2196 Ante Arbitrium The Balance

"We haven’t fought a battle like this for centuries," said the Pope, blowing a vast cloud of cigar-smoke through the command tent. "But the Vatican remembers. We endure. And we learned a few moves from that tricky old Saladin, back in the time of the First Crusades."

"You mean we have to fight them without guns? How the hell are we going to even slow them down before they swarm all over us?"

This from the leader of the city’s surviving Confederates - a bald-headed old veteran with a wrestler’s physique and a black eagle tattooed across the dome of his skull.

"They aren’t as good at fighting as they are at butchering women and children," said CeeAn, pointing out across the spillway with her half-no-dachi. "We’ve got every clan and nation of Elysium represented here – some of the finest warriors the world’s ever seen."

"So what if we usually fight each other?" called out a Celestial guardsman near the back of the throng. "Do we have to help those skinhead bastards if we see them getting eaten alive?"

Cee scowled, scanning the faces of her little army.

It was impossible to fit everyone who wanted a say into the little army-surplus tent. There were just too many factions represented in the Exodus; too many voices to run this game as a democracy. And they were under the hammer no matter how they cast their votes, because the hordes were coming.

"You’re gonna be too busy for that today," she said, leaping catlike up atop the table. This put her face to face with Pope Joan, who was still wearing her massive carapace armor. "We don’t have time for doubt, or arguments, or rivalry. Today is what it is. We’re fighting so that the people we love can escape."

She couldn’t help thinking of Abdulafia, then. He hadn’t escaped. He’d gone to the very heart of the disease, to face the thing which had killed her once already.

"We know they hate iron, and we know they want us to fear them. So most of you are going to fight in spear phalanxes, using the rebar pikes we’re grinding sharp for you now. The Vatican Knights will take the right flank, Clan Ghyre, your warriors will hold the left. Me and the Dervashi will take the middle, and we’ll be the last ones to fall back through the gates. Remember – this is a delaying action. We don’t expect to win… just to stay alive."

As far as inspirational speeches went, Cee had heard plenty better. But it would have to do. Because now the hand-cranked klaxons were howling, and the sound of fear and panic echoed up from all around them. Cee and Joan had pitched their command tent behind the vast shuffling mass of the refugee horde – close to a million people trying to fit through a crack in the Ashishi gates. Black Technologists stood at the portal, scanning each and every one of them for infection.

The battle-line of the Exodus was strung out behind this mobile shantytown of tarps and bags and milling humanity – the last able-bodied fighters winnowed from every faction and clan in the city. They were ranked up ten deep in places, armed with long sharpened stakes of rebar, ancient longswords, machetes, axes and spiked clubs. Here and there makeshift banners were raised high – bedsheets and plastic mats spray-painted with the names of Hab-blocks, manufactoria, sub-tribes and religions.

Behind them, on the walls, any warm body who owned a weapon had their own crenelation, slit, turret or merlon. A spiked profusion of muzzles stood out against the gray dawn, giving the top of the Ashishi battlements the look of a thorny crown. They’d hauled up every piece of artillery they could scavenge, and manned them with wounded soldiers and civilian volunteers.

In the end, it might not be any use. There were far too many Saprophytes ranged against them, a whole ragged nation of them advancing slowly across the incline. When they reached the over-arching bridges which led to the Iron Basilica, Pope Joan turned to the chief of her Black Technologists and made a curt signal with one hand. He nodded, opening a jeweled cask and bowing down on one knee.

"It doesn’t matter," Cee heard the warrior-pontiff whisper under her breath. "The rock of our church is wherever we go. We will endure."

And with that, she reached into the cask and pushed a button.

The walls of the Iron Basilica were strong; after all, the place had once been a great barbican fortress, dominating the western dam-top in defiance of the Ferals below. But there were five more armored Seraphim down beneath the domes and spires of the Holy See, and each one was powered by a fission micropile.

The blast vaporized the great central cathedral from its cupola to its foundations, carving a crater down through a hundred sub-basements as steeples blazed and shattered. Still, the great ring-wall of the barbican had been built expressly to withstand nuclear warfare – superheated flames mushroomed up from them in a vast eruption, rolling out flat against the belly of the clouds. Those reinforced walls cupped the explosion like the barrel of a vast bombard, creating a pillar of raving fire.

Thousands of Asag’raal’s slaves died in that instant, Exalted and Saprophytes together reduced to dirty smoke as they screamed. The howl of anguish which went up from the hordes on the spillway was sweet music to the warriors of the Exodus, but it was far from enough. Especially when they could finally see the linchpin of the horrors’ advance; the hulking form of the Worm’s avatar itself.

CeeAn pushed her way forward through the ranks of the Dervashi, right at the center of the battle-line. Combat diagnostic programs flickered across her augmented eyes as she reached the front, calculating trajectories and arcs of fire…Closer. They had to be just a little closer…

There was no way that gunfire alone would put these things down. But a massed barrage might slow their advance, and open gaps in that seething black wall of nightmares. Two hundred feet. One hundred… now she could see individual demon faces in the press of flesh, rotting eyes and lolling tongues, needle teeth glistening wetly in the light of dawn…

"NOW! FIRE!"

