Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  The drop-bug descended slowly inside a vertical shaft, to a bright reception area below ground, with smiling people waiting to greet her.

  A new world!

  For a moment Rekka was young again, alone on the surface of EM-0036 before it became Vijaya, on the verge of changing her life and becoming the person she was meant to be.

  I’m in the right place, at the right time.

  This would be a good ending.

  SIXTY-ONE

  LUNA, 1005300 AD

  The crystalline man twitched on the silver bier. He opened his transparent eyelids as he came awake, seeing a woman, equally of living crystal, asleep on a bier like his. At that beautiful sight, he smiled.

  –You’re so beautiful, and I know you.

  For now he remembered nothing more, but confidence was strong in him, and soon everything would come back. He swung himself to his feet, onto a polished floor; a shining hall of sapphire and glass surrounded them. This was a fastness, a place of power, and his body thrummed with it.

  Shields hung on the walls, decorative and war-like simultaneously, some ancient and battered, others new and formed of exotic matter, each marked with a rune; and each of the runes glowed a soft blood red. A sign of some kind. There was deep history here, a sense of the glory involved in sheer survival across time.

  In an archway, he paused at the threshold of an even larger hall, this one star-shaped with nine annexes, while sapphire dots of light shone overhead, soft and elegant, a sign of great powers tamed. Another man was lying here asleep, his name almost available to memory; but another mental image came crowding in.

  The galactic core, the light of a billion suns, and the fifty-thousand-lightyear jet arrowing outwards, stretching from the dark-matter centre to the outer halo, the bridgehead of . . . what?

  Darkness.

  Peaceful vitality filled him, but this was not a time of peace.

  There was an enemy invading from beyond the void, and the warlike glory of these halls reflected long preparation for the Final Days. He understood that conflict was, is, and always would be awful; that pride and camaraderie are born of necessity, without which defeat will follow; but there was the possibility of moving beyond fear, of finding the best within a person when the universe was at its worst.

  From the wall, he took down one of the heavy spears, and runes flared upon the haft.

  He walked through to a long, gleaming corridor of crystal, and followed it to an external balcony set upon an outer wall of that shining fortress, overlooking the grey landscape marked with sharp black shadows, beneath a black and airless sky.

  This was the homeworld’s moon.

  And there it was, the planet that gave birth to so much: her disc full, revealing blue oceans and green land, beneath the ribbons of crimson and silver that girded the globe.

  –Hello my love.

  The words had formed inside his head. He smiled as he turned.

  –My beautiful Gavi.

  More than beautiful: wondrous.

  –Is that my name?

  He took her hand.

  –I am sure it is. If you remember mine, let me know.

  Hand in hand, they looked out upon the moonscape for a long time before she asked a question:

  –How long have we slept?

  Looking at the stars, he shook his head, then stopped. Three stars formed a distinct row.

  –See Orion’s belt. What colour is the central star?

  –It seems . . . red. Does that mean something?

  He had remembered the constellation’s name, and she recognised it. Full memory was about to come flooding back, but he answered her question nonetheless.

  –It means a million years have passed.

  She squeezed his fingers, crystal upon crystal.

  –So much time.

  Emanating from behind but sounding in their heads, a feminine, commanding voice manifested:

  –You remember what we’ve always known to do. Observe what the enemy does, deduce what the enemy intends, and then prevent it.

  Without turning, the man sensed Gavi asking:

  –And now we fight the darkness?

  –Now we fight.

  He raised his spear in salute to the banded Earth, as everything came back to him.

  And laughed, though the vacuum was hard.

  For Ragnarökkr was imminent.

  Rathulfr joined them in the Council conference hall, straight from the star-shaped chamber in which he had lain. Sharp was waiting, their watcher who could see the darkness more clearly than the rest, with pinpoints of reflected light sliding along his living-crystal antlers; along with Harij the Seeker, around whom sapphire light billowed and blazed, for Harij embodied the talent of mind-talk and hyperdimensional severance, their defence against absorption.

