by Lee Bond
Ute wished he could explain the changes that’d been wrought in him by being dead and then … not dead. He was certain they went beyond this newfound ability to distance himself entirely from the Harmonic bond, a feat that not even Fenris and his ilk could do; the Horsemen could quite easily prevent anyone from sharing in their worldview through will alone, but they couldn’t disappear like he could.
“Yes, well.” Tomas pointed to the monitors displaying the eye of the quantum storm brewing against the shield. “This next part is going to be the next of the do or die stages. Powering up black hole engines.”
“All at once or?” The wash of quantum power hammering against the micron-thin shield of energy was mesmerizing. Ute wondered if any man, woman or Offworlder anywhere else in the entire Universe had ever been witness to something like this, and if they had, had they lost their minds?
“I’m thinking in sequence, actually, sa.” Tomas tapped his own readouts. “The funneled energy isn’t quite as perfectly contained as it was a few moments ago. There’s a bit of bleed coming off two of the four struts. Plus the AIs are starting to wonder what’s going on. If we hammer at the focal point with all five manufactured black holes at the same time, they may panic.”
“And that’s bad.” Ute stroked his chin thoughtfully. His children were parked in ships that were less than a handspan away from lightning powerful enough to rip the fabric of space apart. Yes, they were shielded by gravnetic generated shields themselves, but the ancient warrior rather doubted anyone, anywhere, had thought to test their efficacy against redirected Quantum Tunnels and angled engine dispersion.
“Oh my yes.” Tomas activated the first ship –Agrimal’s- and watched the engine feeds like a pensive hawk. If he didn’t like what he saw, he'd cut the power to those engines with a simple flick of a finger. “In dire cases, the AI minds can unleash a broadcast emergency beacon that'll carry on for quite a distance. Easily the volume of a single solar system. Any artificial mind in range can and will pick it up.”
“And the Army or Specter or Heavy Elites will come running.” Ute nodded. Yeah, that was bad.
On-screen, Agrimal’s engine spat it’s initial payload into the heart of the storm; the artificial black hole was instantly caught and held in place by the maelstrom, the incredible density of the thing in turn warping the furiously colorful disturbance into a churning ocean of madness.
Ute closed his eyes for a long second, only opening them when Tomas announced that phase two was about to begin. The God soldier was just in time to catch the second stage of a black hole engine’s operation strike the Quantum Tunnel’s flow; a band of gravity, thick and powerful enough to deplete the black hole bobbling around the Technicolor madness, locked on to the singularity as readily as a fisherman hooking a fish, but where the ship would ordinarily be launched halfway across the solar system, Agrimal’s vessel stayed right where it was, forward gravny-gen shields operating as a kind of brake system.
The effect was instantaneous: the black hole –once a merry wanderer roaming around the confines of the Quantum Tunnel’s displacement field- was moved to the top left and pushed directly against the shield, pulling along with it a fifth of the Tunnel’s power.
Ute thought he saw a tiny fracture ripple outwards from the point of contact, but he decided he was imagining things. “Agrimal.”
“Fine, Sa Worrypants, everything is … fine. The view from here is quite lovely.”
Everyone chose to ignore the rumbling, clattering and other sounds of general disarray coming through Agrimal’s broadcast. They all knew that the chance of death was high, they all knew the cost of freeing their ultimate sire so he could do what needed doing. The Engineer’s safety and sanctity was a more important goal than making it to the End. They each of them understood that this moment, right here and now, was a linchpin moment, that if Ute wasn’t out doing what needed to be done, the Darkness would never Fall, and Light certainly wouldn’t Rise.
“Tomas?” Ute flipped his attention to the monitors watching the ships. Agrimal’s vessel bucked this way and that, but only microscopically, like a fish trying ever so gently to break free of the line. Until or unless Tomas allowed the engine avatars to follow through with the final stage of launch, that God soldier was going to stay right where she was until the ship shook apart.
