"Well, that's interesting. Is that another Arc?" Zhou asked.
"Sorry, that's me," Bath murmured, his disembodied mouth speaking directly into Lisa's ear.
Lisa stared blankly at the Arc torpedoing out of the mountainside and into the air. "What?"
"You might want to drive the kursi Arc off the mountain," Bath said. "The city may no longer be structurally stable. Moreover, the radiation is potentially unsafe..."
---
Bath was working feverishly to plug all tunnels beneath the mountain with dragonleaf. Last time, after the death of the tortus, White Sun's mountain had collapsed in a similar fashion. However, unlike last time where dragonleaf ravenously tore into the tortus' fleshy corpse, the dragonleaf here dug into the mountain's rocky interior.
To Bath's relief, rock proved an easier dragonleaf substrate than tortus flesh. The dragonleaf rapidly expanded out to burgeon the mountain, stopping its collapse before it could really start.
While Bath was relieved that the mountain was stabilized, he was otherwise occupied by the chaos aboard the surfacing Arc. Just because he (Thaddeus) was flying the ship out of the mountain didn't mean that the situation had improved. Even as he steered the Arc, numerous bug-bots lunged and slashed at him, their limbs silver gleams at the corners of his eyes.
Moreover, the fifty-two other verdora worked hard enough fending off their own bug-bot adversaries while the ship was stable: Now, as it cavorted and twisted through the mountain and into the air, they had to fight with the ground moving out from under them. The Arc had stabilizing systems to negate inertia and protect the ship's inhabitants from G-force. However, the way that Bath drove the Arc rendered them insufficient.
Bath eventually touched the ship down five miles from the nascent city-seed. The landing wasn't pretty, but since he'd landed the ship into a bank of sand, he felt confident that any sustained damage was minimal.
After the ship stopped moving, Bath led the verdora on a charge back through the main corridor, opening up the hatch in the bedroom and ushering everyone out. The bug-bots didn't attempt to follow past the ship's threshold.
The contingent of verdora welcomed the reprieve from fighting with sighs of relief. Many of them were completely exhausted and lay on the sand, their chests heaving. Others simply sat and watched the ship with careful eyes, wary for a potential attack.
Bath looked over to the Delelens, giving them a lopsided (albeit veiled) smile. "Tell me: How was your second real adventure?"
---
"Let's continue along this line of thought," Lisa said, standing at the front of one of the Spire's conference rooms on the lower levels. While the conference rooms on White Sun remained without compare--the city's all-glass, prismatic Spire was stunning to behold--the typical, unmodified conference room of the nascent city-seed was sufficient for their needs.
Lisa currently stood in front of a white wall, her chip reader projecting a series of questions onto its level surface.
The whiteboard currently looked like so:
------------------------------------------------------------
Why does the ship have bug-bots?
What gives off radiation?
Why are the sigils different?
The android is dead. AI Ninety-Seven?
Is the ship definitively from the same organization (Fezosisn) as the Arc?
Why did the ship crash?
How did it end up beneath a mountain?
When did the ship crash?
Who was the former pilot and where is he/she now?
Why is the ship fully operational?
------------------------------------------------------------
She recorded Dean's question, wishing dejectedly that they'd decided to bring wasps on the vanguard. They're damn good advisors...and scribes. Of course, she and Bath had never anticipated running into so much trouble on their way back to Earth: Bringing the wasps on a "routine" trip seemed like overkill.
"I think we have enough questions for now," Lisa said, sighing and walking over to the nearest chair. "Do either of you have any theories?" She looked at the Dean and Bath, who were currently looking disinterestedly at one another. "Okay, well, I have a theory of my own. I think that the ship likely headed out on the same mission as the Egdelek Arc. While I don't have evidence, I think that the Arcs headed out at different times, a few years apart, and that all of them were intercepted around the same general area." Lisa exhaled. "I've been doing some research on the way that gates connect to one another, as well as consulting with Eyrin, who received a formal education on the universe gate economy."
Dean nodded. "I know a bit about it myself after talking to Juserin."
Dean spoke to Juserin...about economics? Lisa found the idea somewhat incredible. "Oh? What did Juserin say?" If anyone knew how networks of gates functioned, it would be Juserin.
Dean tilted his head forward, as though trying to consider how to word his response. "I transcribed exactly what he said," he began, "though considering that fact that he spoke for over an hour on the subject, I'll try to condense his explanation. Um." He took in a breath. "Gates exist all over the known universe. They originally expanded out from the Ildr, the universe's center." Dean frowned, giving Lisa a confused look. "What exactly do sapients mean by the word, 'universe?'"
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Lisa matched his expression. "The universe is--well, the vast expanse of space," she replied.
Dean sighed. "But that can't be it," he retorted. "The records in the encyclopedia talk about the universe being trillions of years old. More specifically, they state that records only exist for the past twenty-nine billion years. However," he said, giving Lisa and Bath a hard look, "the universe is only supposed to be just under 14 billions years old."
Lisa chewed her lip. "Earth's scientists could just be wrong."
Bath remained quiet, watching the exchange.
