As it did now.
Rzom trash. It was all their fault.
Another shudder shook the habitation bulb as Bastu came under attack again. Ordaln unleashed a volley of concentrated plasma bolts at the nearest vessel, not caring terribly whether it hailed from Tkon or Rzom or any of the other worlds that had been dragged into this stinking bloodbath. They had attacked him, that was enough, so he emptied his arsenal at them, then waited for the pulse cannons to recharge.
Tkon can still win, he realized, even with everyone shooting randomly. We can triumph by attrition, when the last rebel craft has been reduced to null-dust. He just had to stay alive until then, and the best way to do that was to fire at anything that came within range of his weapons. “Blast them all, and let Ozari take Their pick,” he growled, his throat bubbling over with bile. He launched a brace of cobalt missiles at a suspicious-looking scout ship at sixty degrees, and was gratified to see it spiral away in flames. “Isn’t that right, Nasua?”
The subpilot was dead, killed by a jagged piece of silicon crystal that had broken through the habitation bubble during the last missile strike. Ordaln wasn’t worried. She wouldn’t be dead much longer. Already both pilot and bulb were repairing themselves, the crystal shard retracting back into Bastu’s internal mechanisms, the pierced plasteel shell of the bulb knitting itself shut miraculously. Time almost seemed to be running in reverse as the gaping wound in Ztrahs’s throat closed, leaving not even a scar behind. Ordaln watched, unsurprised, at the way the color came back into her expression. Her lifeless golden eyes blinked, then looked back at him. “They killed me again?” she asked, sounding more annoyed than distressed.
“Yes,” he replied curtly. It was nothing new; they had each been killed a couple of times already. But Ozari would not let them die, it seemed, as long as the fight continued. Their wounds healed magically, their ship kept repaired, their weapons perpetually replenished…what more proof did they need that the fates were on their side? This had become a holy war, and Ordaln was more than happy to wipe the rebel dirt from existence, no matter how many times he had to die. He’d had friends among the Rzom, sure, and family, too, but they were nothing to him now, not anymore. All that mattered was winning the war, which meant destroying the enemy once and for all.
He launched more missiles, one in every direction, confident that no matter how many he fired, there would always be more. He was glad that he had taken control of the weapons himself. It was more satisfying this way. “Die, rebels, die!” he chanted, and Ztrahs joined in, laughing maniacally. “Death to the Rzom!”
And the battle went on and on….
Ten
In the fiftieth year of the reign of the empress:
Far from the stresses of work or war, a photon wave engineer named Kelica udHosn stretched out upon a leased solo lifter and went fishing for birds. Elsewhere in the empire, there was strife and nullfleets were clashing, but not here on Wsor, deep in the heart of the inner worlds, between sacred Tkon and the dying sun. Kelica’s shallow float drifted several lengths below a billowing bank of swollen tangerine clouds. A thin line of polynitrated filament stretched upward from the reel in her left hand to somewhere deep within the cloud directly overhead. A minus-grav hook, baited with a piece of raw ewone, waited for any unwary avians who might be lured by the glistening magenta pulp.
To be completely up-front about it, Kelica didn’t care if she caught a plump galebird or not. This was the first vacation she’d had from the Great Endeavor in what felt like a radioactive half-life and it was enough simply to waft through the sky on the gentle wind currents, the clouds above her, the rolling umber hills of the Maelisteen countryside far beneath. Yes, this was exactly what she needed after seven months of balancing and rebalancing the light index ratios for the proposed solar transference. For Ozari’s sake, the tired old sun wasn’t going to flare out anytime this week. The Great Endeavor could do without her for a few days.
She rolled onto her side and took a sip of the spicy nectar in the juiceskin beside her. An elevated calciate ridge, about a hand’s breadth high, ran along the perimeter of her oblong lifter, preventing her from tumbling off its padded surface carelessly, even though she kept her emergency floater belt on just in case. She gazed out at the breathtaking scenery available to her from her lofty vantage point; aside from another float on the horizon, she had the whole sky to herself. That was the great thing about Wsor: As one of the innermost planets, the war with the outer worlds had barely touched it so far. Peeking over the edge of the safety ridge, she saw Proutu Mountain rising to the southeast, its snowcapped peak reflected in the glassy surface of Lake Vallos. A few small pleasure rafts, looking like discarded wood shavings from this high up, nestled atop the lake, prompting her to wonder why anyone would still go fishing the old-fashioned way when they could go trolling through the clouds instead.
