Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 38
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
“She is nevertheless vital to the mission. So say the Erelim, and the Elders obey their Word. We’ve prepared transport to take you back to the edge of the wall with your goods. From there you’re on your own. You’re sure you understand your new mission?”
“I do,”
“Repeat the summary, please.”
“The Temple of the Queen and its Shrines must be destroyed; the buildings levelled, only ruin left behind. But precedent, Pomeroy Zaiola is to be delivered to the Queen.”
“Pomeroy is the Erelim’s messenger. No matter what, McQuire Allison is to be made to remember we are here,” Van Anders said, “And She is to be made humble by punishing the unfaithful idolaters who have made Her as their God.”
“God forgive us what must be done,”
“God, Brother Leonardo, forgives the sins of all those who fight – and die – in His name.”
“As you say, Brother Orlando.”
FOURTEEN
THE ALIEN AMONG US
The message from the Jibrail El-Ahur ship repeated five times. There was no specification as to what would happen if they failed to comply.
The small ship remained at station keeping facing the Ouroboros, halfway between the two fleets. Heihachi watched it from the Bridge while standing by for further instructions from Midian.
In the situation room in the bunker beneath Olympus, all eyes were focused on Benedict. He looked at them one and all.
“I suppose now would be a good time,” he said, “For you to tell me who the Hope is, who the Jibrail El-Ahur are, and what the fuck they want with me. Somehow I think you all know already and this is just one more thing that you’ve neglected to share with me. So before I decide whether or not to tell our friends out there to go fuck themselves, I think it’s time for a full briefing; don’t you?”
♦♦♦
They sat together in a round alcove, sitting around a platform that rose from the floor. The door irised shut. Benedict, Baxter, Fleetmistress Kaplan and other members of the Council, including the Handmaid to the Absent Queen, Yeung Elysz sat together.
“Well?” Benedict demanded, “Let’s hear it.”
“We had discovered a critical system, a Primary System Node: a sort of relay used to coordinate the Zohor. But...it was more than that.”
“Commodore,” Fleetmistress Kaplan cautioned.
“Proceed, Commodore Baxter,” the Handmaid said, overruling Kaplan.
Baxter nodded and gathered his thoughts, “For the longest time, we thought the individual Zohor ships were autonomous; they aren’t. The Zohor themselves are networked and controlled together through Command Relay Nodes. All the evidence suggested these thousands of fleets, millions of ships, were not being controlled by those alone; There had to be at least one more layer, some sort of network of decision-making Master System Controls; but we could find no physical evidence of one.”
“Why not just interrupt their communications? Jam the transmissions?” Benedict asked.
“Because the Zohor communicate using holographic entanglement.” Baxter replied.
“They what?”
“It’s a form of communication that relies on the surface tension of the chaotic edge of the membrane underpinning reality, and the individual displacement of the points of transmission and reception; essentially it’s an unjammable communication that is sent and received instantly no matter where in spacetime the transmitters or receivers are. It’s also untraceable, because there’s no actual signal in space to pinpoint.
“When we stumbled across our first Command Relay Node we mounted a raid. Before we destroyed it, we were able to learn that such nodes are themselves nothing more than glorified relays and coordination engines. There were multiple overlapping networks of Zohor Master System Controls. The Master System Control network decides each course of action to be taken by every…single…Zohor. Imagine, if you can, just how many trillions of decisions they have to make every second. Now imagine several hundred thousand of these Master System Controls, perhaps even several hundred million of them, linked together, deciding everything by simple majority System votes. But where these Systems were, we couldn’t know. With holographic entanglement, the Zohor’s command hierarchy could be scattered across the whole of the cosmos and we’d never know where.
“Then finally one of our probes found something hidden in orbit just outside the event horizon of a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy billions of light years from ours: we thought it was a Zohor Command Relay Node. And so we planned an assault against it. The Queen was still with us, then. She, Herself helped devise the plan of attack. It wasn’t a Command Relay Node, but it was something just as significant: it appeared to be their primary weapons manufacture facility. It was nearly the size of Bloom’s Point…and it was incredibly well defended. The Zohor were harvesting elemental raw material falling in towards the black hole’s event horizon and there was a near infinite supply. There were billions of ships. The facility wasn’t just controlling Zohor ships, it was creating them…they poured out of it, rising like clouds…like swarms…But the Queen had come back into Her power…”
“She took out the Zohor?
“Their fleets were thrown aside,” Baxter said, “Hurled straight across the event horizon of the black hole. It’s true what they say about black holes…from the outside anything that strikes its event horizon just seems to be…frozen. And there was nothing between Manufacturing Facility. Our first strike took out its shipbuilding systems and their defences. We had to use tactical time travel of course…we waged that battle for months.