“All green.” Tomas looked up from his screens, gave Ute a terse nod, and went back to keeping an eye on the AI feeds. The chatter was considerably higher, but hadn’t reached that threshold of panic.
But they would. Sooner rather than later.
“There’s a but there, isn’t there, sa?”
“Yes.” Even though he doubted Ute could understand what was going on, Tomas indicated the screen that was decoding the AI chatter into something digestible. “The, ah, the black hole and gravity leash are, ah … making the AI minds … unhappy. The only reason they haven’t started their broadcast is because everything is under control. Our emissions look like an Esoteric Event. If I do this slowly, they’ll worry quicker and shut everything down. But if …”
“But if you go all at once from here, they won’t have time.” Ute pursed his lips together and took a reading from his children. They were all okay with it, he just wasn’t sure if he was; three of his brood were of great importance to the God soldiers by dint of their status, and the thought of them potentially sacrificing their lives …
Trista’s voice broke through the com. “Sa, if you continue dicking about with your worrywarting, the machine minds on this merry-go-round are gonna flip their shit and this’ll all have been a giant waste of time. Now, I don’t mind because I didn’t have anything better to do this week, but I’m pretty sure Shoonty here had some paint he could've watched dry.”
“All right, Sa Tomas.” Ute opened his eyes. “Fire the engines.”
“Adding three millisecond delay.” Tomas’ hands flew across the keyboards. “Firing now.”
Ute and Tomas, snug in their heavily protected orb-shaped escape pod, watched four more handmade singularities hit the oceanic energy storm in rapid succession, each invisible, predatory circle slamming into the powerful vortex and kicking up repetitive storms of madness. The first moored black hole shimmied this way and that along it’s gravity leash but otherwise stayed right where it was; the four other holes were neatly repelled by the leash and each other thanks to the sheer chaotic nature of what was going on. There was just too much turbulence for them to latch on to one another.
Releasing a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding, Tomas spoke into the relative silence of the cockpit; outside, in the depths of space where nothing was supposed to be hearable, madness shrieked, a never-ending howl of space/time being messed with on a level of desperate insanity that the Universe had never seen. “Gravity leashes deployed.”
Ute felt a thrill of panic rise up in Shoonty, a heart-stopping, breathtaking, mind-snatching rush of emotion that threatened to spill over into Gorak, who, being a Twoesie, would almost certainly be capable of transmitting that infectious terror to one of the others with too little trouble. The ancient Goddie reacted without thinking, his mind seemingly in tune with the gravity leashes outside; as the bands of powerful gravity lanced through the fervid sea of color and energy to catch their prizes and slam them against the shield wall, so too did he reach out through the Harmony to hold his child’s hand, to soothe and calm the young warrior who’d been braver than anyone his age had any right to be.
“We’re holding! We’re holding!” Tomas’ voice cracked and strained with the excitement. “There’s definitely an effect taking place along the shield! Gravnetic distortions! The lens of the shield looks softer! One last singularity, right down the gullet! That’ll soften this bitch up enough to go through her like water through a pipe!”
Ute could barely hear Tomas, so intent was he on corralling Shoonty. A million miles away and smaller than ever, the Goddie told Tomas to do what needed doing; cracks and shards of the younger God soldier’s fear
was spreading to Gorak and the others, so the Fivesie spread more of himself outwards. He reached into the minds and hearts of his remaining children, feeling their feelings and hearing their thoughts as if they were his own. It was unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
He smiled at them through this strange and powerful Harmonic link. “Figures you young’uns would start to panic like this. Things get a little hairy and suddenly you all need my help.”
Shoonty’s embarrassment tried to flood the Harmony, but Ute pushed it away.
Salax whispered, “This is like what Fenris can do. What happened to you that day?” The others added their inquisitive thoughts to hers.
Tomas’ voice seemed to echo through Harmony, low and slow like languid thunder. “Final singularity launched. AI minds panicking. No time to waste. Firing final singularity leash. Prepare for orb departure! Prepare for ship launch! This is it, sis and sas!”