Lazy minutes passed without a single tug on her line, and Kelica began to feel just the tiniest bit bored. Closing her eyes and activating the implant at the base of her brain, she tapped into the psi-network, her mind scanning the local emanations for something interesting.
People of Wsor, turn away from your sin and arrogance. Pay heed to The One who stands in judgment above you all. The days of your folly are numbered. Great is The One who comes from beyond….
What was this, some kind of crazy religious wavecast? Might be good for a giggle or two, she decided as she adjusted her sun-warmed limbs against the cushions and took another sip of the nectar. The float coasted south toward the mountain, blown along by a cooling breeze.
…unto you and yours shall the overweening pride of your ancestors be held to account, even unto the end of days. Repent of your wayward paths, for The One will brook no impiety nor disrespect. Yea, even if no more than one soul shall turn away from The One, then all shall be punished. Many will fall before His Wrath, and those that live through the first chastisement will surely long for the sweet release of death….
Okay, okay, Kelica thought. She got the message, which was exhausting its novelty value at amazing speed. Who would actually want to listen to this blather? She searched for something else on the adjacent psi-bands.
…and the signs of His Judgment shall be written among the elements. Fire and water shall be His Rod and His Scourge, just as the rocks below and sky above….
Huh? How did she get this again? She tried another neural frequency. …and there shall be neither peace nor mercy, neither pardon nor deliverance….
For the first time, she began to feel slightly nervous. The demented rantings seemed to be all over the psi-scape, supplanting even the imperial news and weather wavecasts. She even tried accessing some of the more popular erotic transmissions, but to no avail. The apocalyptic warnings were everywhere, and expressly where they didn’t belong.
Fall upon your knees and pray for salvation, but it shall not be forthcoming. The time for redemption has passed. Now comes The One and His Anger is great….
It must be a psychological propaganda offensive, she realized, but how had the Rzom insurrectionists succeeded in hijacking the entire psionic network? And did they really expect modern-minded Tkon to fall for all this pompous mumbo-jumbo?
A yank upon her hand reminded her of her fishing line, which she had completely forgotten. Automatically she began reeling the taut filament in, too preoccupied by the unsettling wavecast to even wonder what she had caught. She was only planning to let the bird go anyway. She liked snaring the pretty birds, but saw no point in letting them suffer afterward. That was just pointless cruelty.
A deafening boom came without warning, the shock wave rocking the small lifter and tossing her backward against the cushions. Her elbow collided with the juiceskin, squirting nectar onto her side. Grabbing the safety ridge with her free hand, she pulled herself up to a sitting position and looked with amazement to the south.
The top of Proutu Mountain wasn’t there anymore. Instead of the white-frosted peak she had admired only minutes befo
re, a tremendous explosion of smoke and ash as large as the mountain itself gushed from an open crater, spewing flame and red-hot magma. Rivers of glowing lava poured over the jagged rim of the crater, racing the swiftly melting snow down the side of the mountain—no, the volcano!—and flooding into the wide-open reservoir of the lake, where a gigantic wall of steam rose into the air, obscuring her view of the mountain itself. The once-placid surface of the lake churned and bubbled, turning into an enormous cauldron of boiling mud and water.
Proutu had erupted. But that was impossible; the mountain had been extinct for aeons. All the travel data said so. And there hadn’t been any signs or indications. No preliminary tremors, no geothermal disturbances. No warning at all, except:
Behold His Justice, and tremble. Look upon the retribution of The One and know that the harrowing has just begun….
