Enter the Pilgrim • Empty of God • An Alliance • Into the Wreck • Ring of Hell • The Waiting

We woke up in a crudely made hut, wind howling around outside and through the cracks in the walls. A man with the face of a lion observed us placidly for a moment as we sat up, and then silently offered us bowls of mush scooped from a big pot over his fire. We were still full from our last meal, and declined, but then he poured out little cups of eye-wateringly potent liquor. I debated whether my recent recovery would be impacted negatively by accepting his offer, but decided I’d never had a constitutional vulnerability to mind-altering substances; my slide into substance abuse had been situational, and now the situation had changed. (I also worried about offending the hospitality of a man with lion’s teeth.) I accepted the drink, and Minna did too – she could break down the liquid into its components in her mouth and make them harmless if she didn’t want to feel the effects – and we sipped. The liquor burned a line down my throat and made warmth in my belly.

“Can you speak?” I asked.

He cocked his head and let out a series of low growls that eventually became comprehensible: “…seem to make sounds almost like speech.”

“We do speak.” I growled, and the language hurt my throat, but his eyes widened. “We are from elsewhere. We thank you for your kindness. We also wish to warn you. Other strangers might come. The vanguard of an invading army.”

He made a sound I interpreted as a chuckle, then rose, and flung open the door to his hut. Wind rushed in, and he pushed out through it, beckoning us to follow. We went after him – I was wishing for warmer clothes – into a rocky, mountainous landscape under a steel-gray sky. We followed him a hundred meters or so to the edge of a cliff, and he gestured. There was nothing for as far as we could see but broken rocks and stunted trees… and the wreck of what looked like a spaceship, hull delicately curved but cracked like a broken cup. “I am the last Pilgrim of my cell,” our host said. “The only survivor of the journey. We thought we would find the home of our creator here, but we found only desolation. I do not know if we were misled, or if the auguries were misread by mistake, or if the translation of the scripture was flawed, but this world is empty of God. My supplies, salvaged from the wreck, have dwindled. I am contemplating my end.” He shrugged. “Let your conquerors come. They may have this empire of dust.”

“Would you like to come with us when we leave, Pilgrim? I can’t promise you what world awaits us, but I’m sure we can find one better than this.”

He cocked his head again. “God is great. I never doubted that, even in this desolation. I will continue my pilgrimage, then. Perhaps God dwells elsewhere.”

“Do you have any military experience?” Vicki asked.

The pilgrim blinked his great golden eyes. “Your ring speaks?”

“My ring’s name is Vicki.”

“Hello, Vicki.” The Pilgrim nodded gravely. “I am a veteran of the stand at Adaara, yes. Those of us who survived fled here, ahead of our persecutors. We brought our weapons, in fear of pursuit, but the Assimilators were happy to see us expelled, and did not follow. Those weapons are useless, as there is nothing here even to hunt for food. But, yes. I have some experience of battle.”

“Would you like to have some more?” Vicki said.

The Pilgrim asked us to tell him about our adversary. “I cannot offer myself to a cause I find unjust.”

I told him about the orchard of worlds, and the Lector’s Moveable Empire, and the tactics the Lector used to oppress his victims. I worried a bit that the Pilgrim wouldn’t be sympathetic to our cause. What if he turned out to be a religious fanatic who revered strength above all else, or something? But it turned out he was from a small and marginalized sect that had only taken up arms to protect itself from genocide. His people were wanderers, following rumors and myths and legends about sightings of the divine, attempting to find the homeworld of God Itself… and, as a result, they were always showing up uninvited and unexpected throughout the galaxy, where they were usually greeted with suspicion and hostility by the locals. His sect was also hunted by the agents of a galactic empire he called the Assimilationists, who insisted that only their leader was divine. (A possibility the Pilgrim’s sect had investigated and roundly rejected.) “This Lector sounds like philosophical kin to the Assimilationists,” the Pilgrim said. “I would gladly lend my arms to your cause. And when we are done, you say you can take me beyond this galaxy? To worlds that cannot be reached by any ship?”

“There are as many universes as there are stars in your sky,” Vicki said, rather poetically, I thought.

“Perhaps God dwells in one of those places,” the Pilgrim mused. “That would explain why it’s been so damnably difficult to find It. Let there be an alliance between us.”

We made our way down to the wreck, dressed in bulky suits that didn’t quite fit us – the Pilgrim’s people were built on a somewhat larger scale than Minna and myself – but that he insisted were necessary protection. “The containment field for the engine is cracked beyond the ability of the repair drones to correct,” he explained. “That’s why I don’t live in the ship, even though my quarters there are much more comfortable. The radiation, you see. I would have to wear these suits all the time, and I find them far too confining.”

As we made our way down the narrow, crumbling path to the ship, the Pilgrim and Vicki discussed tactics. Vicki was very excited by the weapons the Pilgrim described, though most of his explanations made only sketchy sense to me: “In terms of small arms we have masers, and directed plasma beams, and kinetic weapons aplenty of course.”

“The repair drones,” Vicki said. “Could their cutting torches be reconfigured into offensive weapons, or could other arms be mounted on their chassis?”

“In theory,” the Pilgrim said, “though I lack the necessary skills to reprogram them, and we have no military drones capable of overriding and commandeering them.”

“Oh, just let me within range of their operating systems, and I’ll do the rest.” The relish in Vicki’s voice made me happy, even though I knew it was the precursor to violence. “Tell me a little more about this engine, too…”

I fell back and talked to Minna. “We need to prepare for worst-case scenarios.”

“What do you mean?”

“Vicki told me about spies, in their world, who sometimes had a false tooth implanted, filled with poison, so if they were captured, they could bite down on it, and die before they could be forced to reveal secrets.”