Ute shrugged at his children through his self-made Harmony. “No clue, kids, no clue at all. Chairman Herrig broke my connection to the Harmony by shutting down my implants. Maybe I’m old enough and was steeped enough in Harmony for the fleshy parts to find their way home.” He looked around the ship, eyes seeing all that his children saw and the monitors to the outside.
It was chaos. The five black hole/gravity leashes formed a perfectly shaped pentagram right against the wall of the shield, forcing the Quantum Tunnel’s energy into a fiery figure that was surely visible at every corner of Latelyspace. Their singularity was locked right in the middle of the madness. The gravity leash from the ship inside which their escape pod was locked lashed out and struck the black hole and everything outside … rippled. Bent. Flexed.
The shield wall grew … soft. Ute couldn’t find the words to describe it any other way. But softer it was.
Soft enough to let them through, though?
That was the question of the moment. Ute took a deep breath, told his children to prepare, and flooded them with gratitude and love, enough to last them the rest of their lives, no matter how long or short that might be.
“Orb launch! We ride the leash! Goodbye, new friends. I cannot thank you enough for your bravery, or your madness!” Tomas felt a gripping exhilaration he’d never felt in his life as their escape orb was spat out the back of the larger ship; the moment the nigh-on indestructible escape vessel hit the gravity leash, an inexplicable urge to shout and holler like some kind of madman filled him through and through. And then …
They hit the shield wall.
“Fuck my life.” Ute intoned, pulling loose from his children so they wouldn’t catch their great-grandsire’s woe.
Their pod, specifically designed to withstand a greater-than-average level of distress, started shaking.
Violently.
Monitors and screens cracked, spitting electricity into the air. Ute slammed his monolithic hands down on those closest to him, instantly ending their discharges but also depriving him of any chance at learning anything about what was happening.
“We’re breaching, sa, we’re doing it!” Tomas shouted to be heard against the cacophony, his thin old man’s voice cracking with excitement. “Come on come on come on!”
“Sa,” Ute whispered, his voice full of promise and sincerity, “if I ever suggest to you that you aren’t on the same level as a God soldier ever again, remind me of this moment. You, sa, are a fucking lunatic.”
“This is fun, right?” Tomas beamed. “We are doing something that no one, anywhere, has done.”
Ute returned Tomas’ mad smile with a lunacy-laden one of his own, raising an eyebrow as he took the old man in; for a split second there, gone quick enough to be a trick of the light and madness surrounding them on all sides, the EuroJapanese madman had seemed to be a much younger version of himself. “Oh yes, Tomas. This? This is fun.”
Just then, a huge rumble slammed into their ship, knocking both men hard against their chairs. Ute filled the cockpit with Harmonic power, not really knowing what he was doing beyond the urge to do something; protected as they might be by the fortified ship’s immensely armored exterior, they were messing with what appeared to be the very forces of creation.
The pressure eased off a bit, counterbalanced by the purity of Harmony filling the cockpit with an invisible field that had the unexpected bonus of dulling the warbling sounds of the Universe being torn apart just outside down to whispers.
Now that he no longer felt like he was going to be shook apart, Tomas read the data spilling onto his proteus quickly. “Seventy-five percent through, sa. Now comes the hard part.”
“I thought we were doing the hard part already.”
“Well, no.” Tomas shrugged. “The hard part is when I launch your children away. We’re … going to get a lot of … extra push.”
“How much is a lot?” Ute knew how much ‘a lot’ would be if he was talking to Garth, and that ‘a lot’ would mean ‘enough to probably destroy, at minimum, a solar system’, and from the way Tomas was acting at the moment, the Goddie kind of worried that it’d be the same, if not more.
“Mmm.” Tomas wasn’t going to say anything to Ute unless the God soldier brought it up himself, but whatever the massive soldier was doing to stabilize the inside of their escape pod had the man kind of … glowing, around the eyes. Harmony was a powerful thing, all right. “About … five gravnetically induced black hole expenditures’ worth of ‘a lot’. It’ll push us through.”