“Sacred Ozari,” she whispered. This couldn’t be happening, but it was. Her ears still ached from that first cataclysmic detonation. A noxious odor, like sulfur or macrum, teased her nostrils. Ignoring the sticky wetness of the nectar spilling onto the floor of the float, she retained the presence of mind to press down with her thumb upon the release switch of her fishing reel, slicing through the filament and setting the unseen avian free. Then she looked back down at the frothing lake beneath her. None of the tourist rafts had overturned yet, but dead fish were floating to the surface by the hundreds, turning the murky waters into a grotesque, colossal bouillabaisse.
…nothing shall be spared, neither the beasts of the field, nor the swimmers in the deep….
Fortunately, the initial shock wave had sent her gliding away from the volcano. Thank…someone…that she hadn’t been any closer to the mountain when it blew. She started to activate the auto-recall on the lifter, intending to get back to the launch center as quickly as possible, when she remembered the other float she had glimpsed earlier. Could that poor individual possibly have survived?
Holding the float in place by mental control, she peered back into the roiling fog of smoke and steam. The acrid smell was getting stronger by the moment; she could feel it stinging at the back of her throat. “Hello!” she called out hoarsely. “Is there anybody there?” There was no point scanning for a psychic cry for assistance; that malevolent sermon, which sounded like pure gloating now, was still raving across every psi-band, swamping everything else. She could hear that harsh, unforgiving voice bellowing inside her skull, no matter how hard she tried to shut it out. She shut down her implant entirely, but somehow the voice still came through.
…from the lower regions shall His Vengeance come. As blazing as an inferno is the sting of His Whip….
Cupping her palm over her nose and mouth in a fruitless attempt to keep out the increasingly corrosive fumes, she squinted with teary eyes into the opaque black smoke. I can’t wait any longer, she thought. I have to turn back.
Then she heard it.
“Help me!” a strident voice cried out from behind the curtain of fog. It was a man’s voice, steeped in terror. “Somebody help me!”
Kelica hesitated, unwilling to steer her own float into that lightless, tenebrous murk, but unable to abandon the desperate stranger lost in the dark. “Help, help me, please!” he screamed again, coughing loudly afterward. He sounded like he was choking.
To her relief, the prow of the other lifter poked from the sooty depths of the spreading smoke, pulling the rest of the craft behind it. That surge of hope was quickly replaced by fear when she saw that the unlucky air-fisher was no longer safely inside his craft, but was instead dangling by his fingertips from the edge of the float. “Don’t panic,” she whispered to herself, remembering the multiple safety measures built into the floater belt around his waist. He couldn’t fall to his death if he tried. It was scientifically impossible. Of course, that was what they had said about Proutu erupting, too.
As the stalks fall before the scythe, so shall the unrighteous fall before The One. Nemesis is He, the leveler of nations, the purifier of worlds….
Both man and floater were blackened with ash. Sooty tears ran like rivulets down his cheeks, streaking his face. “Just let go,” Kelica called out, worried about colliding with the other lifter. They probably wouldn’t hit hard enough to do any damage, but she didn’t feel like taking chances. “Activate the minus-grav switch, and I’ll come by and pick you up.”
He tried to reply, but all that escaped his throat was a raspy cough. He nodded, though, and closed his eyes, mentally willing the belt into readiness. His straining fingers let go of the float—and he fell like a stone.
What! She couldn’t believe it. The belt should have held him aloft. Why hadn’t it worked? Her mouth hung open, too shocked to even breathe, while she watched the shrinking figure drop toward the boiling lake. It’s still all right, she remembered. The emergency transfer will kick in any second now, the moment he hits trigger velocity, transporting him back to the center and canceling his downward momentum. She waited anxiously for the falling man to disintegrate into quantum particles.
It never happened. She stared in horror as he plummeted into the lake, the splash of his impact lost amid the churning chaos of the reservoir. Kelica gasped, sucking in air at last, only to choke on the caustic smoke. Panic set in, spreading through her like a fever. She had to get out of here now! Back, she ordered the lifter, grateful that she didn’t have to breathe the word aloud. The fumes were getting worse, making her sick.
…and the kingdom of the air shall crumble, and the waters of life made into slaying venom….
“Shut up, shut up,” she snapped, pressing her hands against her ears. This was a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. “Stop it. I don’t want to hear it.”
…and the orchards will be as deserts, and the skies as lifeless as the void….