CeeAn called the thunder. And from above them ten thousand guns opened up, sleeting withering fire against the foe. Everything from hydrogen maser blasts to ancient cannonballs plowed into the Saprophytic line, mowing down their first ten ranks in a spray of carrion and black blood. Arms, legs, heads… nameless pieces flew wide as shards of bone and tooth and claw became scything shrapnel, and damned souls fled their bodies.

But they didn’t falter. All that the horrors feared was their master; they had become their own worst nightmares, and death was just an escape. At the heart of his horde the loathsome avatar of the Worm laughed, shrugging off the barrage with contempt.

And now the killing started.

Cee heard the war-cries of Clan Ghyre as those fierce warriors met the enemy head-on, swinging morningstars and spiked chains, axes and metal pipes studded with nails. It was one part execration and two parts dirge, that slaying song, and it meant death. The Ferals had the hardest job of it; fighting uphill out of the Pit, holding the flank where the slipperiest, quickest Saprophytes tried to outmaneuver Cee’s battle-line. To her right the Vatican knights held the top of the spillway, few in number but nearly unassailable in their scarred mekan-armor. Knights of the Temple, Crusaders and Furies, Arcanii and Sacristans, hewing into a tide of shadows with blades and hammers and armored fists.

A second barrage tore apart the smoky air as the guns on the wall above her picked their targets and let fly. It didn’t matter that any Saprophyte not utterly shredded by the blast was able to stitch its oily flesh back together – the guns carved openings in the line of battle, allowing CeeAn’s defenders to slice deep into the ranks behind.

But this barrage never reached its target.

Cee felt the world shiver, flesh and stone and steel pulled tight and thin. A heat-haze shimmer came down across the spillway, slowing time down to a crawl like a massive hit of the ‘chrome. But this came from Asag’raal’s cadaverous avatar, squatting amid its minions like a toad. And it slowed each and every bullet, each shell and energy beam to a standstill.

"Watch and learn, little human. You can tell my brothers that I sent you, when you reach the outer dark…"

Its voice screwed its way into her brain with a feeling like pulling teeth, and an oily chuckle came in on the same wavelength. It was meant for her alone, and Cee knew exactly who the Worm meant by its ‘brothers’. The suspended ocean above her rippled as the heart in its depths began to beat – the sound of a war-drum in her blood.

Time came back, for her at least. But not for all those glittering shells and red-hot fusion blasts hanging in midair between the two armies. The laughter in CeeAn’s head clawed its way up the scale to a screech as they blurred together, energy and heat and mass shuttling and switching as though the laws of physics had taken a sudden leave of absence. She tried to move as the avatar brought its hands up above its head, fingers fashioned from entire severed arms cupped together…

The force of it slammed into the back of her head like an iron bar, dropping her to her knees. But she saw.

All that molten, bubbling metal was gathered into a sphere above the battlefield, kept aloft by the will of Asag’raal. The vile thing’s bioelectric field made hers and those of her Dervashi look like pitiful candle-flames before a supergiant sun, bending outwards, swelling, splitting…

"Hold your fire! For the love of all your gods and ancestors, don’t shoot!"

But it was too late.

The avatar brought its hand down in a chopping motion, sending the sphere flying. It struck the warriors of Clan Ghyre head-on, roasting a score of them alive in a heartbeat, then splitting apart into a quicksilver wave. Wherever those deadly droplets landed flesh charred and scorched, wringing screams from those who survived.

Tears blurred CeeAn’s eyes as she spun back to her feet, slicing a pair of saprophytes in two. Her Dervashi bodyguard were right behind her as she cut a deep notch in the Worm’s line of battle, their panga knives and giant two-handed kukri tearing through black ooze and rotten bone in a whirling dance.

There was no way that she could make it to the center of the horde.

And even if she could, how could a handful of Dervashi hope to hack the bloated head from Asag’raal’s shoulders?

CeeAn supposed that it really didn’t matter. The Magi of the Ashishim had been trying to convince her that death in battle was the only honorable path for decades… now they were going to get their wish. The shadows lengthened and darkened around her as she left her warriors behind and pressed on. But rather than becoming more difficult, the slaughter she was orchestrating among the Saps seemed easier with each passing second. It wasn’t until they hemmed her in on all sides that she looked up, and saw that she wasn’t entirely in the world anymore.

The spillway was still there, but it was hazy and indistinct, like a badly-tuned threedeeo feed.

"He really isn’t my brother, you know," said a voice all around her. "It’s an honorific which he’s not really entitled to anymore. Not after his fall…"

CeeAn spun left and right, her broken sword up at guard. But there was nobody there… just the washed-out phantoms of the Saps all around her. The edge of her sword went through them like smoke.

"Part of them is in another world. That’s why your conventional weapons won’t destroy them," sighed the voice, a choir singing every tone at once. "The one you call Asag’raal turned his own terror in upon itself, and made himself a universe alone. Not yours, where he feeds… and not ours, which is already dead."

