DOCUMENT INSERT – MULTIPLICITY ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT

 

++ message intercepted ++

 

>> NYL, G/Serp, Tech 3 Hiero. Report LOST repeat M.I.A.<<

 

>>Code – Breach – Moderate. Thrall Down. <<

 

>>Probability --- 100,478,573,9475 to 1 vs chance<<

 

>>Flagged / Response – RetCluster Arbitrex access only<<

 

>>Request - "Mission compromised request backup/rescue/vindication. Reality tensile stressors critical. Send only repeat ONLY unit/single/technical/designation ZHE, A/GexxisExoethnologist Operations. <<

 

>>Flagged, support – Nil. Kataphrakt Command will not be advised continue Y/N<<

 

>>Y _<<

 

 

17 Aevum Oblivio Predictable Chess Analogy

Seventeen years later.

Seventeen years and one elaborate trap, engineered to bring Gharfos Nyl back from the dead.

For want of a better word, anyway.

Klaeroc came in through the wall in a horizontal rain of diamond and stone, tentacles lashing left and right like scourges. There were no words. A whole universe of animosity arced between the eyes of Nyl and Zhe as the atmosphere blew out of the Labyrinth chamber, taking the shredded bodies of two unlucky Dervashi with it.

Because in the end there was nothing to talk about. Deceit, tricks, subtleties and politics had all failed, and the two Technicians threw themselves at each other in a rage, stripping back the veneer of the Pax Praetorium to its bloody raw bones.

This was the end. Once and for all.

Jaws snapped and sliced. Gravitonic fields sheared through metal. And Nyl raised his arms out to his sides, drawing in a storm of glistening black nanotech – the living flesh of Everdark. It formed into pesudopods and ropes as it split around him, parrying Klaeroc’s attacks and driving the Balraashi voidhunter back out into clear vacuum.

Outside it was war.

Zhe spun his mount around in a wide arc as his nemesis lashed out wild, throwing hooked blades in a frantic tangle. Behind him a Multiplicity warship was torn in half by violet particle beams, and a wing of Stirges howled past, smart torpedoes flicking like shoals of tiny fish as they followed. The Technician spun away from the station, turning end over end in a globe of flashbulb explosions. Nyl was right behind him, and the thing he’d woven together with the sum of Everdark was a crude imitation of a Devilfish – ten times larger than Klaeroc, with tentacles that flattened down to metal blades. They carved through drifting chunks of stone and steel as Zhe put the spurs to his voidhunter, fleeing the mad Hierophant’s onslaught.

He cursed Klaeroc’s lack of bonded weapons as he went, powering into a thirty-G spin up through the magnetosphere. He was cursing twice as hard a second later as a Blacksteel interceptor locked on behind him, lighting him up with a burst of plasma.

His new Balraashi was far more vicious than Mirdain, though. Rather than twisting to evade the arrowhead bulk of the Unity ship Klaeroc stopped dead, inertialess, pouncing on the interceptor as it roared past underneath them. Those pale spiked tentacles clenched tight, crushing it to scrap. Before its fusion drive tore open Klaeroc was already accelerating hard… and Nyl was right on top of them.

Zhe didn’t look back as the void behind him flashed white. Of course, the death of a mere fightercraft was nothing amid the slaughter which surrounded him. Bigger things were burning in the sky above Earth – living starships screaming as they were dissected, ragged chunks of Unity dreadnoughts with holes punched through them a half-mile wide – a whole meatworks of torn flesh, colliding with a junkyard of twisted metal. It rained down through the aching skies of Earth, dragging thick pillars of smoke behind it.

