Earth Eternal (Earthrise Book 9)

by Daniel Arenson

Hanging from the cables in the heart of his pyramid, the Oracle laughed. He reached out his claws. He grabbed Marco and Addy, digging into their flesh. He lifted them off the floor. They kicked, legs dangling, bodies bleeding. The azoth crystals surrounded them, a vertical ring of light, controlling spacetime. Other crystals thrust out from the Oracle's head, embedded into his skull. In the crystals, they could see Old Earth falling. See humanity perishing. See the grays conquer the world.

  We failed, Marco thought. We lost.

  "Now your torture begins." The Oracle laughed and licked his lips. "First, humans, I will shatter your limbs, then your ribs, then your spines, but I will not let you die. I will heal you. Then shatter you again. Then heal you. Then break you a third time. Over and over, I will break and mend you. Once you are begging for death, I will carve you open. I will remove your organs, but I will keep you alive. I will keep you in pain. I will stitch you up. And then, humans, then the true pain will begin. And it will last for many decades."

  They struggled in the creature's grip, desperate to flee, unable to free themselves.

  Panic seized Marco. Even Deep Being couldn't help him now. His head spun. Sweat mixed with his blood.

  We were fools! Fools to come here! We should have fled.

  He wanted to go home.

  He wanted to be with Addy back on the beach.

  He wanted to forget this place.

  As the claws tightened, Marco shed tears.

  I'm sorry, Ben-Ari. I'm sorry, Addy. You don't deserve this.

  Ben-Ari still lay on the floor, bleeding. Slowly, creaking, the elderly woman rose to her feet.

  She stared at the Oracle. At her captor. Her tormentor. The father of her daughter.

  She smiled.

  The Oracle spun toward the old woman, sneering.

  "Why do you smile, wretched ape? I will give you a red smile. I will rip off your lips and leave you with an eternal grin of agony."

  Ben-Ari's smile never faltered. "You might be too busy for a while. I created a paradox."

  The Oracle backhanded her, knocking her down, spraying blood.

  "You are a miserable wretch," he hissed. "You are powerless. You are my slave."

  Lying on the floor, blood in her mouth, Ben-Ari laughed. She gazed up at him. "This form of mine is. This form is an old woman, frail, powerless. But the other Einav Ben-Ari. She is young, a great leader, a great warrior. I remember." She rose to her feet, staring at the Oracle. "I remember! And now you are undone. Look, Time Seer. Gaze back and see."

  The Oracle spun toward one of the azoth crystals and stared. Marco and Addy stared with him.

  Inside the crystal, they saw a vision of the past. Ben-Ari stood there, a woman in her early thirties, a captain of HOPE, a warrior of the HDF. Grays surrounded her. The corpses of dead soldiers lay strewn at her feet. Nefitis loomed above her, wretched and cruel, prepared to grab her, to take her captive, to begin her long torture that would culminate here—with an elderly woman, trapped and beaten and bloody.

  "I let myself be captured once," the old Ben-Ari whispered, gazing at the crystal. Tears flowed down her cheeks. "Not this time."

  In the crystal, the young Ben-Ari placed a pistol to her head.

  She pulled the trigger.

  "No!" Marco shouted.

  He reached toward the crystal as if he could save his friend. His breath trembled.

  No. No! He had lost so many. He couldn't lose her too. He wept.

  The Oracle shrieked.

  The old Ben-Ari stared at the creature.

  "I am fading away already," she said. "I died young, Seer. I killed myself at thirty-two. I died before you could rape me, place your seed in my womb. Before I could give birth to the wretched, twisted monster you call Nefitis. Before Nefitis could lead her hosts in your war. Time is undone. All your empire will be sucked into the paradox. Watch. It already begins."

  With every word, she was fading. Her body withered, the flesh cracking, the eyes sinking. Fading. Fading from reality.

  And in the crystals, the gray army was fading too.

  Back on Green Earth, saucers tilted. Gray warriors fell.

  Hanging in the ring of crystals, the Oracle shrieked so loudly Marco had to cover his ears.

  Frantically, with dozens of hands, the creature reached toward crystals. He jangled on his chains, grabbing some crystals, releasing others, barking commands.

  "Sanctified Sons! Go back in time to grab a younger Ben-Ari!"