CeeAn watched the speaker push through the hazy forms of the Saprophytic horde as if they were veils of mist, cobweb-shimmers knitting back together as it passed. The creature was tall and thin, its body all squat and round in contrast to its long, angular limbs. Four furled wings depended from its shoulders, and its face… CeeAn couldn’t focus through the light which streamed from the alien’s countenance. She caught the vaguest of images, deep in the well of light; strobe-shots of people she’d known and loved - people long dead.

"We are the Harvesters," it said "At least, that is the best description in your language. We felt that ‘Reapers’ had the wrong connotation, but it may be slightly more accurate. We exist to take the patterns of the dead into our own great Seed."

"Why…why are you telling me?" asked the Dervashi, bringing her sword up to shade her eyes. "Isn’t this the kind of thing more the Pope’s department?"

The Harvester smiled (or at least, a blur of imagined faces inside its actinic halo did), pointing one impossibly long arm up at the sky. Above them hung a suspended ocean, rippling with the reflection of flames.

"You helped us break the rules. You would not enter, but you would not hesitate. You touched. And we know a loophole, human, when we see one."

CeeAn remembered what lay beneath that quicksilver surface. Billions of dead voices, calling out in a million dead languages for her to join them…

"What you saw was one of our machines. There is no supernatural… only science you have yet to comprehend. We are no different. We only seek to build."

"Then why do you want our dead? What the hell right have you got to…"

"We could let them dissipate. We could let them be gone into the dark. But we have seen the end of days. We have watched our own universe fall to heat-death and dissolution. We would build a new one, but not alone. We desire your… input. It is a worthy cause."

"And Asag’raal is one of you? Is all this part of your worthy cause?" Cee knew that she was walking on the far side of madness. Hells, this was probably all just some kind of terminal delusion, a brain-spark as she bled out. But there, again, was the cool-headed certainty of the pre-deceased. This was just as real as she wanted it to be.

"He is… I believe your word would be apostate. Certainly renegade, but with undertones of abomination… Yes, apostate it is. It requires much suffering to exist in the place between. We cannot enter the worlds which we tend and harvest from, because of the cracks." The alien traced the line of one crazed fracture through the sky with its claw. "Asag’raal doesn’t care. His mind is gone, and all he knows is hunger. We would kill him, if we could."

"So I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s my problem now. Well, that’s sweet of you, but I was already trying to hack the bastard to pieces before you dropped all this metaphysical bullshit on me."

"Oh, we can see that. We can also see that you have only a 0.3419 percent chance of actually succeeding. But as I said, human… we know a loophole when we see one."

"So what, you’re going to give me some of your power? Some kind of alien super-weapon?"

"Think of it like this, CeeAn," said the Harvester. "Right now, your world is like a plank, flat on the ground. When our dear Brother hammers down on his end, nothing happens at the other. If we stood at the other end and applied the same amount of force, we’d drive the whole plank down into your planet’s core…"

"In the metaphor, or in reality?"

"Both. Probably. Anyhow, what we can do is become the fulcrum in the middle. Then when Asag’raal’s end goes down…"

"MY end goes up. Right?"

"Right. All you have to do is feel it. I’m sure your primitive warrior instincts will take care of the rest."

"O.K, so what then? What about rest of the city?"

"I’m afraid that this place is lost, human. Those cracks aren’t getting any smaller. And when one of you tries to use the Forge… well, I believe a suitable analogy in your parlance would be ‘like a fireworks display in an oil refinery’. Messy."

"We could use the Forge to seal the cracks! We could use it to destroy Asag’raal entirely!"

"Have you got any idea what drives that thing? Your Kronos is using exactly the same postmortem bioelectric patterns that we harvest, and if they all come through at once, with our Brother forcing the gateway open… this whole universe will unravel. No, we’ll teach you how to STOP the Forge. So long as Asag’raal lives, it would be suicide to use it. Worse… your kind don’t even have a word for murdering an entire reality."

"So that’s it? I just go in there with my little sword, cut your big bad brother to pieces, and you carry on harvesting the dead for your science project? Pardon me for asking, but what’s in it for me?"

"You’re dead, CeeAn. We sent you back. What’s in it for you is… you."

She ran up against that one, hard. Obviously these things, these Harvesters, knew leverage just as well as they knew loopholes.

"Just try to stay alive for the next forty seconds. We’re about to arrange a coincidence for you."

"So you do those as well? Anything else you specialize in?"

"Yes," said that harmonic voice, laughing all the way up and down the scale from subsonic bass to a glass-and-wire squeal. "We also take care of star-crossed lovers. Tell Abdulafia we said hi. After all, we want to build a whole world from your memories. Input from other perspectives, you know. It wouldn’t do to make it boring…"

Cee was sure that the storm of faces at the center of the alien’s halo winked at her just then.

Just before the sky collapsed in on itself, and the misty wraiths around her slicked back over hard and black with needle teeth. She snarled, bringing her sword around in a vicious cross-shear that met the suddenly substantial flesh of a Saprophyte halfway through.

Forty seconds, the thing had said.

