society divided into three groups.”

  Gethin jerked his gaze away from the coalescing patterns of sea creatures. “Three?”

  The images fell away like a curtain and the room returned, shadow-drenched and dull. Apollo was a lonely figure again, dressed in drab monastic garments, arms folded across his chest, head shaven in a cross between devout Zen Buddhist and Trappist ascetic. “One group,” Apollo explained, “considered life a natural development, just another branch of the cosmic tree which had produced us. The universe was constantly changing and life was but a symptom of that change. Another group opposed this. A third group took no sides in the debate at all, instead proclaiming that we had lost sight of a grander quest to fly out from the wombworld and investigate the stars. They reasoned that we were not alone, that atmospheric conditions of other planets must have repeated this miracle. They wished to seek them out.”

  Apollo approached Gethin and took his hands. In three steps Apollo was dressed as an early twentieth-century tycoon, pencil-thin moustache and neatly side-combed hair. “The third group – call them the Farseekers – made a reasonable suggestion. They would travel to the nearby worlds of the solar system and seek other intelligences if they existed; an attempt at finding an outside mediator. The Farseekers departed for Mars and Venus and Jupiter…worlds we knew not by name but by luminosity and position in the dappled night sky.”

  “They never returned, did they?” Celeste guessed.

  “No,” Apollo said. “And neither did we wait for them. Some of the purists had begun exterminating life in the seas, and others tried to stop them.”

  “How?”

  Two patterned globes of energy blinked into the room suddenly, darting across the foyer through the living room. They stabbed at each other with pulses of crimson light. Each impact blew off jellylike tatters where they struck. The quarreling lights fled into the far wall and vanished.

  “I don’t think any of us realized we could kill each other. Our earliest battles were simply attempts at cowing one another, dominating so one set of beliefs could prevail in the world. But when we realized murder was possible – the concept so new, understand – the war became terrible and savage. Enough wounds can shatter us so we are unable to reconstitute. The helical scaffolding whirls apart. We can soak incredible damage, but there is a threshold that, once crossed, disperses us.”

  Apollo moved to the liquor cabinet and retrieved a flagon. He poured a drink. Gethin approached and before he could say anything, Apollo handed the drink to him.

  “My side won that first war,” he said. “There were terrible losses, but by the end we were the last ones standing, so to speak. Life was free to develop undisturbed. It moved to land and we wandered among it. We mimicked them. We tried our hand at terrestrial society. We lived as reptiles and insects and plants. Experience was our religion. We killed, mated, dined, died…only to shed our mortal coils and return to heaven.”

  Gethin gave the glass of liquor an absent consideration. He handed it to Celeste. She placed it, untouched, on the nearest counter.

  “Then the dinosaurs were killed off,” Apollo said with a sigh.

  “Your enemies again?” Celeste asked.

  “An asteroid. A chance billiard ball from space. We were so involved with our earthly experiences that we had ceased paying attention to space. Life had gotten interesting. A civilization had sprouted among the Troodons.” He laughed at Gethin’s expression. “Yes, I saw it and lived among them. Their culture lasted a million years before
death came from above…”

  “But they left no cities…”

  “They left many cities,” Apollo admonished. “But different from what you would build. Natural materials. Stone, wood, iron…they really never progressed beyond their Iron Age. But the comparison isn’t fair. They created technologies no human culture would. They recorded their stories in pottery played by sunbeams. They had musical instruments of crystal and water. Oh! Their music! Haunting melodies of terrible majesty sung to rituals of fire.

  “Their extermination devastated me. I wandered the deathly world of ash, taking small solace in the rodents that emerged from burrows to feast on the dead beasts. And in that grisly twilight, our enemies returned. This time, they coordinated their vengeance not against terrestrial life, but against us. It was a hateful, relentless battle. Eventually, we seemed to have won again, yet a Pyrrhic victory it was, reducing us to a meager handful. Three! Our enemies were likewise reduced, dead or licking their wounds deep in the Earth.”

  Apollo bowed his head, quiet for such a stretch of time that Gethin thought he had fallen asleep. In that silence, Keiko’s voice came into his head:

  “Ask him how they can be destroyed, Gethin. We have to know how to kill them!”

  Jack’s voice countered, “Let him finish telling our history, for gods’ sake!”

  Apollo looked up. “Even I didn’t appreciate the small, dwarfish ape-things in the African trees. Who knew they would become masters of the world? The world had sprung back from reptilian holocaust to a time of fur, tusks, and mammalian claws. And so here we stand.”

  The visions faded. The room returned in drab, blue gloom.

  Gethin was breathless.

  “Your enemies have returned,” Celeste prompted. “At least two of them are back.”

  Apollo smiled. “But I have friends, as well. Come with me to the gardens. I have someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Peacemaker and Warbringer

  King D. set a playdisk of popular music in the Sinkiang underdark while he excused himself to use the lavatory. The troops cheered and danced to the tunes, slapping each other on the backs, forming circles to clap in delight. Nor could Father Chadwick complain; this was not bland arky music, but the pounding, vivacious rhythms of mortality. The soldiers were mostly young too, and they grinned in lustful delight to the stirring bass echoing off cavern walls.

  Near the inclinator, two bathrooms had been cut into the rock wall. The stalls were dirty, and the toilet tissue was like sandpaper, but King D. didn’t care. A newsfeed piped into the caves with an incredible report: The IPCS Nobunaga, crippled into a deteriorating orbit by Promethean Furies, had just exploded over Canada.

  And so ends the Pax Apollonia!

  How to exploit this? King D. contemplated his reflection in the streaked and dirty mirror while he washed his hands.

