Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 55
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
“Couldn’t you have intervened? Stopped it from happening?”
Benedict had been anxious upon travelling from “his” end of the Aeons War back to Midian to see what he could do to reshape things. Benedict’s memory of the scale of the attack described in the history texts was what prompted him to go after Pomeroy Zaiola’s past self. However the devastation caused after his less than successful intercession left the temple far worse off than it had been recalled to him.
“Directly interfering with the chain of events of this history is too dangerous – both for your future and my past. I can’t take such risks, and you know why.”
“Your very presence here in the past is an interference in time,”
“And to minimize that interference, I have to follow a very, very rigid script.”
“Even as you’re trying to rewrite the end of that script?”
“I always have,” Benedict said, “And I always will. Unfortunately, I can’t rewrite what’s to come for Decker Marius.”
“Goddess, no…” Allison rasped, “Not another death.”
“One of many more who will die fighting this war; myself included. You have the ability to affect certain outcomes and events; can You see any possible way for us to save Decker Marius without breaking the peace with the Sinai? Can we convince them to return him to Terra Nova to stand trial?”
Allison tried looking down the path of Decker’s future, of Her own, of where this horrible matter would lead. She saw no means of interceding, directly or indirectly, that would not make matters worse. As it was the clamour in Terra Nova was for his freedom and security forces were already clashing with rioters. She knew they would yield to Her Will, but She knew there would still be unrest and resentment towards the Sinai; more tension between the Abrahamics and the Terra Novans. They needed unity because unity meant victory over the Zohor. This She knew for certain. If Decker Marius did not answer to Sinai Law for what he had done the Sinai would never agree to an alliance and fractured, the Queen’s Hand would not prevail against the Zohor. The outcome of the trial would be decided by Abrahamic Law; Decker’s fate would be left up to a religious tradition that was, as far as Allison knew, the only Human thing on Midian older than She was.
As much as She wanted to intercede She could not; not without tipping a precarious balance. Allison shook her head, “I am bound by what Must Be; as surely as you, Grandmaster.”
Grandmaster Benedict sighed.
“Then he’ll pay for his crimes according to Abrahamic Law. We’re all bound by what Must Be, Allison; not just You and I but everyone. You taught me that – or You will.”
“I know,” She said wearily, “They call me the Queen of Light and Sorrow. The Light is the hope I shine onto Humankind’s descendants, all that I will do to protect and defend them. The sorrow is My own, for all that I can’t do, all that I can’t accomplish for their sakes.”
“Yours is a burden I don’t envy, My Queen.” But before he finished saying it, Allison had vanished again. Grandmaster Benedict had long grown used to Her sudden disappearances, as well.
“God help us all,” he sighed.
TWENTY
THE END OF THE TRIBES
Heihachi paced the length of the Command Office, still decorated with the artifacts of its previous occupant. On the lenses of his eyes he read the initial reports from his Security, Medical and Data Systems teams about the room’s rightful occupant, Baxter Vincent. Heihachi was also simultaneously studying the reports on Benedict Jack and Pomeroy Zaiola. His teams had run every kind of diagnostic test, scan, and exam on their “guests” short of vivisection; they couldn’t find anything wrong with them. They were clean and the streaming visual Pomeroy and Benedict had testified to uploading to their cortical implants had been examined and found to be equally as benign. Baxter had neither viewed nor downloaded the stream; having opted to only read a summary of its contents, A Collection of Lives Among the Jibrail El-Ahur.
At the moment Roshenko Aqualina was going over the full hard-data readouts from the medical and physical analyses; but it looked like the Commodore, the Voyager and the Bulldog (Heihachi couldn’t resist the pejorative Bax had thrown out for Pomeroy) were clean of any physical tampering. There likely hadn’t been time enough to perform any psychic or psychiatric altering. If ‘Lina’s analysis concurred Heihachi would order them released from the secure section of the ship’s infirmary, assign them restricted access to the ship and return them to their quarters. Then he’d sit down with Bax and listen to what he had to say. It had been seventeen hours since the envoys from the new Queen had come aboard the Ouroboros.
He longed for easier times; before the Shekhina Mehdi went mad and vanished, before the Grandmaster died. After all the uncertainty at the beginning of the War when they’d all finally united behind the Grandmaster and the Queen of Light and Sorrow, the war began turning in their favour. Everything that followed seemed to be leading them towards a final, decisive victory against the Zohor. Then they lost the Queen; the Zohor began to evolve even as the Grandmaster turned what they’d found at the Weapons Manufacture node against the machine swarm. The War seemed to somehow be going wrong; their victories were harder won without the Queen’s help; their losses greater and getting worse. The Hope – such as She was when they’d first rescued her – provided them with information about the architecture of the Zohor hierarchy, but even using that to defeat entire Zohor armadas and raid and destroy other Master Control System nodes had taken an exacting toll. The Zohor simply fought harder and more aggressively, with more ships and more destructive firepower. Then the Grandmaster died; the Ouroboros was pulled from the fight by the Council and their search for the Voyager began.