She just hoped that its coincidence was going to be spectacular…

 

Ω

 

"Well, here’s something I never thought I’d get to do," said one of Kaito’s electronic shadows. "Check out the slipstream! If we were real, that wind-shear would be peeling us like grapes!"

Another fragment-Kayzi stood off to his right, surfing the bright steel back of a cruise missile. He rode with nonchalant ease, as though piloting a multi-megaton tactical nuke like a longboard was something he did every morning before breakfast.

"Just concentrate, Eighteen. This is a very delicate operation…"

"Delicate like a sledgehammer! I just hope Big Ugly appreciates the effort I’ve made."

"Yeah… about that…"

Number Eighteen was dressed, for no discernible reason, in an old-fashioned pilot’s g-suit and a Stetson hat. His boots were polished alligator, with spurs the shape of tiny atomic trefoils.

"Philistine. No respect for the classics."

"Showoff."

"Well, remember who we came from. Not exactly mister subtlety, right?"

"Just shut up and fly your missile. We’ve got to give that thing the mother of all enemas…"

The two rockets carved in low across the boiling sea, their stubby wings almost slicing into the wave-tops as they banked hard left.

There, ahead of them, was the colossus-form Everdark, a nimbus of electric fire playing across its particle-cannon forearm. Twin roostertails of spray glittered behind the fragments as they triangulated attack vectors, priming their deadly cargo.

"Yeeeeeee hah!" shouted Eighteen, waving his outsized cowboy hat in the air. "Here we go!"

 

Ω

 

"What in all hells have you done?" shouted Rugal 301. "Nuclear weapons? Are you out of your tiny little wire-fried mind, Kayzi? We’ll never get clear of the blast radius in time!"

The big Dervashi was hanging from a pair of rails, his muscles straining as merciless g-forces pressed in like the jaws of a vise. Up front, the pilot of the masslifter was praying on automatic, mumbling invocations as he pushed the throttles to overload.

"It’ll be fine. Trust me," said Kaito, pushed deep into his acceleration harness "The Uriel scanned that thing as soon as it could… we were lucky it was on the other side of the Pit. The whole damned shell of it is hollow."

"And that means what, exactly? It’s still big enough to crush us like a bug!"

"Oh Lord, please make our deaths both swift and painless," intoned Brother Pious. His face had turned a delicate shade of green as the ‘lifter spun crazily across the sky. "Deliver us from our tribulations, unto the kingdom of heaven…"

"I think I see what you’re getting at, K," said Haszan, levering himself forward with the cold gray blade of Grief. "Not so tough on the inside, right?"

"Well… we’re about to find out any seco…"

"NOW" said all the fragmented shades of Kaito inside his head.

And behind them the world blazed white, burning the vast shadow of Everdark across the skin of Elysium.

 

Ω

 

The Slavesystem never saw them coming. In space, in vacuum, nuclear warheads were beneath its contempt – the weapons-system equivalent of chimps banging rocks together in the dirt. Everdark’s reactive exotic-metal armor was proof against such tiny pinpricks of fire… after all, some of the Motherbrain’s war-thralls could dive into the hearts of suns without the slightest hesitation.

But it had chosen this colossus-form to inspire fear, and it was just as hollow as Kaito had predicted. Everdark was nothing but an inch-thick skin, bulked out and inflated to terrify the primitive beings of this vile little planet. Up until now, their most potent weapons hadn’t even been able to scratch the Slavesystem’s hide.

Number Eighteen’s missile caught it just behind one articulated knee-joint, bursting open in a great mushroom-head of fire. Energy-reuptake filaments pumped all that light and heat directly into its laminar battery array; more fuel for its particle cannon fist. But the shockwave from that multi-megaton detonation was enough to make the colossus stagger, its clawed feet losing purchase on the seabed. For an instant the beast’s torso passed through one of those cracks in the sky, twisting it through a set of dimensional-vertex transforms even the Motherbrain couldn’t have predicted.

Three feet upward and to the left.

And in that second Number Four’s missile struck, splitting open into a daisyhead of submunition rockets. They shot the gap, ricocheting inside the hollow shell of the Slavesystem until their solid-fuel boosters ran down…

And then Everdark roared.

It’s blank, faceless helm split open as it let loose a howl of agony and rage, a jagged-edged sound clawing its way up the register until it shook the sky. It sounded like a human scream, in the instant before it was blown apart by nuclear fire.

The Slavesystem was already trying to alter its form as the submunitions detonated deep within its heart, bypassing all that clever reactive armor, all that hard-forged exotic metal. It folded in on itself like mad, multidimensional origami, twisting and budding crystal blades, kaleidoscoping through transforms as explosions tore its insides ragged. Bright blasts of actinic flame stabbed out through cracks in its shell as it compacted down smaller and smaller, trying desperately to contain all that raving energy.

It had to give, somehow.