On and on they flew, weaving and diving through a frantic orbital war, dancing around the probing fingers of particle-cannon beams, outrunning missiles and smart torpedo drones with a dizzying series of loops and spirals. There was no shaking Technician Nyl though… the bastard knew that Zhe would never stop until he was hauled up before the Praetor and devoured. Nyl wouldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t. Not while so many alien souls were being fed through the grinder of Asag’raal’s hunting ground, stretching reality tight as a drumhead…

Oh yes. It was still alive. Seventeen years behind the veil hadn’t diminished the Devourer one whit. Hells, it had waited tens of thousands of years for its chance to spawn. Zhe knew that down in the dead streets of Elysium the Exalted were waking. They’d be filled with fire and purpose again as their father fed on the essence of whole city-sized living starships and their crews.

This time there was no Eddie Tsien, no Chrome Ark.

This time there was only the Forge, and Zhe really didn’t want to have to pay its price…

He looked back over his shoulder and saw Nyl closing the gap, crouched down low on the broad, flat back of his imitation Devilfish. There was a gruesome smile slashed across his face behind his helmet, and he was almost close enough to strike.

Zhe spun sideways through the vacuum, twisting hard through a maze of shattered Unity wreckage. Up, down, left, and loop back… they powered through a tunnel of ragged steel, still glowing cherry-red from the blast which had hollowed it out. Clear through the hull of a crippled superdestroyer, its turret-guns still spitting and blazing as its A.I. core slowly died.

That gained them a little ground. Enough to watch a glowing blue moon rise above the curve of the Earth, a single cyclopean eye with a chasm of utter darkness at its center.

It was the Multiplicity Order of Battle Rapid Deployment Vehicle Effortless Subjugation, and it was stretched out into a double-helical ring, spinning slowly against a backdrop of ruin. Behind it the shredded remains of a dozen Unity cruisers spread out wide, largely the work of the immense living voidship Mace. Teuthis Rex and Princeps voidhunters, Dominators and Tyrants and wide-shelled Myrmidon gunships were queued around it in a holding pattern – wounded craft headed for the safety of the Null Storage Strata. There were very few fresh reinforcements folded in the heart of the portal carrier now, but they were still emerging, headed off into the furnace of war.

The Mace picked them up when they were still thousands of miles clear, locking into Klaeroc’s tiny brain and scanning its security-code neuroimprints. Zhe would have loved to see the look on the Menial’s face who decoded that transmission… that is, if the thing had a face at all. Klaeroc had been declared K.I.A. some two hundred years ago, local time, and his master…

Well, there weren’t many outlaws in the Multiplicity. There were the loyal and the slowly digested. But Gharfos Nyl was a wanted creature. Some of the Subpraetorian council even suspected that he had information which could take down a Lord Arbitrex, one of the third tier of the Praetor’s byzantine government. Such a thing hadn’t happened in over twenty thousand years.

Zhe’s comm-unit was patched through direct to Kataphrakt Yrr Bosphasian in a heartbeat. The Admiral definitely wasn’t pleased to hear from him.

"Traitor! How nice of you to turn yourself in. The Agonizers may just go easy on you for the first two or three centuries…"

Zhe didn’t have time for the Kataphrakt’s power games.

"It’s Hierophant Nyl you want, Bosphasian. I’m bringing him to you now… in fact, he’s right behind me. I’m willing to bet he’s arrogant enough to throw his pet Slavesystem right up against a capital ship like the Mace. Then you can throw him screaming into the Null."

The draconian face of Zhe’s superior cracked into a twin smile. It was as cold as the emptiness outside his helmet.

"Galq still wants you picked up, Technician. He wants to ream your mind out raw. I don’t have much choice but to take you in as well."

"What I’m carrying in my head doesn’t matter… yet," said Zhe. "I just want to know that Nyl is going to lose his. That’s all I ask."

Yrr pondered, watching the twin traces of Klaeroc and Everdark come skittering across the void toward him. The planet-shattering armaments of the Mace could destroy the Devilfish… but even so, both Technicians would survive. And Lord Arbitrex Galq was under suspicion. If he really did go through with cortex-stripping young Zhe, the evidence he found could damn him utterly…"

In which case, Zhe was disposable. After the ream he’d be nothing but raw meat. Nyl would be the star witness in a trial for high treason… and that meant room for advancement.