  In one crystal, a saucer flew into a portal. In another crystal, a vision appeared of a teenage Ben-Ari captured, of the Oracle mounting her, impregnating her, of a creature emerging. A hybrid. But not Nefitis.

  "Too different. Too different! The DNA is wrong. Wrong!" The Oracle screeched. He turned toward another crystal. "Soldiers! Find the factory that made her pistol. Sabotage it!"

  In another crystal, grays obeyed. In the past, they invaded a weapons factory. They sought the derringer that Ben-Ari would use to kill herself. They tinkered with it.

  The factory workers opened fire. One of the grays died. The other grays returned fire, slaying the factory workers.

  Hanging in the ring, the Oracle screamed.

  "Do not slay those apes! Those apes are fighting us in Jerusalem as old men!"

  He spun toward another crystal, showing the same factory workers—dead in the past—fighting in the Battle of Jerusalem. They were twenty years older but still alive, still fighting. In the battlefield, they began to fade, ripping open spacetime around them, sucking in grays.

  "Paradox, paradox!" the Oracle cried. "A paradox in our battle! Restore the factory! Sabotage the gun another time!"

  The paradoxes spread from crystal to crystal, timeline to timeline. With every change the Oracle made, another paradox appeared. Cracks appeared one after the other. Time began to unravel. Rips tore through space.

  The Oracle moved faster and faster, grabbing more and more crystals, frantically fixing paradox after paradox. In his panic, he released Marco and Addy, bringing his claws toward other crystals. Soon all his arms—there were nearly a hundred—were engaged in his task.

  With Ben-Ari killed, with Nefitis never born, with the old woman in this very chamber now an impossible reality, the cosmos was fraying.

  And the Oracle was desperate to hold it together.

  His many hands grabbed and released and tugged. The eyes on his palms peered. His blind, bloated head swung from side to side, mumbling, shrieking, ordering, screaming.

  Marco looked at Addy. She lay on the ground, bleeding from many cuts, maybe dying. But she met his gaze, and she rose to her feet. They limped forward together.

  "Redo the opening salvo!" the Oracle shrieked. "Use the replacement commander! If Nefitis is not there, fight in the name of the new goddess I've named you!" He whipped toward another crystal. "Return to the man's birth. Make sure he founds the factory! Make sure she gets that faulty pistol!"

  Marco and Addy took another step closer. The Oracle dangled ahead on his hooks, not even noticing them, all his hands occupied, clinging to crystals, peering at visions of a crumbling reality.

  "We might be destroying the cosmos," Addy whispered.

  "Then let it be destroyed," Marco said. "And let it be remade. Without him."

  Addy nodded, tears in her eyes. "I love you, Marco."

  "I love you too, Addy. Always."

  They faced the Tick-Tock King.

  They shouted wordlessly and leaped toward him.

  They grabbed the vestigial, dangling legs. They pulled themselves up onto the wrinkled body. The Oracle howled. He snapped his jaws and shook his head wildly, struggling to shake them off while still mending spacetime. A tooth sliced Marco's arm. His blood dripped. He kept climbing, grabbed a cable, and pulled himself onto the Oracle's back. Addy joined him. They clung to the creature, dangling here among the ring of crystals.

  All around him, Marco beheld space and time.

  His past. His present. His future. Mankind rising from th
e muck, roaming the forests, reaching for the stars. Mankind choosing paths of darkness or paths of light. Evolving into twisted, wretched beings or rising to become noble and pure. All the cosmos spread around him.

  A voice rumbled deep in his mind.

  You cannot kill me. You would be killing yourself.

  "Then I kill myself."

  You would be destroying your own species!

  Marco raised his eyes. In a crystal above him, he saw a different path. A path where the grays never existed. Where humanity evolved over a million years to become noble, beautiful, custodians of a green planet. That path still lay ahead, and no paradox could touch it.

  "I will not," Marco said softly. "Only yours."

  He reached toward the Oracle's head. A crown of shards rose there, the crystal embedded into the skull, connecting the brain itself to the light of spacetime. Marco grabbed one of those crystals. It was cold and smooth and the size of a dagger. He yanked it back, pulling it out from the Oracle's skull.

  The creature screamed.