The batteries at Everdark’s core couldn’t contain such power, and it would be suicide to push them to overload. Instead, the whole great machine froze in mid-transformation, humming and crackling with sparks. The sea beneath it bellied out in a shallow concave bowl as it hung broken in the sky – half the size of its colossus-form now, a spiked triskaidekohedron spewing pillars of oily dark smoke. A charge built up within it, along the axis of what had once been its particle-cannon arm. An orifice like a metal iris spun open in its flank, glowing red-hot…

And a purple-white beam lashed out as Everdark fell, losing its grip on the sky. This wasn’t a single-shot pulse, punching down into the heart of Elysium… the Slavesystem vented all of its excess energy in a spitting, sizzling arc, following the line of its fall. It carved through the Last City in a diagonal slash, severing Kheptic megatowers like stalks of wheat, razing hab-clusters and highways down to radioactive vapor.

It only cut out as the gunmetal star of Everdark plunged beneath the waves, sinking out of sight beneath a plume of choking steam.

"And as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea…" whispered Brother Pious, his face pressed up against the window of the howling masslifter. They scudded across the sky like a seed before a hurricane, caught on the shockwave of that immense triple-blast. "And the third part of the seas became blood…"

 

Ω

 

Darion and his Master were powering up though a tunnel to the open sky when the particle beam sheared clean through Oleander Avenue, punching out the Sensorium mansion as neat and clean as an abattoir bolt-gun. A blast of heat came up under them like a great cupped hand, propelling the two Kheptarchs high into the pall of smoke which hung over Elysium’s burning streets.

"What was that?" shouted Darion, the words torn from his lips by the storm-shear wind. "Kronos? Some kind of satellite weapon?"

Ahead of him Akheron spun clockwise in the air, the wings of his antigrav-pack flashing like mirrors. His facemask was fashioned into the grimace of a warrior Oni, but Darion knew that behind it his new Father was smiling.

"Perhaps. All that matters is that it missed, son. After all, we were never going back there, were we?"

Behind them the baby-blue polyprop sky of the beltway peeled back, burning. There was nothing left of Octavio Vanecke’s old sanctum, but then again, there was nothing left of Octavio Vanecke now, either.

"Onward and upward, child. To Kronos, the Forge, and godhood!"

In Akheron’s slipstream, Darion Blaire shivered. He knew that he’d asked for this. He knew that he’d helped Octavio become the creature he was now. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being used, just as comprehensively as his poor, damned Lord Father had been.

 

Ω

 

CeeAn hardly had time to adjust to reality before it suddenly went sideways on her.

First came the scream, a sound which cut through her mind like the lash of a broken bandsaw. Then came the light – fans and spikes of fitful radiance spreading out from between the towers of Elysium.

Surely there was no way that a second sun had broached the horizon, out beyond the dark silhouette of the city…

But it was true. She watched in horror as a beam of violet light came down through the upper levels of Elysium, a butcher-stroke severing towers and gantries and chimneystacks, amputating whole neighborhood-platforms where they jutted from the flank of the city. Like threedeeo, she thought, as the concrete beneath her feet began to rumble. Like some kind of ‘mersive hack’s idea of a disaster flick.

The glass-sheathed immensity of Duke Gideon’s spire came down across the remains of the Vatican, carving a deep notch in the dam-top. Foaming gray water cascaded down the far wall of the Pit, shearing one of the great powerhouses from its face. It was too far away for CeeAn to comprehend the scale of the destruction being wrought, but the distant roar of underground turbines hitting overload came up through her feet.

All around her the Saprophytes were in disarray, scrabbling back toward the bulk of their master. Up on the heights of the Spillway, where the gates of Elysium yawned open, they were trying to worm their way back underground, away from the stroke of that ravening beam.

This, she thought, must be the Harvesters’ idea of a coincidence… because most of them didn’t make it.

There were only three seconds between the particle beam laying its burning lash across the Saprophytic line and Everdark falling into the poisonous Atlantic. But they may as well have been three seconds in the plasma oceans of the sun. Oily black figures burst and hissed and evaporated, blown away as twists of smoke. Thousands of them. And just before the beam flickered and died it pierced the flank of Asag’raal’s avatar, making its necrotic flesh melt and run like tallow.

CeeAn figured that this was all the break she was going to get.

"Take them down! Now! We’ve only got one chance…"

The comms bead pierced through her ear seethed with static. There was no guarantee that any of her little army had heard her… or even that they were all still alive. So the Dervashi raised her sword to the battlements, signaling the guns. This time, perhaps, the crippled leviathan at the heart of the horde wouldn’t be able to stop them.

A stuttering roar of cannon-fire answered her as the Ashishi defenders let fly. The reeling Saprophytes fell beneath a withering battery of fire, burned and shredded and driven back until the Avatar of the Worm stood alone at the vanguards of its army. Its scream of anguish was almost enough to throw back all those bullets and shells… but not quite. A barrage of them tore chunks from its rotting bulk, making it slump down to one side on its vast palanquin. The exalted slaves bearing that platform of steel and bones were too terrified of their master to flee – and one by one they, too, were plucked away by the hammering gunfire, sent tumbling and bleeding back across the Spillway.

"Do you really think you’ve won, you little bitch? You know your pitiful weapons are no use against my children…" The voice was there in her head again, cutting through her own thoughts like rusted steel. The voice of the Worm, secure behind the walls of its own twisted-off universe. "That’s right, human… destroy this piece of me, and give in to the hate! Each blow draws you closer to my embrace…"

This time she focused her mind and struck back.