For loyal Kataphrakt-Admirals, especially.

"No. He can’t bring that Blacksteel creature into the Null. He must be taken alive. But you... you, Technician Zhe, are required for my investigations. S’stho and Fleet Command need you for one last thing."

Gravitonic clamps came down on Klaeroc hard. The big Devilfish bucked and writhed against its confinement, but to no avail. They were picked up by an invisible fist and drawn in toward the azure eye of the Subjugation, both of them cursing in their own alien languages.

Behind them Nyl came on, smiling his hangman’s smile. He could feel the tension behind reality. He knew that there was nothing behind him to stop him from claiming the Forge, and tearing his hideous new body through into three-dimensional space. Zhe was caught – snapped up by his own foolish masters. Their bureaucracy would grind him up and spit out the shreds, by which time it would be far too late. He brought his infected Slavesystem around in a sweeping arc as the guns of the Mace opened up, stitching fire across the void behind him. Too slow…

Zhe watched the open eye of the Effortless Subjugation looming larger and larger above them, its helix-coil mesh spanning a circle the width of the Moon. Down on Earth the tides would be thrown into chaos by the simple fact of its proximity. As for the Behemoth, clear on the other side of the planet…

There was only one chance to do what must be done. One chance, as those gravitonic fields let go, letting inertia take over.

That was the trick. Zhe had learned long ago that with his mind to make the calculations and the power of a Devilfish beneath him, inertia was optional.

Klaeroc almost missed it, as data seethed down the umbilical nervebridge and into its brain. Then it understood, and space slipped sideways for a second, sending them skittering across the lens of the great portal. Pale tentacles lashed out and gripped the latticework of Subjugation’s body as it rolled by, and Zhe was over the side before they’d even stopped moving. The nervebridge twisted out from its socket, heavy in his hand. It was a rope of glistening black muscle, tipped with flexing bone teeth.

Scalpel. Incision. Check.

The Effortless Subjugation squealed as it bonded with its tiny brother-ship, communing direct with its mind.

And Klaeroc told it exactly how it had spent the last hundred and twenty-seven years. It told the Rapid Deployment Vehicle what Nyl had done to it.

For an instant there was silence. Zhe couldn’t tap into the vast creature’s thoughts… the nervebridge was between Subjugation and Klaeroc alone. But he felt the porous coral mesh beneath his feet shudder. It was as if the R.D.V. was drawing in a measureless breath to scream…

It did.

The Geocore ripped through the tight holding pattern of injured voidhunters around the portal, sending them spinning away into the dark. The Mace itself was thrown end over end, howling. But they weren’t its target. Oh no.

Gharfos Nyl had no warning. But some seventh sense (or eighth, if one is to believe the Multipline Gnostics) made him twitch his head around as billions of tons of nickel and iron licked out toward him as a salamander-tongue of plasma.

He may even have had time to curse the day he was spawned.

Everdark wasn’t made to face that kind of punishment. Even the unnaturally tough body of a pureblood Technician couldn’t take such staggering overkill. Here was a weapon designed to shred moon-sized battleships, directed with terrible hatred at one tiny speck of metal and meat.

Zhe was still laughing when the Trolls came for him. They wrapped him up tight in plastic and Gauss fields, hustling him into the rift nexus to his doom. The last he saw of Earth was the battle raging above it; a doomed and fragile little eggshell of a world pulled tight over a well of horrors.

"What? Don’t I get any sandwiches this time? It doesn’t matter, I suppose. You’re all dead, anyway. Dead. You’ll see! Asag’raal is coming! You’re feeding him with every one of you that dies…"

The masters of the Nexus put it down to stress.

The imminence of devourment, they’d found, can do that to a person.

 

Ω

 

"It kills you. That’s why not. You can’t just point it at reality’s head like a gun."

The scene inside the throne room was tense. There were four of them standing in the little diamond bubble… three of them re-living the horror of open vacuum, the other wondering what was so frightening about the plain black chair with a surround of silver ivy-leaves.