Now everything seemed poised to collapse and nothing was certain. Heihachi felt tired; more tired than he could remember feeling in a very long time. He also felt afraid; dread fear gnawed at him. He sat down at the desk and leaned back in its chair. At that moment he wanted nothing more than a good ten hours of sleep; such luxuries were not the purview of the commander of a fleet of mutineers. For one, he had to report to Bucha Rachael as soon as he’d finished going over the briefings; for another, he had to tend to his guests.
♦♦♦
The secure wing of the ship’s infirmary was elegantly simple: a ward of beds behind a heavily secured transparent metal door. A nurse and two armed guards were stationed inside the ward, while more nurses and armed guards were at the nurses’ station beyond.
The prisoners weren’t supposed to talk to one another, only to the nurse and then only if necessary; however the prisoners in question being who they were, the Commander had allowed for certain privileges at the discretion of their guards, of course.
Other than the crews’ private areas every part of the ship was under constant computer surveillance. If the security system saw or overheard anything deemed a risk or threat to the ship or its crew the security team was flagged. The system also allowed for the dispatching of medical crews in the event of an emergency and specialized technical staff when other issues arose. If the prisoners started talking of escape or other plans, they’d soon be shut up and in full restraints.
“He’s taking his sweet time,” Pomeroy complained again. Benedict was flummoxed by how impatient she was; how angry. He couldn’t understand how someone could live as long as an El-Ahur and not master such traits.
“Commander Heihachi’s one of the most thorough officers I’ve ever served with,” Baxter replied, “You know that he’s going over every detail he can, so he can prepare himself fully before dealing with us.”
“It’s what I’d do,” Benedict concurred.
“Dan learned from the best,” Baxter said.
Benedict lapsed into silence. He could remember a time when, naively, he’d thought the strangest experience of his life was taking over as security chief for the Ship Survey Expedition under his former commander, Colonel Margaret Bloom. That time felt as long ago as it actually was. For him Bloom had been dead just over a decade; in reality it had been over fifteen hundred years. And though likewise long dead, Alina had died just weeks ago for him; he still felt the loss of her presence, scent, voice, the memory of her…that she was gone forever stabbed him more often than he could bear, and unbearably less often than after he’d first heard the news.
And then the constant reminder, the Devil himself popping up to leer at him at every turn: the Grandmaster was there; his own ghost haunting him with grim visions of his own future. Destined to become a treacherous bastard for the sake of winning a war; destined to die fighting that war, and to both start it and fight to its end. Destined to let those he loved the most die for his sake and to manipulate them into doing it besides. It was terrifying and outrageous and he hated them all for expecting it of him. Even Pomeroy, so convinced she could help him escape the fate, kept seeing in him someone he didn’t want to be.
Pomeroy and Baxter were still bickering; there was a mutual respect and a mutual resentment between them; she wasn’t as hostile with him as she was with Heihachi but there was definitely no love lost between them. Benedict tuned out their chatter as best he could; waiting to see what Heihachi would have to say for himself and whether they could convince him to rejoin the rest of the kids on the playground. Benedict didn’t understand Gabrielle’s assertion that they needed the Ouroboros. He accepted that She could see into the future – or at least that She seemed able to see the future – but he didn’t understand how one ship could be so vital when right now the Jibrail had an overwhelming number of ships and the crew to man them. As he understood it Midian’s fleets had been decimated. Yet She insisted: Heihachi must return to the fold and bring the ship with him or they would have to take the Ouroboros by force – and though they’d win back the ship, doing it that way would be very bad.
Pomeroy and Baxter had finally stopped arguing – or at least stopped talking. Benedict looked up, in case it was because they were waiting for him to say something. Thankfully they weren’t. Instead they shared similar looks of waiting: blank, determined stares. Benedict imagined he’d spent the last little while wearing the same expression. Just then there was activity beyond their locked ward: a bustle at the nurses’ station as the ship’s Commander came in from the main Infirmary. The guards inside the locked ward rose and stood ready to either side of the door as their counterparts on the other side did the same. The door was unlocked from the nurses’ station and opened, sliding into the wall. Heihachi came in, nodding to the guards before addressing their prisoners:
“As you’ve probably guessed, you’ve been cleared by security.” He said, “You’ll be returned to quarters with limited general access to the ship for now. We’ll meet in forty minutes to give you a chance to refresh.”
“There’s much to discuss,” Baxter Vincent replied.
♦♦♦
Gabrielle looked up into the night sky, towards Anuket. The air was cool and the balcony caught the breeze just right. Gabrielle watched the star in its slow dance in the heavens. The light reaching Her face from Anuket was just a little more than five months old; nothing transpiring there now could be seen by the naked eye. But Gabrielle could see more than any eye; using the light of Anuket as a focal point She was looking down the vibrating string of the current future, trying to guess which outcome was being favoured by the superposition. But everything was still in flux; even She couldn’t see past the blur of uncertainty. She turned away, frustrated. Perhaps it was the Constant’s proximity to the heart of events; perhaps it was Heihachi’s own reluctance. Whatever the reason there was nothing Gabrielle could do to predict or forestall the outcome of events now unfolding.