  There were sixty regen centers on Earth. StrikeDown, for its part, possessed nine low-yield antimatter missiles and six tactical nukes, already loaded onto its invisible shapestone fleet positioned carefully throughout the world. Their captains had the attack schedule. Six nukes for major Save centers. The resulting megadeaths would be routed to the nearest backups.

  It was then King D. would use his antimatter stash. By then, the arkies should be gibbering with panic, eager to meet his simple demands: the end of the apartheid. No more Wastes, but a free and open world to all.

  King D. realized that he had been scrubbing his hands raw. He twisted the faucet, blotted his hands on his pants, and left the bathroom.

  His sensorium flashed with an incoming call.

  “Celeste,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, but I’m not at the rendezvous yet. Something came up and I have an intense negotiation going on now.”

  “Can you spare a minute?” she asked quietly.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you recover the missiles?”

  “Funny you should ask. I’m meeting with the High Priests of Stillness right now. We’re all waiting to see how this IPC thing plays out.”

  Her voice was edgy. “Can StrikeDown work without them?”

  “The missiles? Sure. It’ll work better than ever,” he said, still weighing his options. “War is good for us. They’ll be so busy looking at each other that our attack will come like a knockout uppercut.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. Peace is being brokered. If I read this right, the IPC and Prometheus are about to turn their collective focus on the Wastes and go after Stillness for good.”

  King D. chewed over this.

  Celeste was still talking. “Did you hear me? If you’re hanging with Stillness, you better get out now.”

  “I need to speak with Father Apophis first.”

  Silence descended on Celeste’s end. “Apophis? That thing on the moon?”

  He laughed. “Just a coincidence, I’m sure.”

  “No, you’re not,” she snapped. “Something important has happened, D. I don’t have time to explain it. I don’t know how much of it I believe. But you can’t be with Stillness when shit goes down. I…oh my God!”

  “Celeste?”

  The call ended.

  “Celeste!”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Midas Hand

  The Sea Gardens of Shimizu were a tropical delight of bright flowers and green bramble. It was the usual port to receive diplomats and VIPs when they arrived at the pyramid. The floral wonderland of bamboo forests drank from desalinated streams. Lilypads drifted on a mirror-perfect pond.

  The moment Gethin stepped into the gardens, however, he was stricken with tension.

  As if to confirm this, McCallister’s voice sounded in his ear: “Cameras have gone dead! Gethin? Do you hear me? The cameras in the gardens have blacked out!”

  He nervously cleared his throat. Apollo strode ahead with steely confidence.

  When they rounded the circuitous rock garden, Gethin spied a lone figure waiting for them. She stood by a patch of chinaberries, displaying herself as a woman of surreal height and shape. Gethin gauged her at eight feet tall…but her body was stretched out like a warped reflection. Her arms were like ropes. Her hips were narrow to the point of absurdity. Small-chested, with a neck like a swan, her head elongated and oval. Gethin had only witnessed such freakish appearances on ancient Cycladic statues.

  As if this appearance wasn’t unsettling enough, the mystery woman had elected to display skin the color of real bronze. Under the garden lights, that unearthly carapace glinted in a burnished sheen, and the face she wore set Gethin’s heart thrilling with panic. Her features might be called elegant, even lovely, but for their nightmarish distortion of length.

  She looks like a humanoid praying mantis, he thought. His stomach contracted in a nervous spasm. If not for Apollo’s fearless approach to this thing, Gethin knew he would be running for the nearest exit.

  Apollo, for his part, seemed bemused by it all.

  “May I present Lady Wen Ying,” he said, grinning. “My co-founder of Earth Republic.”

  Gethin felt the color drain from his face.

  Here was the second component of the trilobed world government. The aftereffects of the Final War had been especially brutal in Asia; with China’s central government nuked, the sprawling region collapsed into bloody despotisms not seen since the Warring States period. The Dragon Kingdom bled from hundreds of wounds hatched within and without, while the surrounding nations of Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, India, and Korea found themselves embroiled in a tidal surge of vicious border disputes and resource wars.

  And then Lady Wen Ying arrived.

  It was during the same decades as Apollo the Great’s campaigns in Europe and Africa. Historians shrugged at the coincidental timing; Gethin now saw that Apollo’s faction had deliberately coordinated it under the guise of political hegemony. Lady Wen Yi
ng was believed to have arrived from the north and, like northern hordes of another age, delivered a single Mandate of Heaven. Like her counterpart in Europe, strange powers were ascribed to her, assassins repeatedly failed to kill her, traps proved unable to contain her. The Mandate was hers.

  Gethin gaped at this figure of legend. Unlike Apollo, there were never definitive images of the elusive Lady Wen Ying. Depending on the source, Wen Ying was a stocky milk-white yakuza ruler; a tall green-clad Chinese empress; a brown-skinned CEO in a sleek business suit; a scarred Mongolian horsespider rider; or a simple peasant clad like a rice-field worker.

  She had never appeared as this freakish apparition.

  Lady Wen Ying tilted her insectile head at their approach. “Friends of Doros in an hour of need?”

  Apollo grinned. “Tiamat’s allies are operating publicly. So shall we.”

  “Why now?” Gethin asked. “If you’ve beaten these things in the past, why would they reveal themselves so openly? Why not lurk in the shadows and try assassinating you?”

  His old friend looked thoughtful. “The creatures known as Apophis and Tiamat have infiltrated Stillness. Likely, they founded the movement in the Warlord Century. They’re clever and resourceful, and their plans unfold over millennia. And they have been unwittingly aided by your species’ own inventiveness.”

  “The cathode rail on Luna,” Gethin guessed.

  The two entities shared a look. They seemed to be passing messages with their eyes. And maybe they were; Gethin considered the millions of years their breed must have communicated without voice, flashing messages across the stormy skies of primordial Earth.