"Fuck you, demon," she sent, shouting out above the sound of an immense sunken heartbeat. "You’re too late. My people have already escaped!"

"Such eloquence. I’m so very glad that I uplifted you apes from your filthy caves… what? NO! IMPOSSIBLE!"

But it was true. A fleet of tethered zeppelins rode the pewter sky above the spillway, headed inland across the Sahara. The Axis Mortalis led a whole diamond-fiber cloud of them, patched and scarred but still thrashing the air with its great brazen prop-fans. Camera-zeps and broadcast dirigibles tugged at a vast net of cables and ropes and hawsers, pulling along those airships which had lost all motive power. And on every surface, from gondolas to gasbag-top helipads, clung the survivors of the Beltway, some of them physically lashed down and tied fast, others depending in bunches from the web of filaments which kept Jimson Holgarth’s fleet together.

As if that wasn’t enough, at that moment the great gates of the Ashishi R.T. rumbled shut, slamming closed with a great tectonic boom. The last straggling remnants of Elysium were through, and all along the dam-top to the east the tribes of the Pit were moving, swarming up the sheer concrete cliff like ants. There’d be plenty of room for them all when the Archangel Uriel set sail – she’d been joined by a whole armada of other ships, rusted and creaking things pulling their dripping chains taut against the load. Cee could hear the sound of gas-axes shearing through cables and bolts, the repetitive cracking sound of a whole rind of metal peeling away from the flank of Elysium.

"Too bad… looks like you’ll be going hungry," she said, looking around her at the remains of her little strike-force. Barely half their number had survived the Saps’ first headlong charge. But they’d done what they promised to do. "Any more empty villain monologues for us, huh? Gonna call us ‘foolish mortals’ one more time before lights-out?"

Cee reined in the power of the Ashishi guns with a gesture of her blade, holding it high above her head. But the Worm only snarled, the face of its avatar showing a mouthful of teeth fashioned from sharpened human thighbones.

"This isn’t over, insect! I will have my reve…"

"Not this time," said CeeAn… and she slashed down with her sword, letting the barrage fly.

A rolling wave of fire tore out from atop the crenelated wall, accusing fingers of flame stabbing through a cloud of drifting smoke. But even ahead of the noise came a solid wall of flying lead, shot through with the scar-bright trails of maser blasts and fusion-fire. All of it was centered on Asag’raal’s heaving surrogate-body - enough, surely, to tear the effigy apart.

Then Cee felt the air grow slippery. She tasted copper in her sinuses as little sparks crawled down the edge of her blade. Time was slowing down again, great invisible gears grinding ponderously against one another in the sky…

It was going to do it again.

The world stood still.

The whole glittering impossibility of it unrolled before her like a vast astronomical projection – the gas-giant bulk of the Worm’s chosen form, encircled by an asteroid halo of explosive shells. Plasma fireballs burned in place like cometary fragments as the creature’s bioelectric field unfurled across the spillway, snapping taut with a ripple of heat-haze blue.

"Witness! This time, little Dervashi, I’ll give it all back to you!"

"That’s the fulcrum. Remember… when his end comes down, yours goes up…"

She knew that the two voices were coming in on different wavelengths because of the biting-down-on-a-battery sensation as they both echoed in her skull at once. But in the end, that’s what made her trust the thing which called itself a Harvester. The enemy of my enemy is my friend… for now.

And she could feel the backswing. She sensed the pivot and rise of her own power, rushing up from beneath her feet until her nerves blurred with strange harmonics. Wherever Asag’raal and its kin had come from, physics seemed to be as mutable as molten plastic. But here, in this universe, Newton’s law was iron-bound. Now it was time for an equal and opposite reaction.

Cee looked up across a wall of winking metal.

The Worm was drawing it in to itself, sending shells and bullets spiraling down toward the gravity-sink between its hands. They flowed and melted, boiling in midair as the ball grew, a hissing, bubbling mass burning with unnatural fire.

This time, she was ready.

The power raved and crackled through her bones, threatening to burst them asunder. Every nerve was sheathed in searing electricity, crawling across her skin in jagged arcs. And as she focused her bioelectric field flared wide, a pair of invisible wings spanning a mile to each side. Their storm-front edges set up fractal vortices in the gunsmoke above the spillway, picking out the shapes of knife-blade feathers, pinions hammered out from glass razors…

They sliced through Asag’raal’s field as swift and sure as shuriken through cotton candy.

Pressure built up along a pair of glowing red-hot lines in the air as that single great wingbeat ran up against the sullen ball of molten metal. Sparks flew wide, spitting and sizzling as they burned in slow motion. For an instant Cee and her nemesis were balanced, neither one able to make the final push. That sphere of bubbling silver was elliptical now, stretched out of true by the relentless vice of CeeAn’s borrowed power. Sweat beaded her brow as she gritted her teeth, wrapping both hands around the hilt of her broken sword.

Then the fulcrum moved. Just a little… but enough.