Minna shuddered. “Zax…”

“Please, Minna. We have to be realistic.” I told her what I had in mind, and she agreed. Removing one of my own back teeth, hollowing it out, filling it with one of her concoctions, and replacing it was well within her abilities. She promised to do so once we settled in for the night.

The Pilgrim led us to the main hatch of his ship, Sojourn, the most accessible entry hatch half-buried in the dirt. The ship as a whole stuck up at a slight angle, so we had to enter and make our way carefully on the slanted floors. There were still lights inside – “The power source here will run for centuries, as long as the containment field doesn’t degrade any further” – and the hallways were wide and spacious, befitting a species of two-and-a-half-meter-tall bipedal felines.

I’d expected corpses, but there were none. “We return to flame when we die,” the Pilgrim explained. “The ship has a great incinerator, and I presided over their funerals. Every member of my sect is a priest, so they had the proper rites. I will not be granted that, alas, but they say God is forgiving. I ask only that if I fall in the coming conflict, you give me to fire, if you can.”

I wanted to reassure him that it wouldn’t come to that, but I knew better. “Of course we will,” I said.

“Keep your suits on, or you’ll need final rites yourselves,” Vicki said. “The radiation levels here are appalling.”

The Pilgrim showed us the armory, full of gleaming weapons that were all curves and shining edges. War was an art for his people, it seemed. He took Vicki to the bridge of the ship, half the panels flickering and the other half dark, at least until Vicki got into the computer systems and cleaned things up. The Pilgrim sat in a great chair in the center of the bridge, which was tilted slightly, making it into a recliner.

“This is wonderful,” Vicki said. “Your weapons are more advanced than anything I’ve seen.”

“Stolen from the Assimilationists,” the Pilgrim said. “In order to fight them, we needed to be their equal in battle. It’s a shame we can’t fly anymore.”

“Those systems are far beyond my ability to repair, alas,” Vicki said. “But having even a stationary weapons platform is rather more than we expected. With the drones providing mobile units, and time for us to prepare the ground… yes, we might have a chance, especially against a small advance squad like the Lector is likely to use.”

Minna went off to look at the ship’s gardens, and returned hours later to say that she’d tweaked the plants to absorb radiation, which would help them grow, but that they weren’t safe to eat, and they wouldn’t be able to cleanse the ship fully since there was constantly new radiation leaking from the engine. “They are happier plants now too, so I am happier also.” She was profoundly bored by all the tech and weapons talk, so went outside to look at the sparse local flora.

That night we camped beyond the range of the radiation and discussed our preparations. We knew where the Lector was going to appear; we just didn’t know when, or with what kind of force. We knew he’d survived a significant explosion unscathed. “That knowledge provides us with the threshold we must greatly exceed,” Vicki said, and talked about how to do that.

I half-slept in my strange fugue state, watching the stars move. There were two moons in this sky, one large and one small. I knew I’d lived beneath one thousand one hundred and thirty-four skies, counting my own, but how many stars? How many other inhabited worlds in each of those skies? I saw only the smallest piece of any given universe, and each one might very well teem with as much variety as this one, with its galactic empire and countless alien races. The vastness of reality was dizzying, and staggering, and I knew I’d never see even the smallest fragment of the smallest fraction of the smallest degree of the whole curve. That was true of anyone, though, even those who lived in the same universe their entire lives, because every world was vast. The Lector, with his relentless hunger to move and control and command, didn’t seem to understand that. As smart as he was, he wasn’t smart enough to know that he’d barely glimpsed any of the places he’d brought under his heel. None of them mattered to him, individually, any more than any given person’s life did. He would argue that every world and every life was insignificant when considered against the span of the infinite… but nothing mattered against the span of the infinite, so if you wanted to care about anything at all, you had to care about the small things. There was nothing in the multiverse but small things.

I wondered if the worry that kept the Lector up at night – if anything did – was the deep and secret knowledge that he was just as insignificant as everything else.

In the morning, when the Pilgrim was rested, we began our preparations, and continued them for over a week. The repair drones – crablike machines a little smaller than me – began to transport panels and struts from the ship, creating structures scattered around the valley and up the hillsides, each one with a cannon or two salvaged from the ship’s offensive systems, arranged to provide overlapping fields of fire. Vicki could control the whole array from anywhere within a few kilometers. They were all solid enough bunkers, and none looked like a headquarters, except the ship itself, where, of course, we had absolutely no intention of being when the battle came.

Drones were repurposed and made into war machines, armored and armed, and they scuttled in the brush to await the enemy. Minna and I carefully covered some of them in dust and stones and plants – Minna made it so the weeds would even stay alive and grow on the machines – so they could hide better and blend into the terrain. The Pilgrim and Vicki ran various scenarios and tweaked the parameters of our position, and Minna and I moved as far away as we could and covered our ears while guns boomed and sizzled. “I don’t like this, Zax!” she shouted.

“I don’t either!” I shouted back. “It will all be over soon!”

One way or another. My tongue touched the new tooth Minna had implanted in the back of my mouth.

We always had a drone or one of us watching the hut where we’d arrived, though it was unlikely the Lector would arrive without us realizing it. The hut was gone, torn down, and the whole area was now ringed with weapons and mined with explosives, all set to go off the moment anything tripped the sensors. The Pilgrim thought that every other preparation was redundant, because nothing could survive that ring of hell. Minna, who’d seen the Lector’s Moveable Empire in action, was less confident, and I concurred.

These have been long days. I’ve spent so long hurtling forward, whether I wanted to or not, that I have no practice at all with patiently waiting.

The place where the hut used to be just exploded. The whole cliff-top is burning white-hot.

Here we go.