“And then?” Ute asked, tiredly. He’d spent most of the last few years using his Harmonically-given powers as little as possible, and in the space of just a few minutes, he’d done two different things that weren’t supposed to be in the God soldier armamentarium of Harmonized gifts. His intense desire to keep them from being crushed down to the size of a very small apple was draining his reserves at a frightening pace.
“Well.” Tomas gave the order. “It all depends. We could wind up halfway across the Universe, crushed into nothing regardless of your efforts, or we could just kind of plop out the other side. Or some awful combination of both. It’s just one of those things.”
Ute felt his children disappear from the local Harmonic horizon. It would only be a few seconds now before they were either dead or free.
“Your plan to get us out of here sucks, sa, great big shubin balls. I want you to know this.” Ute closed his eyes and pushed more of himself out into the open cockpit, envisioning everything being surrounded by soft, gentle energy.
“Better than trying to punch your way through the shield.” Tomas’ breath was taken away as a quintuple-punch struck them.
Both men lost consciousness pretty quickly after that.
***
Ute was the first to open his eyes. He took in the damage with the speed of someone very well trained, then grunted unhappily. They weren’t entirely fucked, but it was close.
Too close for comfort; the Harmonic bubble he’d generated to keep himself and Tomas in one piece had done miraculously in doing just that, but most of the pod’s mechanical and electrical systems had been completely fried by their preposterous bid for freedom.
A quick check on his proteus revealed that –thankfully- life support was still online and would continue functioning for another few days.
A small gift, but one Ute was willing to take.
“I’m just thankful whoever designed this thing made certain that life support was more protected than anything else.” Ute poked Tomas with a finger. The old man looked like he was asleep. “Hey. Old man. Wake up. We’re not dead. I also don’t think we’re on the other side of the Universe, but I can’t be certain. Everything but life support is broken.”
Tomas opened his eyes slowly. He took a few moments to process his continued survival, and a few more to check his limbs. He was all in place. Everything was right where … he checked his inner pocket, and grumbled unhappily as he pulled out his broken pipe. “My pipe is broken, sa. You owe me a new one.”
“Old man, everyone and their dog knows you don
’t bring stuff like that on this kind of mission.” Ute cracked open one of the machines by his feet and started rooting around for useable material. “You just don’t. Now help me find stuff to fix other stuff. We’re dead in the water here. We either need to figure out a way to hotwire the engines or Jerry-rig an emergency beacon or the hell we just went through was for nothing. Well, for you. I’m a Fivesie. I could go to sleep for a few decades and be just fine.”
Tomas put the broken pieces of his pipe back where they’d come from and did as Ute suggested. A devilish grin crossed his face as he began picking through the broken machinery in his side of the orb.
“I can’t believe it was that easy to get through the shield. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that?”
“Old man,” Ute reefed a cracked but mostly useable communication circuit board out of it’s casing and put it off to one side, “I know you’re messing with me. That was anything but easy.”
“Agree to disagree, old friend, agree to disagree.”
***
Mayin Chisolm was –in addition to being a Naval Intelligence officer assigned to one of the mobile listening posts continually surveying the exterior shell of the shield surrounding Latelyspace- one of the Emperor’s Shriven.
No one knew it. Her cover story was one in a million, and she preferred that no one knew she was Shriven because in a Universe where many things were accepted without hesitation in the most readiest of fashions, she and her … kind rarely were.
It was their own fault, naturally.
Without being Shriven, without being given the opportunity to descend into the crucible of your own guilt and face the horrible repercussions of your past actions, without struggling and striving to rise up and make things right, you were nothing more than an addlepated moron fighting against millions of tons of emotional dead weight.
Being Shriven was to be free of that burden, and it showed, especially in the fresh ones. Older Shriven kept their emptiness hidden as best they could.