Something rough and feathery smacked against her head, then rebounded onto the sticky floor of the float. It was an adult galebird, its eyes glassy and immobile, its beak locked open in silent protest. She didn’t need to feel for its hearts to know it was dead. The fumes, she realized. The gases from the volcano were killing the birds.
…from the meager to the mighty, from the lowly to the lords of the spheres, none shall escape The One….
More downy bodies struck the lifter. They were falling by the dozens now. She held up her hands to shield her head as the shallow float teetered beneath the force of the avian downpour. The stricken birds began to pile up all around her, some of them still alive, their crimson wings weakly flapping, and a new fear struck her: What if the weight of the birds overloaded the capacity of the float? This was only a solo lifter!
Frantically, she started bailing out the bottom of the float, throwing the dead and dying birds over the side as fast as she could manage, heedless of the new feathered bodies slamming into her head and shoulders, buffeting the tiny craft while she wheezed for breath amid the suffocating smoke. But despite her frenzied efforts, the front of the float tipped downward alarmingly, throwing her forward onto her hands and knees among the grisly carpet of dead birds, their tiny bones crunching beneath her weight.
…for the greatest of the great is but a mote of foulness in the sight of The One, as the most flawless of gems is but a rough and coarsened stone in the face of His Glory….
She wanted to flee the lifter, jump free of the float, but fright kept her frozen in place. What if her belt didn’t work, either? She tried to activate either the minus-grav or the transfer alert, thinking at the belt so hard that her brain hurt, but nothing happened. She remained tethered by gravity to the foundering lifter, even as it began to spiral irresistibly toward the scalding water below, picking up speed as it carried her inexorably toward annihilation.
…thus shall perish the heretics and apostates, the blasphemers and nonbelievers, for I am The One, the alpha and omega, your beginning and your end….
The last thing she saw, before the terrifying acceleration rendered her mercifully unconscious, was something almost too incredible to believe, e
ven in the middle of a waking nightmare. It was the bottom half of the mountain where, impossibly, insanely, the flowing lava had carved a single word into the granite side of the mountain, like an artist affixing his signature to his latest masterpiece.
It was the ancient Tkon symbol for the number one.
Eleven
“Ah, I love the luster of lava atop lesser life-forms,” 0 rhapsodized. “Between you and me, Q, The One can be a bit overbearing at times, not to mention utterly humorless, but you have to admit that He puts His All into His Work.”
“I spied a lush morsel on a banquet so vast,” he chanted in his customary singsong fashion,
“That I wanted my fill as ’twere my last,
Among this spread that was all I could wish,
Never before had I seen such a dish,
Oh, never before had I seen such a dish.”
The length and breadth of the Tkon Empire was spread out between them like a colossal game board. At the moment, the planet Wsor occupied the spotlight of 0’s attention, which passed through the spinning globe and projected onto an adjacent plane of reality a magnified view of the volcanic devastation currently demolishing the southern continent, much as a lesser entity might use a holographic monitor. Rivers of molten lava, rendered several quadrillion times larger than life, oozed across the intangible screen, casting a crimson glow upon 0’s grinning features as he levitated above the game board, being careful to keep the soles of his buckled shoes off the solar system below. Superimposed upon the magma, like a ghostly double image, were the stern and unforgiving features of The One. “Didn’t I tell you this only got better?” 0 asked.
“It’s certainly dramatic enough, I suppose,” Q answered. He hung upside down on the reverse side of the board, his knees wrapped around a stretch of sturdy quantum filaments while his head dangled only a light-year or so above (or below, depending on your orientation) the diverse worlds of the empire. To be honest, he was starting to get distinctly disgusted, but it struck him as impolite to say so. 0’s confederates had been at work for some time, at least half a century by Tkon standards, and yet all their games, no matter how creatively conceived, seemed to arrive at the same conclusion: lots of death and devastation and screaming. Which had a certain crude shock appeal at first, granted, until it became unpleasant and monotonous. Frankly, he thought, I’d appreciate a little comic relief at this point, maybe even a nice romantic interlude. He avoided 0’s gaze as he let his mind wander. I wonder what Q is doing right now?