  Addy grabbed another one of the crystals that sprouted from the Oracle's head. She tugged it free.

  And the Oracle begged.

  "Do not do this! You will undo an entire species! You cannot! You cannot! Please. Mercy. Mercy . . ."

  Addy looked into Marco's eyes.

  He nodded.

  They both screamed and shoved down the crystals like blades, slamming them back into the Oracle's skull, driving them deep, deep into the brain, cutting, destroying, and spacetime blasted out in waves of visions and sounds from infinite realities. All around them—themselves as children, as ancients, humanity evolving and falling and rising again, nomads in the desert and navigators among the stars.

  They grabbed more crystals.

  They shoved them deep.

  The Oracle screamed.

  Addy grabbed one of the cables that held up the creature. She tore the cable free, wrapped it around the Oracle's neck, and tugged.

  The creature sputtered, tried to beg, could not. His dozens of arms retracted, curling up, leaving the ring of crystals. Inside the shards, Marco saw the saucers falling, the gray army fading away.

  The Oracle's tongue emerged, warty and twitching. On his many hands, his eyes bulged.

  Marco took hold of the cable too. He and Addy gave a mighty tug.

  The Oracle's neck snapped.

  The creature went limp and moved no more.

  They removed the last of the hooks, and the deformed, wretched thing thumped onto the floor, dead.

  Marco and Addy stared at it. It looked so pathetic. So withered. A deflated, pale octopus rotting on the beach.

  Marco turned away from the dead Oracle. He never wanted to think of it again.

  He stumbled across the chamber and knelt by Ben-Ari. The old woman was ghostly, so pale, so thin. Marco gathered her in his arms. She weighed nothing.

  "Marco," she whispered.

  "I'm here, Einav." His tears fell through her.

  "It's over now," Ben-Ari whispered, translucent, and a smile touched her lips. "Finally this long pain . . . it will never have been. All these years of agony. They will never have been. Shalom. Peace. Peace . . ."

  She grew dimmer, faded to a wisp, and was gone.

  * * * * *

  She pulled her derringer's trigger.

  The gun jammed.

  Ben-Ari lowered the weapon and stared at it, confused.

  I'm still alive. I'm still in Jerusalem.

  Gripping her, Nefitis cackled. "You cannot break time! My father broke your pistol, ape. I cannot be destroyed. You will be captured. You will be broken. You . . ."

  The creature's voice faded.

  Her body began withering.

  Ben-Ari fell from the goddess's grip.

  Nefitis screamed. Her body was coiling inward, drying up, growing translucent. Across the hills and valleys of Jerusalem, the gray army was fading to dust. Its saucers fell from the sky, vanishing on impact.

  Ben-Ari raised her eyes to the sky. The portal was still there. Through it, she could see the future Earth.

  It was shattering.

  The pyramid was cracking open.

  Ben-Ari wept.

  "You did it," she whispered, sobbing. "Marco. Addy. You did it. You did it!"

  Nefitis fell to her knees. The goddess's body was nearly gone now. She raised an arm, reaching up to Ben-Ari.

  "Help me!" Nefitis cried. "Mother. Mother! Help me!"

  Ben-Ari stared, tears on her cheeks.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. "Daughter."

  Nefitis gave her a last, pleading look, and then her arm fell and shattered. She vanished from the world. She had never existed at all.

  Across the battlefield, soldiers began to cheer.

  "Victory! Victory!"

  The last of the grays vanished. But Earth still lay in ruin. Thousands, maybe millions of humans still lay dead. They could not undo the damage the grays had wrought.

  But the enemy was defeated. Earth would rebuild.

  "Victory!" the soldiers cried.

  Ben-Ari looked away from them. She ran across the ruins and knelt by President Petty.

  He was still alive, but barely. Nefitis had cut him deeply. His hand was gone. His body was crushed. Fresh tears filled Ben-Ari's eyes to see him this way. Petty had always seemed so strong to her, impossible to hurt, the pillar of Earth. She placed a hand on his cheek.

  "James," she whispered.

  His eyes were hazy. He managed to reach up, to touch her cheek.

  "Einav."

  Her tears fell into his hair. "It's all right, James. You'll be all right."