CeeAn hadn’t seen what Abdulafia had seen, in there with Darion Blaire seventeen years ago.

He was thinking about the little body which had been nailed down to that chair with needles, dying. Meticulous mekan slaves had removed every trace of the young Kheptarch’s death, each tiny drop of blood. They’d also built the Dervashi a new pair of hands while he slept in cryostasis… in fact, this whole rock was lousy with steel insects, hidden servants which had prepped them all for deep freeze and carried them to their tombs.

"So what are our choices? Somebody has to use it!" That was Haszan, taking up half the room all by himself. "I’m not going to be petfood for some tentacle-faced bastard alien. You saw that silver thing down there, the night it all went wrong. That’s his bloody friends and family outside!"

"If we use it to destroy them, Asag’raal wins," said Cee. "The Harvesters have shown me how it all works, these last seventeen years. I know…"

"So the walls are getting thin. If we sit still, he wins anyway!"

"But just the Earth. Not everywhere else."

"Problem is," said Kaito, with all the grim sarcasm Jaq was used to, "We don’t have anywhere else. Can’t we use the Forge to seal old ugly back up again?"

"Oh, of course we can. It’s just that then we’ve still got two alien war-fleets to deal with. I don’t want them to find out how our species tastes, Kayzi."

"Your Illuminatus probably already told them!"

"Enough!" growled Abdulafia. "We can fight aliens. I don’t care how many arms and legs it’s got; if it bleeds we can beat it. But the Worm… I know him better than any of you. He was in my mind. I vote we use the Forge against Asag’raal – and I’ll be the one to do it."

CeeAn stared right into his eyes for a second, her fists balled white-knuckle tight at her sides. Jaq and Kaito didn’t dare to breathe. Then the tiny Dervashi took two steps toward her commander, knotted her fingers through his dreadlocks, and pulled him down into a kiss. Kaito looked away. Haszan coughed behind his hand.

Abdulafia looked utterly dazed as she let him go… he looked like a man who’d been struck by lightning. Then Cee’s fist slammed into his solar plexus, and he doubled over, hissing in pain.

"If that doesn’t cure you of martyrdom, nothing will! Now, if anyone’s going to die using this thing, it should be me. I’ve been there before, bought the postcard, and spit in Asag’raal’s eye."

"It’s still just a throw of the dice, isn’t it?" asked Jaq. "Sure, we can fight. But there’s not that many of us left, Ashishi. Those guys out there don’t look like the type who worry about endangered species."

Kaito couldn’t say, afterward, how the idea entered his head. There was the intimation of a face behind the strobe-light flash of it in his aching skull – but perhaps that was just another side-effect of the Chimera coming back online again.

"We know that the stricture of Kheptic blood was a lie. So I’m gonna do it. I’m dead anyway, Jaq. And… I think I have a plan."

There was that look in his eye again. Cee and ‘Afia didn’t know it, but Jaqub Haszan recognized the expression on his friend’s face all too well. It was the one he got when a sledgehammer of trouble was about to come down on everyone who pissed him off – and he got away with it clean.

"No! We can fix you, Kaito! Vanecke’s labs are down there, and Lancaster’s too! There’s no reason why…"

"And how can we be sure you’ll do the right thing? The Harvesters spoke to me, Kayzi, not you. I know how to stitch the veil back together. I’ve been there!"

So much for the Ashishim. Kaito turned to Jaq.

"There’s about a million reasons not to. But if it looks like the end anyhow… I know you’ll make it look good."

That was all he needed.

Kaito vaulted the railing before any of his friends could stop him. He was lying on the cool black leather of the throne while Cee and Abdulafia struggled to get past Jaq Haszan, throwing themselves against the huge ‘pharmer’s bulk like waves against a slab of basalt.

Then the arms above him unfolded, whirring. Needles punched in between his vertebrae, locking him in place. And the connection came down on him harder than any interface with the Wetsystems ever had, ripping his brain in half down the middle.

