“You have remembered more than you had earlier, then?” Agrippa asked.
“I have,” Solonis replied.
Agrippa met his eyes and could tell instantly that he was not speaking the truth in that regard. He slowly moved his right hand down to the grip of his gladius; Solonis’s lie had only served to heighten his sense of being prepared for any eventuality that could occur in the next few moments.
“You now believe you, the humans and we all share a common cause, then?” the unnamed Dyonari leader asked.
“I do. We all seek the preservation of the galaxy.” He focused his gaze directly upon the leader. “That is, after all, your goal, is it not?”
The alien did not flinch. “It is,” he said.
Solonis smiled back at him; the alien appeared utterly uninterested.
“You said to us that Aurore—the goddess who convinced us to come and who brought us here—was a ghost,” Agrippa went on. “And that you were one, as well.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Solonis said. He paused, touching his dark finger to his lips, then continued, “The goddess Aurore, she of beauty and wisdom and above all stealth, was slain during the Vorthan incident, thousands of years ago. But, like all the gods, some measure of her spirit lingered on. I took a portion of the Power—that cosmic energy that issues from the Fountain of the Golden City and sustains us across the planes of reality—and used it to bring her back, in a manner of speaking. I blew upon the last glowing embers and summoned forth a flame—albeit a tiny one, and one that would burn for only a short time. Then I sent her to you, or rather to whomever she could find at the appointed time and place, to bring back those capable of helping me to fulfill my task. Once that was done, and the last of her reserve of the Power gone, she vanished.”
“Indeed she did,” Agrippa said, nodding. “Right in front of us.” He glanced over at Torgon, who appeared mystified by it all. “Well. A ghost.” Agrippa shook his head. “Alright. Then how are you a ghost?”
“I, too, died many centuries ago. But one of my godly abilities had always been to detach my spirit from my physical body—to separate what one might call my astral form from my physical form— and send it into the future. This is why I was called the seer-god. I had not only seen the future—I had visited it, repeatedly, in spiritual form, and returned with newfound knowledge of it.”
“You sent your soul forward in time?”
“That is one way of putting it, yes.” Solonis hesitated, seeming to consider his next words. “During the period when the gods were being murdered, I sought to discover who was doing the killing. I concluded that if I traveled far enough into the future, at some point there would be only one other god left alive in the universe, and he or she would likely be the guilty party. Not an entirely foolproof plan, I concede, but you must understand that things had grown quite desperate—and frantic—at that time. Something had shut off the Fountain in the City and thus the Power had been denied to us for centuries, and around me my fellow gods and goddesses were disappearing; I later learned the reason for that, but it is of no matter to the point I am making now. In any case, at long last the Power returned and I took that opportunity to dispatch my astral form far into the future.”
“You left your body behind in your original time, but your spirit traveled forward, yes?” Agrippa asked, clarifying his understanding.
“Indeed,” Solonis said. “And, as I moved forward in time, I began to notice something extremely curious and disturbing. There were...” He paused, looking down, seemingly struggling to find the right words to express the concepts in his mind. “There were waves radiating backward in time from some future point. Shockwaves. Cracks, if you will, in the fabric of spacetime and reality. Spiraling outward from some future event, traveling back even as I traveled forward. I realized then that those waves had been there all along, for all the time that I had been moving. In other words, they continued back in time to before the moment that I had left my body behind. To what point in history before that they were proceeding, I did not know, and still do not. Perhaps they reach back to the origins of the universe; I cannot say. In any case, I kept going forward, into the future, now following them like lines on a map, seeking the point of their origin, leaping greater and greater distances in time. They were always there, coming back to me and continuing on behind me, moving into the past as I moved into the future. It was most peculiar; like traveling upstream against a flowing river.”
“Cracks in the fabric of time and space,” Agrippa grumbled. He looked over at the aliens standing a short distance away. “That doesn’t sound to me like something even the Dyonari could have caused.”
“No,” said Commander Merrin.