"Ooops," said a voice in her head, with just a hint of oily sarcasm. "Must have slipped…"

Time came down on them like the walls of the Red Sea on Pharaoh’s army, in the old book of the Vatican. Swirling eddies of temporal spray billowed down the gullet of the Pit, lensing and warping the air. But here, at the center, it was all forge-heat and righteous fury. And it wasn’t looking good for the Worm.

The Avatar’s last indignant scream may have been the start of another scenery-chewing monologue, or just flat-out idiot frustration. Whichever it was, it didn’t do the damned thing any good. CeeAn’s mind was all over the surface of that boiling silver globe, shaping it thin and flat and sharp…

"I know what you are. I know what you want, and what you’ve been driven to. But don’t expect any sympathy from me, demon. Mercy, either…"

The giant hot blade glowed cherry-red from its forging as it hung in the air above the spillway, an impossible thing fused from lead and copper and steel. It was all of a quarter-mile long, twenty feet wide – and as thin and sharp as a cruel whisper. Cee knew that she only had a second in which to use it; the Worm’s bioelectric field was crumbling, shattering to pieces as its army fell apart around it. Every fraction of a heartbeat it took more and more effort to keep the damned thing cohesive, let alone move it to strike.

In the time it took to form that word in her mind, she had.

The red-hot blade followed the swing of her broken no-dachi – once, twice, thrice, a blur of looping forehand cuts which ended in a wild upswing follow-through. As it burst out from between the Avatar’s neck and shoulder the whole thing lost its shape, scattering up into the sky as a rain of glowing shards. But the damage was done.

Asag’raal’s slaves had built it a body from the remains of the dead, and only its will had kept it together. As it slumped forwards, hollow, red and black lines began to show across its belly, its chest, its great lumpen face… They were sword-cuts, core-deep and bleeding even as the whole necrotic pile unraveled and fell apart.

CeeAn was dimly aware of cheering as she fell to her knees, her sword clattering to the concrete. A huge shadow loomed over her, and hands reached out, crusted with gold and pearls.

"They’ll be back," said the Pope, as the young Dervashi’s eyes flickered closed. "They’ve got us on numbers, even without their damned witchcraft. Take her aboard the Archangel, and prepare to cast off the chains. We’ve got nothing keeping us here…"

"What about the strike team? The one’s who’re going to shut down the Forge?"

Cee recognized the voice of Submagus Devine through her delirium… she could just imagine the little man wringing his hands in consternation.

"They knew it was a one way trip when they took off. Blessed are they for their sacrifice."

"And who’s going to hold these gates while we get underway? We’re taking damn near half the city with us… two hundred floating drydocks, hulks, wrecks, oilrigs on floats… they don’t have a great acceleration profile, your Holiness!"

The darkness was almost complete now. Static hissed in CeeAn’s ears like the sound of broken waves caressing the sand. But she knew the voice which answered Devine – it was her old Master Militant, Dervashi-Commander Calent Zephir 90.

"We will do our duty," breathed the dry old voice of the Academy-master. "The Ark is shattered, our Illuminatus fled – we have nothing left to live for but honor. Please… let us be your shield."

"My Knights stand with you, then," rumbled Pope Joan – not to be left out of a glorious, martyr-producing final stand against the Devil’s stepchildren. "Between us, we’ll hold the line."

"And our leader? The chosen?"

"She goes with you. No questions. After all, look what happened to Moses when he didn’t have directions. Our map to the promised land is in that girl’s head, nowhere else."

Cee tried to protest as she felt strong hands lifting her up onto a stretcher. Her fingers reached out blindly for the hilt of her sword, but some Dervashi or Vatican Knight had already thought about her honor – they’d wrapped the broken blade in rags and propped it up under her feet. Devine and his medics soon had her trussed to the stretcher like a spider’s next meal, and she was passed from hand to hand to hand back toward a tiny postern-gate in the Ashishi walls.

Ahead, she could smell acetylene and diesel and salt; the great fleet of the Exodus was pulling up its gangplanks and shearing its final waist-thick chains. Behind her, she heard the sound of chanted prayers and whetstones on steel, the click and slide of loading guns. That was her place. There, in the middle of the coming fight. Where Abdulafia would have been…

But the rocking motion of the stretcher already felt like the waves of the sea. And the only one she could call out to, across the void of her own internal darkness, was the thing which called itself a Harvester.

"Did we do it? Is that thing… is it gone? Dead?"

The answer which came back from the Outer Dark rode in on a comprehensively galaxy-weary sigh.

"Our brother can never die, CeeAn. Not any more than we can, in the sense that you use the word. But he has been weakened. His only chance now is your keeper’s Forge… and the foolish human being which he’s convinced to be his ally."

Then the darkness crested and crashed down like a wave on Cee - smothering any worries about what that made her… By the time she awoke, they were far out at sea, and Elysium was nothing but a smudge of drifting smoke on the horizon.

 

Ω

 

The Worm Asag’raal, Blackest Destiny, The Devourer in the Pit, Son of the Dark Star (etc, etc), had never been a happy creature. In the dim sediment of memory which stirred in its soul it recalled being a morose and gloomy Harvester – scornful of the high aims of its fellow Universal Architects.