“There were so many Zohor...but we had the Queen of Light and Sorrow. It didn’t matter how many ships they threw at us; she cast them aside. We fled through time using the Q-field, repaired our ships and returned to the fight. But as we were preparing our final assault on the Facility, She ordered that we send a team in. She barricaded our fleet and the Facility as She once had the Twin Systems and took command of the infiltration. If once it had been as much as She could do, by then it cost the least of Her Power to do such a thing.”
“Jesus Christ,”
“I can’t describe that mission to you in detail, for obvious reasons.”
“That’s where I died?” Benedict didn’t believe the tightness in his chest as he spoke.
“No; but foreknowledge of the specifics of that event could cause you to act differently which could have disastrous consequences; like what happened when the Zohor destroyed the instances of the Starburst Bay.”
“Fair enough,” Benedict conceded, relieved, “Please continue.”
“We only really understood after we went inside that…thing…what they had done,” Baxter said, “On some level...the Zohor must have realized we would defeat them. They needed to adapt and evolve again, in order to beat us first.”
“Which they did.”
Baxter grunted, “I prefer to think that they won the battle but not the war, Voyager. They were probably observing how we used tactical time travel while we were destroying them during the initial attacks. But to find the means of adapting to fight us…the Zohor took extraordinary measures. They were capturing El-Ahur for study. Only what we didn’t know was that they were most interested in the Jibrail El-Ahur; the El-Ahur who left Midian long ago following the Hope, McQuire-Rejas Gabrielle. What we could not know, what we found out…was that the Zohor had taken the Hope. The Queen could sense Her Daughter in the Weapons Manufacture Node…perhaps that’s how we found that node, in the first place. Perhaps they had been calling to each other across the cosmos all this time. The Queen found the Hope. And when She saw…what had been done to Her daughter…She….”
“Jesus Christ.” Benedict said again.
“The Queen vanished,” Baxter continued, “Screaming and beyond madness and rage. A moment later we felt the explosion somewhere deeper in the Node. We were able to rescue the Hope…more or less…we evacuated back to our ships and made our escape as the Control Node fell into the supermassive black hole’s event horizon.”
“We had Gabrielle all this time and we never contacted Her people?”
“We never knew how,” the Handmaid replied, “We knew they were out there, but we had never encountered them before. And the Grandmaster was able to…use…the Hope against the Zohor. She and they had become entangled.”
“The Grandmaster used her as a weapon? And now the Jibrail El-Ahur have finally caught up to you after your little stunt, and they want to have a sit-down with me…because of what my future self did to her?”
Baxter paused before answering.
“That would sum up events, yes.”
Benedict rounded on Baxter, suddenly and violently angry. He pulled the Commodore up from his seat, and slammed him into the wall.
“You keep telling me about the Grandmaster, and how you’re supposed to help me become him!” he shouted, “And all I do is find out more and more just what kind of a bastard he was! First he killed my Colonel, and then he let me send my officers – and my lover – to their deaths so I could be extracted after he died! Now you’re telling me that I’m responsible for exploiting some poor girl as a weapon, instead of returning her to her own fucking people?”
He threw Baxter to the ground, stalking for the alcove’s exit.
“Voyager!” the Handmaid called out.
“Fuck you!” Benedict retorted, storming from the bunker’s situation room.
♦♦♦
From the bridge of the Ouroboros Heihachi looked upon the magnified image of the Jibrail El-Ahur Starfleet. He was as disturbed by the violent, deadly appearance of their ships as he was by the grotesque fusion of machine and El-Ahur that they had allowed themselves to become. Had they been in fact captured and reprogrammed by the Zohor? On the face of it, that didn’t seem likely. The Zohor’s only interest in organic life was in how to destroy it. They were masters of biological warfare as much as they were overwhelming force and ballistic advantage.
“Sensor, Conn. Update on the passive scan of opponent fleet.” Heihachi ordered from the Bridge.
“Opponent Fleet still at station keeping, energy readings constant,” The Sensor officer replied from the crew pit below. Heihachi looked at a magnified view of the ships. They were spread wide, hundreds of kilometres apart. Up close, they were as jagged as broken glass, and uniform in design. He’d never seen their likes and it disturbed him that this fleet should be crewed by El-Ahur…and that the El-Ahur that were aboard were merged with machines.
In the lens on his eye he replayed the transmission from the Jibrail fleet’s spokeswoman. Her eyes were silver, and where her tear ducts should have been, a spidery network of metal veins crawled up her forehead to her hairline. He could see metallic spines run down the side of her neck to her shoulders, disappearing beneath a heavy uniform of some glimmering black material. He panned and magnified behind her, picking out other Jibrail, sitting at stations and watching her transmit the broadcast. All of them had implants similar to the spokeswoman, and all wore uniforms of the same shimmering, black material.