Thirty-two Kaitos opened their eyes on hell, and screamed.

 

Ω

 

ARE YOU PREPARED TO LEAD US INTO DEATH? ARE YOU HERE TO END OUR SUFFERING?

Kaito’s hair whipped out sideways in the storm, but the ‘mersive Op in him knew that it was all an illusion. He lit a cigarette and took a long deep drag before he looked up again, into an immensity of suffering. Beside him, thirty-one replicas in a variety of different costumes all did the same

"My name is Kaito Kayzi, son of Marko, lately of Saint Pete’s in the Subcity. I don’t give a Cyben’s fart for Manifest Dogma, but here’s the deal. Me and my buddies here – we’ll show you how to reach the other side. So long as you can get with our program."

Forty million wraiths howled as the contents of his mind spilled out and unfolded in the eye of the storm. They understood.

THEN YOU, WHO ARE WILLING TO SACRIFICE HIMSELF FOR HIS WORLD… OPEN YOUR MIND TO THE FORGE. LET THE EARTH BE REMADE IN YOUR IMAGE…

"Not quite," said Kaito. "But close enough…"

 

Ω

 

"Don’t do that! Damn, Haszan, do you know how many needles that thing has in my spine? If I wake up paralyzed, you’ll be wiping my arse for the rest of eternity!"

The hologram of Kaito scrawled itself into existence right out in the curve of the throne room’s bubble, sitting cross-legged in the air. When Jaq turned from the Throne, the Kayzi was shocked to see a single hot, wet dear-track carved down the dreno ‘pharmer’s face. He cuffed it away with a growl, but it was too late.

"You irresponsible little…" began CeeAn. ‘Afia stopped her.

"I trust you, Kayzi. You took out the Scourge. You dug me up out of the ruins. And you brought us the Archangel Uriel. I even think I know what you’re trying to do now…"

"It’s simple," said Kaito. "Those creatures out there have brought us the technology. They didn’t get here slower than light, that’s for sure. With Kronos dead, there’s a huge, powerful processor below us going to waste. That can run the navigational math… And the problem with Asag’raal is all one of place. Reality is cracked here. It’s thin here. Not on Earth… but where the Earth is…"

‘Afia went pale. Perhaps he actually saw what Kaito was going to do.

"I take it back! You’re mad! Just…"

This time it was Haszan who stopped him.

"I think telling us is a bad Idea, K. Just gonna make everyone paranoid. Just do what you’ve got planned, and we’ll see you through the other side."

With that he vanished. And as the green glow of his holoprojection faded, it was replaced by a crimson light from below…

 

Ω

 

This time it didn’t unfold slowly. There was no origami slide and shift of glass petals. This time it was an explosion, a vastly complex orchid blooming in fast-forward as thirty-two minds took up the traces. The Forge swallowed up the Earth, and it kept going.

Yrr Bosphasian saw it coming, and he ordered the vast shield-batteries of the Mace up to full power. It didn’t help him one little bit.

The Behemoth-mind of the Motherbrain was still trying to analyze the tightly controlled net of Planck-scale manipulator fields as it was ablated away to sub-atomic particles.

In seconds the entire war above the Earth was over – both sides were broken down to dust, then less than dust, then drawn in toward a silver ring around the planet…

Certain parts remained. Whole ships remained untouched as the vessels around them were slagged down to particle soup. There was a definite method to Kaito’s madness.

"Integrated shield batteries to stop radiation. Fusion and antimatter reactors stepped into orbit. Sensor probes shunted out to one light-minute. This thing’s gonna fly!"

It all came together when the Effortless Subjugation felt itself moving again, its distended helix-wheel pulled around until it sat above the Counterweight like a halo. Wireless data connections sunk their hooks into its mind, pulling it down into a mountain of silicon, steaming in a lake of liquid nitrogen.

"Think you can work out a good place to park this thing?" asked Kaito. "We need a similar kind of star, and just the right distance to keep the water from freezing or boiling."