Postphysical and sublimed? Pah! Just another cliquey little society with their long-winded speeches and their venality skinned over with words. They’d seen the end coming, and chosen to ape the Gods they’d stopped believing in - around the time they discovered science. It wasn’t a democracy. Asag’raal (or whatever musical, lilting, and ultimately meaningless Harvester name he’d once owned) had been pressganged into saving the multiverse from becoming cold particulate soup.

Well, fuck that.

Prolonged exposure to the feeble agonies and comical pleading of his prey had brought a lot of personality back to Asag’raal. Every second he remembered more… back beyond discovering a whole species of vulnerable cave-dwelling hominids with a cruel streak a mile wide to play with. Now the beast had given way to the witch-doctor’s deity, which had in turn blossomed into a very sullen, very resentful Harvester-Apostate indeed.

Not a small part of his anger was directed against his Brothers’ cats-paw… CeeAn 187. But, having assimilated a reflux-inducing amount of information on human emotions during his latest atrocity, Asag’raal was pleased to know that his mortal instrument was the focus of her affections. Betrayal, he’d found, was a rather interesting little game.

That’s why he let her run. Run as fast as you can, little human… when the chain snaps tight, you’ll break your own neck. And in this case, the chain was none other than the proud, stupid and pathetically honorable Abdulafia 330.

Asag’raal would have the Forge, this toy that the thing which summoned him lusted for so badly. Then… oh, then he’d accomplish something that even his pious freaks of Brothers hadn’t imagined… he’d make himself a new homeworld, here in this nice, weak, comfortable universe. Deep biological parts of the Worm (which Asag’raal’s mind piggybacked on, like a monkey straddling the back of a dinosaur) had already prepared for this.

He would spawn. But not in any kind of sloppy, genetically-driven or altruistic sense. Think of it more as a sloughing off of dead skin…

His new self would be right at home in the multiverse of Earth. If early reports were anything to go by, war, death and chaos were here in vast supply.

Oh, and a few other little issues would be taken care of at the same time.

Item – a lingering, hellish demise for one Gharfos Nyl, a.k.a Illuminatus Zeon of the Ashishim.

Similar for Miss CeeAn 187, meddling bitch ne plus ultra and puppet of his erstwhile Brotherhood. All he had to rely on was that Abdulafia remained confused and angry, and killed anything he got his hands on.

To the mind of the Blackest Destiny, that seemed a pretty safe bet.

 

Ω

 

Up in the Ashishi masslifter there should have been cheers, wild applause... perhaps even a kind word or two for Kaito as Everdark collapsed into the seething cauldron of the Atlantic.

And there would have been, if the shockwave from his desperate nuclear attack hadn’t sent them spiraling across the sky like a fleck of dust through a jet turbine; a groaning, vomiting tube of tight-packed misery. Rugal at least had anti-spin dampers drilled into his inner ears. But even they were pushed beyond their limits as their pilot cursed and prayed, making the engines of his baby howl. There seemed to be a lot of chanting and incense smoke coming from the back of the cabin, where the Valle Crucis had strapped himself to the wall, cruciform.

When the laundry-drier tumble of the craft permitted, Rugal could see out one of the port-side windows, to where the force-shield wing of the ‘lifter split the air. Sometimes it was actually visible as a sky-blue hash of lightning, but at others it was hardly there at all. Those instances synched up far too neatly with periods of sickening free-fall.

It took time – nauseous, hellish minutes, in fact – but eventually the masslifter settled into a flat curve, halfway between the sea and the clouds. Rugal took his bearings from the pillar of smoke rising out of the east… they’d overshot the city by miles as they tried desperately to stay out of the water. The big Dervashi’s combat-boosted optics zoomed in, but there was no sign of Everdark. Only a tiny speck of white fire arrowing up out of the ruins of the R.T., silver winking in the morning sun…

It was coming closer. Scratch that – it was coming right at them!

"Evasive maneuvers! We’ve got a missile incoming!" he shouted, desperately trying to link to the Ashishi datanet. But with the whole R.T. empty, he couldn’t trace the weapon’s payload, its origin, its speed…In the end, he didn’t have to.

"Does that thing have arms and legs?" asked Kaito, craning over Rugal’s broad shoulder.

"I’m sure those are actually guidance fins," said Brother Pious, forcing himself a space at the window. "If it is a jet-trooper, he’s way out of safe landing range. Hope he can swim…"

"We’re picking up a transmission from the incoming hostile!" chipped in the co-pilot.

"Impossible! There’s no way that thing can break Ashishi encryption!"

"He’s using our open band! And he says…"

But they’d never find out what the co-pilot had heard. The silver-armored figure came down on them hard, putting on a final burst of speed before its clawed chrome hooves smashed through the masslifter’s canopy, crushing the man’s chest with a sound like kindling-wood.

Technician Nyl covered the interior of the little craft with a pair of large, sleek and hissing cannons as he ducked in through the hole in the front canopy, completely ignoring the horrified stare of the ‘lifter’s pilot.

"Time for a brief detour," he said. "Or were all of you going my way already?"