Agrippa looked back at Solonis. “Continue,” he said.
The dark-skinned, young-seeming god-man appeared momentarily angered by the general’s brusque order, but set it aside and spoke again. “My leaps carried me farther even than I anticipated; they carried me onward, beyond this time where we currently exist. But then, after I passed this current time and continued forward, I discovered something unexpected: the shockwaves in spacetime were now moving forward, alongside me, into the future.”
Agrippa blinked his eyes, processing this point. “Forward now?”
“Yes. So I continued to move into the future. The waves continued to move along with me. It was like hearing the echoes from an explosion that had never actually happened; or as if I had been tracing ripples in a pond radiating one way, and now I was finding them radiating in the other direction—but with no pebble striking the water in between. All spiraling ripples, no splash.”
“I...think I follow,” Agrippa said. “The point in time where you should have found your metaphorical ‘splash’ was...”
“It was now,” the Dyonari commander interjected. “Whatever caused the shockwaves in both directions, the epicenter of it was our time, right here, right now.”
Solonis nodded. “And that is why I came back, using this body and the Temporal Vault, to this time. To find that splash, that explosion—which must be here and now, somewhere and somehow, but hidden—and to prevent it.”
“Why prevent it?” Agrippa asked. “It sounds as if, strange as it is, it has done no actual harm.”
Solonis made a sound that Agrippa realized was a humorless laugh. “Oh, it did harm,” he said. “Or rather, it will. In the future. For I have yet to tell you what I found at the farthest reaches of my journey forward.”
Agrippa felt his stomach sinking. He remembered what the Aurore-ghost had told him. “A shattering,” he said.
Solonis looked at him, then nodded once. “Just so. A shattering.” He gazed out at the two audiences and seeing that both sets of soldiers were listening now with rapt attention. “At the extremity of my leaps into the future, I discovered something of utterly profound importance. Not the identity of the murderer of the gods, as I had originally hoped to find, but something infinitely worse: that the entire galaxy had been obliterated.”
At that, Solonis stopped speaking and the silence hung there; both groups of soldiers, human and alien, moved about uncomfortably and glanced at one another.
“Obliterated,” Agrippa repeated.
“Almost completely destroyed,” Solonis said. “Stars blown out; solar systems engulfed by novas; arms of the galactic spiral cataclysmically disrupted. Of the empires of Man or any other race, no traces remained. Only a very few huddled survivors on the remains of their shattered worlds.”
“And you believe it resulted from this ‘shockwave’ in spacetime? Then what caused the wave?” Agrippa demanded.
“And how can we prevent it?” the Dyonari commander added.
Solonis’s gaze moved from the alien ranks to the humans. He shook his head. “The cause? That is something I have been attempting to understand all along, with no success,” he said. “And the prevention? That,” he concluded sadly, “I have never, ever known.”
10
A goddess opened the w
ay for them, and they emerged into a scene straight out of Hell.
As the lady Teluria ripped the fabric of spacetime asunder and ushered a unit of I Legion soldiers through, their commander, General Marcus Ezekial Tamerlane, blazed the trail—literally.
Summoning the cosmic flame that was his to command, Tamerlane gestured with one hand and then the other, directing the flow, unleashing waves of fire at the enemy.
And what an enemy they faced in these ravenous, slavering hordes of alien creatures from beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Vicious, chitin-covered Skrazzi in numbers beyond counting, each of them brandishing its razor-sharp cutting claw and its genetically engineered disintegrator-gun arm. Horrific, nightmare-inducing Phaedrons that somehow seemed to command the Skrazzi as foot soldiers while projecting waves of psychic fear ahead of them. Both working together in the service of some higher—or lower—power, with the clear objective of scouring all native sentient life from the galaxy.
Their unholy mission had brought them here, to Tolkar, an industrial world renowned throughout the Empire for its tremendous production capabilities. The factories and foundries of Tolkar supplied weapons, ammunition, armor and equipment for all of the legions and planetary defense forces. Cyclopean cranes, lifters and smokestacks towered over a bare, concrete-and-steel landscape as smoke belched from uncountable blast furnaces.