“How could they do that to themselves?” he asked aloud as he sent the same question to ‘Lina, who was in Systems and Engineering’s main drive control room. Her proximity to the drive and its strange effect on spacetime immediately around it amplified what she sent back to him, and he could feel her hand as if it were on his shoulder; warm, loving reassuring, as she replied, “I don’t know. But they did. Maybe what happened to the Hope…”
Heihachi shuddered at the notion and the sending was severed. “Communications, resend ship’s identification and request to open dialog.”
“Still no response from the opponent fleet,” the Comm officer replied. Heihachi wished for the Commodore’s presence. Although he’d held command of the Ouroboros numerous times previous to this encounter the very nature of this operation, a first contact with a potentially hostile new Tribe of El-Ahur was beyond his realm of command experience. The last first contact he could recall had been with the Sentinel of the YosYogoth archive world century earlier; at the time Bateson Morgan had been their Captain, Baxter Vincent held the rank of Commander and Heihachi served under them faithfully aboard the Queen’s Hope. During the encounter Heihachi had expected the Sentinel – a machine consciousness on the verge of breaking free of its cumbersome, planet-sized computer system – to be alien. He had never thought it possible to find his fellow El-Ahur to be alien and yet here they were: flesh and machine hybrids using Zohor technology. A cortical interface was one thing; to have had so much of their bodies mechanized…it was…the word absent from Heihachi’s vocabulary was an Abrahamic word forgotten by his ancestors: abomination.
♦♦♦
The two fleets remained a polite distance from one another. Still there was no word from the Fleetmasters or the Commodore. The only messages they received from Midian were quarter-hourly requests for status updates. Junior communications officers handled the tedious traffic, leaving Heihachi and the other senior officers to study the Jibrail fleet’s layout; the position and orientation of each of their ships; the likely weapons profiles; every array seeming to reach toward the ships under his command. He felt no sense of real threat from these Jibrail war ships; potential threat, certainly. Heihachi was uncomfortably aware of how badly outnumbered and outgunned his fleet was.
“Any word about the Q-field geometry’s healing status?”
“No update from the Andrews Michael,” the Comm officer reported.
“I’d love to get out of this system where we don’t have to fight fair,” Heihachi muttered.
“As you say, Captain.” The Comm officer replied.
“Yeah, don’t I wish,” Heihachi muttered; a phrase he’d unconsciously co-opted from the Grandmaster at some point, long ago.
♦♦♦
There was no point to hiding in a bunker any longer. Benedict stood outside, looking up at the nighttime sky. The light from the city of Olympus, from Heruba and the moons Thalia and Melete in the sky above made it far too bright for him to make out the two fleets. As far away as they were, it would have been impossible to see them, anyway. The only star visible tonight was their celestial neighbour Anuket. Soon enough Fleetmistress Kaplan and Baxter Vincent hurried outside.
“Voyager! You can’t simply tell the Handmaid to the Absent Queen to –”
“I’ll tell her, you and whoever the hell else I want what I want, Fleetmistress!” Benedict retorted, “The more I find out what you people have in store for me the less I want any part of it!”
“Voyager Benedict, we have a little more than an hour before the Jibrail El-Ahur’s deadline expires,” Baxter insisted calmly, “We have to discuss –”
“We don’t have to discuss shit, Bax.” Benedict replied, “Bad enough that the future you people are pushing me into includes me getting killed; to find out that you want to turn me into the kind of son of a bitch who’d do –”
“Anything to save the people of Midian?” Kaplan retorted angrily, “Is that such a horrible thing, Voyager? We are the children of the Human Race; we are the Human legacy.”
“And you don’t seem to be doing any better with yourselves than Humankind did back on Earth.” Benedict retorted, “And what exactly will the Jibrail El-Ahur do if I don’t go to them? They haven’t said, have they? You don’t know, and even if you did, I seriously fucking doubt you’d even tell me! So why should I comply with them, with you, with anyone? What have any of you done to deserve what you want me to become for your sakes?”
“We live, Voyager Benedict!” Kaplan replied, shouting. “We live, because you and Bloom Margaret brought us across the cosmos; we live because the Queen of Light and Sorrow Herself created us when She healed you and all our ancestors aboard the Old Ship. We live because of your mission to find the Hub. We live because your future self came back to the beginning of the Aeons War to defend Midian after he had fought the war until its very end. We live because he sacrificed himself for us.”
“Yeah; and I don’t like a lot of what my future self did in Midian’s name. Let me see this Hope of yours; let me see Gabrielle.”
Reluctantly they took him to her. She was across the city; on the same tier but two levels higher. The building towered over its neighbours; like them carved and built from the living stone of the mountain. Unusual for the other buildings of the city it was walled off, a large courtyard between the high wall and the five-sided, tapered tower. It was listed as some sort of hospital or care center but Benedict couldn’t help but notice the upper floors were ringed by guard towers and patrol ramparts.