  Kenna, Roger and Gavriela stood near the great table.

  Magni teleported into existence, smiling.

  –This may turn out to be exhilarating.

  Of them all, only he had not known death and crystalline resurrection. He represented humanity of the past half-million years, and those of his kind who had not fled the galaxy were preparing to fight.

  They could entangle their minds, the Council, the linkage mediated by Harij. When the crystalline fortress blazed at full energy, slamming orthophotons backwards through time (to use a primitive metaphor) to recruit their masses of warriors, such conjunction was necessary to maintain control; but when the need was over, they were individuals once more.

  But the coming fight was not just theirs.

  –We need to inspect our Valhöll that is Earth, suggested Rathulfr.

  Awoken from the conjunction-trance, for the ninth and final time, they were not just recovered – they were energised, and Rathulfr’s thoughts gleamed with power.

  –Roger and I will go first. That was Gavriela. To check they have absorbed what they need. If that sits well with you all.

  The others smiled at her.

  A feminine reply hummed through the hall, vibrating with gentle humour:

  –Time for young lovers to be alone?

  Another Council member.

  Freya her name, a slender crystalline woman who looked a lot like Roger, her brother. In her pre-resurrection existence, she had not required a name: she had been a ship, uniquely Roger Blackstone’s. Now, in their present forms, it would be truer to label both Freya and Roger as superpositions: she partly her Pilot, he partly his ship.

  –Not so young, sister. Roger was smiling. For the rest, we plead guilty.

  Rathulfr was scanning the hall.

  –We are eight, war-queen. Perhaps the Trickster will not come.

  Kenna shook her crystalline head.

  –It’s unlikely he . . .

  Shimmering sapphire light brightened then attenuated, revealing the kneeling figure of a living-crystal man, the last of their number.

  –Trust him to turn up like that.

  That was Roger, primarily to Gavriela. Long-range teleportation in this manner – Dmitri reeked of ancient, distant stars – was natural to Magni and his modern ilk, something of an affectation to those of the old kind.

  Dmitri the Trickster rose without effort to his feet, and his smile was sly.

  –Waiting for me, brothers and sisters?

  His presence altered the Council’s dynamic in a manner that kept them on their toes. He was insightful regarding the ways of the darkness, his cunning wisdom occasionally disturbing. Roger believed that Kenna recruited him in part because the inherent risk kept everyone else alert – don’t step in any causal loops, she liked to remind them – and remembered a conversation from half a million or a million years ago, depending on viewpoint:

  —This is not the first Ragnarok Council, Kenna had told him.

  —If we’re the second, what happened to the others?

  —They perished in paradox.

  Roger’s former naivety made him smile.

  At some point, half a million years ago, Kenna had pushed t
hrough a transcendent reworking of her physical and mental self – again – to become exquisitely conscious of causal history and the sheaves of possible paths not taken; and if she had some awareness of those other destinies, then why just one other?

  To be aware of an infinite number of disasters, and yet face this reality with confidence and courage: the more he understood of Kenna’s nature, the more awed he became.

  Now, he took Gavriela’s hand, glanced at Dmitri, and turned to Kenna.

  —Perhaps we should all fly together.

  —To Valhöll?

  —Exactly.

  Dmitri smiled his Trickster smile.

  They walked through the shining halls, all nine war leaders with Kenna in the lead, each taking a shield and some other weapon en route, until they came to a great gleaming ramp that led outside to the stark lunar landscape beneath ink-black sky.

  As they placed the shields horizontally two centimetres above the ground and released them – the shields vibrated and hung in place – Magni seemed embarrassed.

  —Must we travel this way?

  Kenna touched his arm.

  —For show before our armies, it is best.

  In vacuum, soundlessly, Magni sighed.

  —I’d rather be fighting.

  —Soon enough, you will be.