  He shook his head. "I . . . die in battle. I . . . lived to see victory. Defend Earth, Einav. Defend our world. You must lead them onward. To peace. To peace . . ."

  She nodded. "To peace," she whispered.

  "Peace . . ." Petty smiled softly. His eyes closed.

  Ben-Ari let out a cry. She wrapped him in her arms, lowered her head, and wept for him.

  A crack sounded above her.

  She looked up to see the portal vanish.

  The link to the future was gone.

  "Addy," Ben-Ari whispered. "Marco."

  She rose to her feet.

  Leaving Petty behind, she ran.

  She needed to find the professor. And she needed to repair her ship.

  * * * * *

  A crack sounded, loud as gunfire. Marco spun to see one of the azoth crystals in the ring shatter. Shards clattered to the floor. Another crystal burst. Soon the entire ring was collapsing. The visions of past and future vanished.

  A crack raced across a wall. Another crack tore open on the floor, separating Marco and Addy. Debris began raining from the ceiling. The chamber trembled so madly he nearly fell.

  "The whole pyramid is falling apart!" Marco shouted over the din.

  "Save me, Captain Obvious!" Addy cried. "Come on, let's get out of here!"

  Marco ran and jumped over the crack in the floor. He joined Addy. The door was still locked, but the wall was crumbling around it. They slammed against the loose door, knocking it down, and raced into the tunnel.

  Stones cascaded around them. Cracks raced across the walls and ceiling. The pyramid trembled. They ran through dust and falling bricks.

  They burst out of the pyramid to see a collapsing world.

  Obelisks and towers were breaking and falling across the city. Great cracks loomed open on the roads like the hungry mouths of primordial beasts, swallowing grays and chariots. Saucers crumbled in the sky and rained fire. Sinkholes opened up, devouring homes. In the distance, mountains were falling.

  Marco and Addy stood on the platform that thrust out from the pyramid, the place where Nefitis had once reigned. Her throne shattered into a million shards that rose as smoke. The pyramid was collapsing beneath them. The sky itself was falling.

  Marco and Addy stood on the stone outcrop. The devastation spread around them. They clasped their hands.

&nbs
p; "The world is ending," Addy whispered.

  "This world," said Marco. "But not our home." Tears flowed down his cheeks, and he raised an azoth crystal taken from the Oracle's lair. "Look, Addy. Look! Green Earth. It's still there. It's saved."

  They saw it in the crystal: The armies of grays vanishing off Green Earth. Human victory. Earth triumphant.

  "We saved our home," Addy whispered, eyes damp.

  Marco nodded. "We did it, Addy. We saved Earth."

  The platform shook. Cracks raced across it. Marco and Addy fell to their knees. Their wounds kept bleeding. The cuts from the Oracle's claws were deep, and their weariness from the long journey here had left them as weak as children. They could not rise again.

  Tiles were tearing free from the pyramid and falling all around them. The entire top of the pyramid tore off. The stone triangle slid down the crumbling slope, digging through the bricks. Canyons opened up beneath the pyramid, forming gaping pits of coiling, shrieking smoke. Barely anything remained of the city now. The platform tore free, fell a few meters, and landed on a jutting shard of stone. The outcrop balanced over the void. The platform tilted, and Marco reached out to grab a ledge. The crystal fell from his grasp and vanished below into the destruction.

  Marco and Addy lay down on the stone slab, clinging for purchase, teetering over the ruin of the world. The pyramid was still crumbling, brick by brick tearing off and rolling down to the darkness. Any moment now, the platform would follow and they would be lost.

  Marco moved closer to Addy and held her in his arms. She clung to him.

  "Look into my eyes," he whispered. "Don't look at the shadows."

  Addy nodded, gazing into his eyes. "I see you," she whispered.

  Bricks fell around them. Stones cascaded. Smoke and dust filled the air, and the sky cracked open, ripping apart, and the void flowed.

  Marco held Addy close. "Let's imagine that we're back there. On the beach in Greece. In the cove we discovered."

  "Shipwreck Cove." Addy smiled through her tears. "The beach with the shipwreck in the sand. Our secret place." She wept. "I can see it, Marco. It's so beautiful. I can see the light on the water, and the seashells, and the golden sand . . . It's so beautiful, and I'm there with you."