The shackles were torn from its mind. This time it didn’t squeal or croon. It unfurled itself through Kronos’ vacant brain, stretching out the kinks of years of servitude.

"It’d be my pleasure. How far do you want to go?"

"How far is ever far enough?" laughed the Kayzi. "Surprise me."

And it did.

 

Ω

 

Kataphrakt Yrr was still alive. But he almost wished he wasn’t. He had a front-row seat for the utter defeat of his Order of Battle, and now…

Well, even old S’stho wasn’t going to believe this one.

The Earth had a new ring, a glittering silver halo woven from ancient satellites, Blacksteel warships and the flesh of Yrr’s living fleet. There were huge microwave dishes studded along it at regular intervals, and they all pointed in toward the Tower as the halo ring spun wide over both poles, splitting the planet in two. It didn’t matter that the whole spiderweb structure was still spinning with the Earth’s rotation – from the point of view of the Tower it was all clockwork-steady, and it all aimed up toward the rolling wheel of the Effortless Subjugation.

Yrr’s flagship had changed.

Not only was its annoying little voice gone from in his head; it was bigger as well, its coral skin shot through with silver. And it was still growing…

Now it was the diameter of the Moon. Now it was even wider, and the blue shimmer within was replaced with the rippling gray nothingness of the Aematerium. Now it was as wide as the Earth itself – wider, gaping like an open mouth…

It swallowed up the Tower, then Elysium, then Afrika, then all the Earth. And at the end it shrunk, turned, twisted in on itself like an ouroboros snake… and vanished.

Yrr carefully began to compile his report, stuck there in a vast troop-carrier Tyrant with all of his Captains, Excisors, Clericals and Menials. They were packed in like Ghoac into a methane tank.

"Regret to inform my Lords of the Fleet and the Subpraetorean Council… latest mission a failure due to the misplacement of the planet known locally as ‘Earth’. On a more positive note, there have been heavy Unity casualties. Unfortunately, the entire Eight Hundred and Thirteenth Fleet is also missing in action, though your loyal servants have survived. When can we expect retrieval and rescue?"

 

Ω

 

This one tore the roof off. Thirty-one Kaitos came first, blazing the trail, drawing out the thread which the dead would follow. And they came up out of the world behind him in an inverse tornado, a storm of hot white light flooding the interstice. Asag’raal’s dark roots and tentacles were blistered raw by their sheer intensity, and the walls of that immaterial place screamed with the sound of knives through metal.

Behind them the lights of the world were extinguished. Vast ropes and pseudopods of darkness were sheared off by the guillotine edge of reality itself as half of the Harvesters’ mechanism fell through the Aematerial Chasm with the Earth.

But the harvest was complete, one way or another. Forty million new souls plunged hissing into the phosphorescent ocean, gone down to meet their ancestors beneath the over-arching waves. Thirty-one Kaitos went with them – fragments stripped from the Chimera in his brain.

Which meant…

 

Ω

 

"If there’s no coffee on this thing, I swear I’m gonna go back to being dead."

‘Afia’s head came up from the consoles as he heard the Kayzi’s whisper. Cee vaulted over her own holoscreens and down to the Throne, ready with a whole roll of detox patches.

Jaq just smiled, sitting on the glass stairs and looking out at space.

"Good plan, Kayzi. I like it. Now we get different horoscopes every week."

That was when the two Dervashi looked out through the diamondglass bubble and realized what Kaito had done. Well – thirty-two of him. Which left one very tender and aching original with an A.I. sized brain in his skull.

The light was different. The sun was ever so slightly greener than it should have been, and just a little smaller, too. There was no moon. Even the stars had changed – they seemed brighter here, and a great paintbrush swirl of them licked out overhead, streaming out from the galactic core.

"All your people down there are fine, Cee," said the Kayzi, wrapping a headband of orange patches right around his brow. "No more rad-lands. But no Garden of Eden, either. We’ll have to work to make it green."