  Magni was not the only one to nod, accepting Kenna’s words. Resurrection and a million years of preparation were about to boil down to that most ancient phenomenon, an army of one species throwing itself against another, all the wonders of civilisation reduced to the need to fight, and do it well.

  It was a bitterness that Magni, of all of them, had found hardest to swallow, while Rathulfr – and perhaps Dmitri, in a less wholesome way – experienced a kind of fulfilling joy, even vindication, in preparing for war, leaving the others to commit themselves out of duty and necessity.

  Each of the nine stepped upon a floating, quivering shield. Then, as one, they looked up to Earth’s disc, banded with silver and crimson, serene in the night.

  Kenna gave the command.

  —We fly.

  They rose amid invisibly roiling vacuum; and then they soared, heading for Valhöll.

  To a battle-ready Earth.

  They flew the skies, made speeches that were beamed across all nine armies within this, the ninth wave of Einherjar, of resurrected warriors. Battalions stood to attention as the exhortations rang in their minds, and the strategic pictures unfurled: the visual representations of that which could not be seen, the darkness, and its journey comprising hundreds of millions of lightyears across a cosmic void and onwards to this galaxy.

  It had a bridgehead established at the core, weaker than it had intended but existing nonetheless, and it had continued its advance, for it was almost here, almost at the galaxy’s edge.

  In the inevitable aeons to come, when two trillion years have passed, baryonic matter will cease to dominate the universe, and each galaxy will be alone, the others receded far beyond an impenetrable black horizon. That will be the epoch of darkness.

  —But we will not allow it to hasten that victory.

  To fight a holding action that would last two trillion years was the greatest victory that ordinary, baryonic-matter lifeforms could hope to achieve.

  Across the Earth, billions of humans and Haxigoji of living crystal shared those broadcast thoughts and images and grew fierce, because this was their reason for existing now: to beat back the enemy’s advance, to hurt it enough that it would never try again.

  The earlier waves were in final preparation, having fought training campaigns in the depths of Jovian oceans and interstellar space; soon the greatest deployment the galaxy had ever seen would begin.

  When the initial speeches and briefing were over, the nine war leaders split their mid-air formation and flew to their respective armies. Gavriela chose to walk among her troops as an individual instead of addressing them from on high, so she glided across the metallic crimson expanse of a continent-sized arsenal, in parallel to one of the silver regions where the crystalline warriors grew.

  At random, she picked a spot and swooped down to land on metal.

  Among her warriors, standing at ease now, were humans of the modern kind like Magni, born to this form, and those who were grown for the battle, Haxigoji and human alike, their neural patterns laid down via cross-temporal resonance: some personalities copied many times over, to varying degrees of fidelity.

  Each possessed true warrior spirit: they were grown that way, absorbing from the very start paraneural crystal shards analogous to archaic logotropes, whose purpose was only to awaken natural potential. Any individual is the descendant of billions of years of ancestors who fought and survived: the son, daughter or clone of champions.

  Gavriela stopped before a strong-looking crystalline woman.

  —I am Gavriela. What was your name, originally?

  Diffractive spectra shifted as the woman smiled.

  —My name was Rekka, War Leader.

  —And do you remember your first life?

  The woman shook her head.

  —Vague dreams, is all. Though I have spirit-sisters who remember more, some of them clearly.

  —And your thoughts on the war? Or on the way we resurrected you?

  Again, the Rekka-echo shook her head.

  —If you hadn’t resurrected me, I wouldn’t exist, and that would be a shame. And as for the darkness, whether the hatred comes from the training or just from being me, who can tell?

  This was the moral question faced by every commander:

  —Is it worth fighting against?

  —With respect, War Leader, you know it is.

  Once, Gavriela would have been unhappy at being addressed as a military commander, but half a million years had hardened the notion inside her.

  The other warriors in the platoon nodded agreement.