Despite the Pentavirate now resting in the Temple and Her Jibrail brothers and sisters on the ground and in orbit around them Gabrielle found no succour. This Minor Uncertainty split off into too many possibilities equally good and bad; She couldn’t predict which would snap back to the Main Line She was trying to follow and so all of them stretched on and branched off, stretched on and branched off, taking a million different paths to the Great Uncertainty that She dreaded so much. She wondered if this lack of vision was how someone with sight used to feel if they went blind; biocloning and genetic recombination on Midian had long eliminated many problems related to disease or loss of organs or limbs. Loss of one or both eyes in an accident would result only in temporary blindness; though Gabrielle likewise understood Her own inability to accurately see beyond events ongoing at Anuket was temporary, She felt frustrated helpless and afraid.
It was rare that Gabrielle felt so overwhelmed; in these moments She could fall back on discipline and teachings that Her Mother passed on long ago: When Gabrielle was a young girl, Her Sight opening for the first time to perceive the future in all its possibilities, Allison had taught Her young Daughter how to control what She saw; how to narrow or widen Her focus, how to watch one line at a time instead of an infinite number of intersecting branches. Eventually Gabrielle learned to watch multiple lines of time, and see maps, for lack of a better word, through time that would allow Her to achieve Her goals. Over time, both as a child and young woman on Midian and later out among the stars with the Jibrail El-Ahur, Gabrielle learned to See farther and farther, down an exponentially greater number of timelines. And by Seeing what She did Gabrielle was able to control Her fate and the fates of those around Her and even those people beyond them. Loss of vision meant a loss of control, something that Gabrielle almost never enjoyed.
…Gabrielle…
The Sending was like an electric shock down Her spine: sudden, unexpected. It was the rest of the Pentavirate; more precisely, Her four oldest friends in the universe. These weren’t Her Sister-Daughters or Brother-Sons; this was Beryt, Anat, Kothar and Dagan; they, like Her among the oldest of the Firstborn. As Gabrielle had been conceived aboard the Old Ship so had they. They’d had longer “normal” lives than She, but they had never treated Her nor thought of Her any differently than they had other Firstborn. They seemed to be the only ones; Gabrielle, Daughter of the Queen and the Rai’Ha, had been feared and avoided by most of the Firstborn and subsequent El-Ahur that She guided up the Umbra. But Dagan, Anat, Beryt and Kothar had befriended Gabrielle as easily as they had one another, forging bonds that would last beyond lifetimes. When Gabrielle looked down the possible paths of the future, the faces of these four friends kept returning; theirs was the only true Certainty She had to hold on to.
…Gabrielle, come join us…
It wasn’t four voices but one, a harmonious joining of Minds, always with room for one more. At Ehlo Bene and then later as the first of Her El-Ahur retinue, the five of them had been more than friends; more than lovers, more than family. They forged their own secret place in the Gathering of the Dream, a sacred space for the Pentavirate Dreaming. Over time they evolved together and the more they evolved the greater their connection to and need for one another seemed to become.
…It’s been so long since we’ve all been together…
The Ache that the Sending transmitted went beyond the barest concept of physical desire. When the Five became One, it was an ecstasy beyond physical, emotional or spiritual bounds. The release was unlike anything a lone Mind or Body was capable of imagining; a poignant, synergistic concussion of harmony that transcended and overwhelmed Body, Mind, Spirit and the Fused Mind. Simple concepts like Sensation, Desire and Love applied in part, but what the full Pentavirate experienced in their Joining was something far greater than mere satiation.
And it was the only time that loss of control felt good to Gabrielle...but She had been gone so long, She had been so radically transformed by the machines of the Zohor…
I don’t know if I…
But their combined Minds rebuffed Her sudden fear with one Voice: You are still Gabrielle.
And there was nothing left to do, nothing left to say; Gabrielle shifted and went to them Her coils and cables unfurling, revealing what was left of Her naked body to theirs. Already their Thoughts traced the boundaries of Her mind, even as their bodies traced the contours of her machine and flesh and pressed to one another and to Her, probing Her with Flesh and Mind, Interface, Energy and Soul. They found Her and they found within themselves that which She had lost. In this joining, in this fusion of their every thought and memory, every sensation and experience, in this harmony of acceptance and abandon they Healed Gabrielle even as the Five became One for the first time in far, far, too long.
The sensation was like an exploding star ripping first the One apart back into Five but still joined Mind and Body until it was unbearable, overwhelming. The release was almost painful and Gabrielle could never be sure if the screams She heard were her own or someone else’s. There was no thought in this last, blinding white moment; only cascading waves of abandon and Grace.