The implications took a while to sink in. During that time the four of them just sat there, staring at the new constellations above their home. ‘Afia even slipped one of his new hands around CeeAn’s shoulders.

Jaq broke the moment, as usual.

"What this thing needs," he said, looking at the Throne through half-closed eyes, "is a proper cockpit. Fuzzy dice. Eight-ball gearstick. A nice twin-grip red leather steering wheel."

Down below them, in the great crater of Aggartta, people came streaming up out of the underground halls and bunkers, blinking in the light of a lime-green sun. A shimmer of huge transparent scales rippled across the sky as Kaito tweaked the shield-batteries of the Earth, and the light upshifted to a more traditional pale yellow.

Out beyond the crater walls there were wrecked starships to break down and study. There were gardens to plant and fields to till. Before the next night was out, there’d be new names for a whole sky of new constellations. A new Zodiac, populated with mythical beasts and heroes.

Because you couldn’t run forever. No distance was ever far enough. But if your journey took you full circle, by the time you got back your fears would seem trivial. Tiny.

Off over the horizon a capsule was coming down the ‘lev, catching the sun as it fell. Inside, four tired and freezerburned people looked down on the world and started making plans.

At least one of them was trying to figure where he could get a drink…

 

Ω

 

"So here’s the story," said Lord Arbitrex Galq, looming up over Zhe like a thunderhead of fat and scales and oozing sweat. "Nyl was a renegade. He was outside of my control, and he tried to ally himself with a postphysical being to overthrow Praetorian rule. I sent you out to stop him, which you did… and Kataphrakt Yrr failed. Nyl was sealed in when the interstice welders shut off the Earth – by which time he was still just a very small nebula, anyway."

Zhe scowled, toying with his cut-crystal chalice. Neon orange Vhulan star’s-blood bubbled ominously within… one of the few drinks able to intoxicate a Technician of the Multiplicity.

"But that’s the truth, Lord Galq! That’s exactly what happened!"

The great wyrm smiled, leaning down to tap the rim of his glass against Zhe’s.

"You learn quickly, little Tech! Yes, that’s exactly what happened indeed! You’d do well to remember it!"

On his way out, Zhe passed a Sanitary sweeping the corridor with its disinfectant-dripping baleen mouthparts. The little creature shot him a look of venomous hatred… but that wasn’t uncommon. Sanitaries were always sick to death of the claw, pad, hoof and footprints the other orders left through the corridors of the Technic Institute.

Although in this case, it was personal. This one had once had a name and a rank and authority. Technician Zhe absently scratched the shell of Sanitary Yrr as he walked past, knocking back the rest of his star’s-blood. Politics was such a funny game. He was glad that it was utterly beyond him.

 

Ω

 

It was cold in the Outer Dark. His brothers had gone, taking their machines with them.

Now Asag’raal was hungry and scared… a shadow of a shadow nailed down to an empty hole in space. The Earth was gone. And if the Worm didn’t feed, the larva in its belly would do what must be done. It would begin eating its parent from the inside out…

Months passed before it felt the first tiny tremor of pain from out in the void.

Reality was cracked open there, and it could still send its tentacles through. It found a thin haze of suffering spread out across several square miles… silver particles falling in together slowly, merging like quicksilver whenever two collided.

For the first time in a very long while, Asag’raal smiled.

Technicians of the Multiplicity could not be destroyed. Not even if they were hit at almost point-blank range by a Geocore.

Nyl’s pain would be enough to last centuries… the time it would take to reconfigure the Worm’s flesh and follow the Harvesters. Those pious, transcended fools would always seek out creatures with imagination… the gift, they said, of the Gods. Imagination could build worlds out of chaos. It could construct glittering heavens and sky-castles of soaring fantasy.

But it had its dark side, too.

Deep in the primordial night, imagination had conjured something for humanity to be afraid of. Something which the human mind gave teeth and claws and all-seeing eyes…

That thing would come to another race, in time.

Until then, the Asag’raal and Nyl deserved each other. They had all the time in the world.

 

∞