  —Good luck, Gavriela told them.

  She stepped upon her shield and soared upward.

  So many weapons. So many warriors.

  But against an enemy like the darkness, was even the population of Earth-turned-Valhöll enough?

  Perhaps they were like children playing with toy guns and mock-heroic fantasy, to be brushed aside and killed when the real invaders came.

  When the war leaders reconvened, eight of them floating in a circle surrounding Kenna at the centre, they raised their arms and tuned their minds to the crystalline armies standing to attention on those silver and crimson pseudo-continents banding the globe, to the eight waves floating ready across the solar system, and for a time they became one being, unifying their purpose: protecting life, protecting the galaxy.

  We fight until we win.

  Or die.

  It was thought and emotion combined, shared and uniting them all. Then every warrior raised a weapon and transmitted a single intention:

  Win.

  Nine times nine billion warriors were ready for the fight.

  For Ragnarökkr.

  SIXTY-TWO

  SHADOW GATE AT HALO’S EDGE, ARCHAIC GALACTIC ANTI-CENTRE, 1005300 AD

  The galaxy had continued to rotate, but the jet had not, relative to distant stars: it still pointed in the direction of Auriga, though Valhöll-once-Earth no longer lay exactly on that radial line. The enemy’s bridgehead linked the dark-matter star at the galactic core to the intricately structured dark-matter halo enclosing the galaxy like an eggshell.

  A black bridge from intergalactic space stretched from beyond a distant void all the way to the galactic core: so long that it would take photons hundreds of millions of years to travel from end to end. Beyond the galaxy’s halo, it was thick and intricate and strong; inside the galaxy proper, its narrower presence could be sensed only by the spotter squadrons, deep space reconnaissance groups composed of Haxigoji warriors, their crystalline bodies resonating with the zero-point energy of spacetime itself, needing no ships to fly, no more than fish needed assistance to swim.

  Among the living-crystal Haxi
goji were crystalline Seekers, entangled in constant communication with their brothers and sisters, remaining alert for hostile feelers along the hyperdimensions, for the Anomaly had also enjoyed a million years in which to prepare: the darkness was not without allies among the baryonic-matter entities of the galaxy.

  The location where the jet ended was designated Shadow Gate, and unless something unexpected occurred, this was where the battle would begin. For all the timescales involved in reaching this moment, no one expected this to be an extended campaign: this was a single confrontation, with everything at stake.

  When Schenck’s renegades of distant memory had tried such a strategy in a different universe, they had failed and died; luckily they were the enemy. Here in realspace, Kenna and her fellow war leaders intended to do better.

  The first test was upon them.

  It was darkness with structure: a three-dimensional moving maze of invisible matter and energy falling upon the spotters and the lead warriors of Roger’s army: phalanxes of crystalline fighters floating in space, some in human form, others morphed into dart-like shapes, all trained to lay down devastating fire by cracking apart raw vacuum, by letting rip with zero-point energy.

  The greater darkness was here.

  —Now.

  Warriors attacked.

  Explosions and death were everywhere.

  Around the fiery end of that great spindle, the galactic jet emanating from the core, spacetime burned, and gamma- and X-radiation spurted like blood, while squadron after squadron threw themselves against the dark, complex structures of the enemy: a ghost creature or creatures wide enough to devour stars, crawling along its black bridge from who-knew-what dark-matter hell, pushing implacably on into the precious galaxy, advancing despite its wounds and losses, for the squadrons were damaging it, that was certain, even as they died.

  An honourable death is still extinction.

  —Fall back.

  Roger had delayed as long as he dared, but to lose his entire vanguard was not his purpose. A huge mass of darkness, all right angles and hollows, was growing large before him; standing on his shield, he focused along his spear and used it to direct his vacuum-splitting beam, gamma-rays and sapphire light spilling everywhere. Then he tipped back, whirling through a vertical half-circle, crouched on his shield as he accelerated hard.