But the orbital defenses had been breached, and the planetary defense forces were falling back in disarray. The world was gripped by chaos. As the blood-red comets of the enemy rained down upon the surface, breaking open to disgorge vicious enemy troops by the thousands, the people of Tolkar ran from their factories, abandoned their posts, and fled in terror.
Into that situation stepped the men and women of the I Legion—the Lords of Fire—horribly outnumbered but determined not to give in. Determined to resist the enemy to the bitter end. They emerged from the cosmic portal and onto a broad gray concrete plain, weapons at the ready, and opened fire immediately. Finding something to shoot at was not a problem. It was easy—all too easy. The enemy was everywhere.
As the I Legion troopers followed Colonel Niobe Arani and Major Titus Elaro, fanning out and opening fire, Teluria kept close to Tamerlane. She allowed the portal she had brought them all through to close, but both she and Tamerlane knew she could open it again—and reestablish the pathway back to the Ascanius, the Legion’s flagship—at a moment’s notice.
“Why do you persist in these futile efforts?” she asked Tamerlane as she stood just behind him, gazing out at the hordes of alien creatures. “You know by now that your cause is hopeless. Your empire cannot be saved. Nor any of the worlds beyond it. Why not simply flee? Take all that you have and quit this galaxy? Why have me bring you and your soldiers directly into the midst of these—these monsters?”
“We have to try,” Tamerlane shouted over the insane din of noise from the battle. “We can’t just give up, give in, and welcome death.”
Teluria scowled at this. “I will continue to assist you for a short while longer, General,” she said. “But my time in this realm is drawing to a close, and the Golden City, for all its flaws, seems far more appealing now.”
“Leave whenever you please,” Tamerlane replied, not looking back at her. He was far too busy sending columns of flame into the ranks of attacking Skrazzi. “I have never attempted to compel you to help us.” Now he did look back, for an instant. “Not like Iapetus,” he added.
“Iapetus.” She spat the name. “He is one of the reasons I continue to help you. For all the contempt I feel for your little empire, it is as nothing compared to the loathing I carry for that man. To think of him somehow winning this war and emerging at the top afterward...” She grunted. “No. That must not happen.”
“I see now how foolish I was,” Tamerlane told her as he shifted to the right and blasted a formation of attackers. Around him, the armored soldiers of the unit were firing away with their energy rifles and pistols. A couple even carried the An-Ro quad-rifles so favored by General Agrippa and his III Legion.
“What do you mean?” Teluria asked.
“I wasted all that time, while Nakamura was ill, doing virtually nothing. Just hoping that he would recover. And practically begging Iapetus to get more involved—to get involved at all!—in the war against our neighboring empires. He never did, of course, and meanwhile I and III Legions were ground down to almost nothing.” He issued a quick order via the Aether link and then shifted position again, flinging fireballs, helping to soften up the Skrazzi positions. “So now the bloody-handed Sons of Terra control the Princess, the homeworld and the core Inner Worlds, while my legion and Agrippa’s are reduced to raids like this one, nibbling at the edges of the enemy’s advance.”
“Yes,” Teluria said. “You fight and die, and he sits back on Earth and reaps the benefits of your great labors and sacrifices, and does nothing.”
Tamerlane gritted his teeth at that. “I can at least take solace in the fact that he will soon have much to do. We cannot hold out for long—the hordes of the enemy will overrun the Inner Worlds within weeks, if not days.”
A trio of slavering Skrazzi emerged from the smoke behind Tamerlane and raced at his back, their deadly dagger-arms raised to impale him. Seeing them, Teluria summoned up a ball of lightning and flung it at the center of their formation. The explosion got Tamerlane’s attention better than any shouted alarm would have, and by the time he whirled about to face the attackers he saw that they were writhing on the ground, tendrils of electricity playing over them. He nodded his thanks to the goddess, and she actually gave him a half-smile in return. Then he incinerated them.
“You see?” he asked, looking back at her briefly. “You’re a better person than you believe. You enjoy fighting alongside my legion, helping us.”
Teluria snorted. “Hardly.” As she flung another ball of lightning, she looked at him sidelong. “I will admit I somewhat misjudged you before,” she said. “I thought you a typically weak, sniveling human. But now I can see that you are more than that. You have a certain nobility, General—not to mention your command of the flame. You might have made a decent god. Perhaps you are someone’s secret bastard offspring? Vashtaar, perhaps? He was quite handy with fire.”
Tamerlane ignored this and kept blasting with his flames.
“Of course, I merely obeyed Goraddon in those days. I did not think for myself nearly as much as I should have.” Her voice dropped from its usual imperial haughtiness and she added, “I regret that now.”
Tamerlane glanced over at her, surprised to hear her admit such things.
“What?” she demanded, as though offended by his look.
He laughed. “In the weeks you’ve worked with us, I’ve never heard you say such things.”
“Oh?” She shrugged offhandedly. “Perhaps I am grown melancholy, here at the death of your galaxy.”
“It’s your galaxy, too—isn’t it?”
She seemed to consider this. “Perhaps it is. If only for a little while longer.” She hurled more bolts of lightning and then actually punched a Skrazzi that was attempting to fire its disintegrator-arm at her. The blow, striking as it did the hard insectoid shell of the creature, didn’t appear to hurt her hand in the slightest. As it stumbled back, she zapped it with lightning and it fell, dead before it hit the ground.
“Do any of your kind know where you came from?” Tamerlane asked.
“The City,” she said, as if it were the silliest question ever asked.
“Yes—but before that. You seem human in appearance. All of you. Could you once have been... us?”
Teluria pursed her lips as a lull appeared in the fighting. The Lords of Fire drew back, reloading their weapons and wiping sweat and soot and blood and alien gore from their faces and hands. “I understand that the origin of my kind is a question your kind has asked itself for millennia,” she said at length. “But for my part—for our part—we care nothing for the answer.” She stopped and looked directly at him. “We are, Ge
neral. We are. And that is enough.”
Tamerlane nodded at this. What else could he do?
“General!”
The cry from Colonel Arani, standing off to his left, brought him back to the current predicament. He took in the situation instantly: the Skrazzi were rallying and charging.
Titus Elaro carried an An-Ro quad-rifle with his right arm, the weight and recoil of the thing savage but the damage it wrought upon the enemy extremely satisfying. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t imagine how General Agrippa lugged one of the things around with him everywhere he went.
“Over there,” shouted Colonel Arani. She pointed toward a cluster of Skrazzi rushing at them.
Elaro swung the big weapon around and opened fire with the particle-beam cannon. The blast of coherent light sliced out, cutting the insect-like aliens down where they stood. The few survivors from that group charged, this time brandishing the disintegrator guns built into their arms. Elaro noted that the Skrazzi probably would enjoy much greater success in their conflicts with Man if they relied more on those disintegrators and less on their stabbing blade arms. The horrific creatures, however, seemed predisposed to leading with their blade-arms. They relished close-quarters combat and had recourse to their distance weapon arms only, it appeared, as a last resort. That was something Elaro was quite pleased about.
“I’m glad you found one of those in the Ascanius’s arsenal,” Arani said as they turned to face the next charge. “It’s making a difference.”
“I was surprised the Kings of Oblivion hadn’t acquired all of them,” Elaro replied. As he opened fire again, this time with the energy-blast barrel—he was keeping the projectiles in reserve, since they were in relatively short supply—he glanced at Arani out of the corner of his eye. “Are we okay?” he asked.
“Okay?” Arani shot him a look of incredulity. “We’re facing an army of giant bug-aliens with ray guns built into their arms. How is any of this okay?”
The Shattering: Omnibus Page 66