"How could they be that wrong?" Dean exclaimed. "Calculating a rough estimate of the universe's age is easy, if you have data on stars and planar bodies. Calculating the universe's size based on its current speed of expansion and acceleration thereof suggests that, at the very least, the universe is less than twenty billion years old." He raised an eyebrow. "And the encyclopedia talks about trillions of years?"
Lisa tsked. "Maybe it has something to do with relativity, and perception of time," Lisa suggested, crossing her arms. "Or maybe, the universe expands and collapses, and it collapsed twenty-nine billions years ago. That would expand why records don't exist from before that time: records literally...disappeared as the universe remade itself."
Dean put his hands on the table. "I'm sure we can find out more about this later," he said. "The only reason why I brought this up is because I'm trying to understand exactly what gates are. Everything I've heard from Juserin or read from other sources are incredibly vague: are gates portals to distant locations within one contiguous universe, or, portals to other planes of existence? Er, other dimensions?"
"Uh..." Lisa frowned. "I don't think so. For instance, the Zder galaxy has been--" she made air quotes with her fingers-- "peaceful for the past twenty-two billion years. That's most of the age of this universe, which is still more than fourteen billion years. That galaxy is definitely in one place."
"Life-supporting stars don't live that long," Dean grumbled. "They live for only a few billion years before dying. Maybe ten billion years. A planet existing for more than ten billion years--as much as twenty-two billion years--seems impossible."
Lisa shrugged. "Zder isn't a planet, like Earth, with only one star," she chided. "It's a galaxy. It has lots of stars. And planets. Anyway, since when do you know anything about astronomy?"
Dean closed his eyes and massaged his temples. "I needed to level through the scholar boon," he muttered. "Let's get back to the main questions."
Lisa smiled. "That's my line. If I recall correctly, you were trying to talk about what Juserin said...I think you were going to discuss the parameters influencing which gates connect to which."
"Right," Dean intoned, drawing out the word. "Well, he just said that the distance between locations is the greatest factor. So, for instance, in the universe, Earth is physically closer to Magnet Planet."
Lisa nodded. "Makes sense." This was the same concept that she'd gleaned from individual research and talking to Eyrin.
Dean gave Lisa a wry smile. "The 'distance' aspect is why I brought up the question regarding whether the universe is a single, contiguous plane, or technically a multiverse, with a lot of different planes all connected by gates. Assuming that the universe is, somehow, contiguous, I assume that, if we sent probes radially out from Earth, the probes would first make contact with Magnet Planet, and then Lime World, and so on."
"Yeah, that sounds right."
"Okay, well..." he trailed off. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed slightly as he latched onto a new line of thought. "The Egdelek Arc is how old again?"
Finally, Bath spoke up, expression calculating. "I'm not sure if you caught this, Lisa, but when AI Ninety-Seven first welcomed us into the Egdelek Arc, it said two different numbers regarding its age. First, it said that its former master, Franz, left the Egdelek Arc twenty-six thousand years previous. However, only a few minutes later, I asked it how long it waited for my arrival." Bath's eyes peered intently into Lisa and Dean's. "It replied: two-thousand three-hundred and forty-one years."
"That's...odd," Lisa murmured, narrowing her eyes.
Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. "We aren't getting anywhere with these questions," he stated, gesturing to the projection of questions on the white wall. "I think we should table the discussion for now until we return to Earth."
Lisa sighed. "I guess you're right: There's just too much we don't know. Can you send me the full transcript of the conversation you had with Juserin?"
"Sure."
Bath's eyes darted between the two of them. "When was the last time either of you slept?"
The two humans gave Bath a droll look. He grinned devilishly back, shrugging his shoulders as he pushed out of his chair and stood up. "Get some sleep," he said, rocking on his heels. "Away from this mountain."
They still hadn't evacuated because the level of radiation at elevation wasn't serious. Moreover, if anyone was going to be last to leave the mountain, Lisa argued that the kursi and higher-ranked COTD members should depart last as a show of responsibility.
Bath didn't care either way: as long as radiation didn't affect people's minds, he could clear their systems of radiation himself.
---
Bath sighed to himself as he regarded the now-empty city-seed. While the vast majority of the vanguard had run over the surface of Equinox to reach the exit gate, Drift Jag's topography complicated matters: The vanguard had flown, in shifts, all of its members to the Drift Jag's exit gate in the North, clearly wary of the jutting mountains that speared out of the planet's surface like a wall of broken teeth.
Bath had given them all a new city-seed to plant in the exit gate's proximity. Given that several hours had already passed, Bath figured that the new city was already up and running.
"The radiation in this city..." Bath murmured, frowning. Even if the Arc were the source of the area's radiation (which Bath still wasn't sure was the case), simply removing it from the mountain wouldn't have any impact on its habitability.
The first city of Drift Jag would, for many years, remain radioactively toxic. Unless Bath did something to rectify the problem.
Unfortunately, he didn't have any bright ideas. The entire mountain was radioactive, along with some of the surrounding few miles. His dragonleaf city-seed and spineroot had both already taken root over the mountain, ingraining themselves into the rock. In actuality, Bath had only exacerbated the problem by drawing out the city-seed's dragonleaf and directing it to support the collapsing series of radioactively saturated tunnels beneath the surface.
Every part of him knew that the city was a lost cause. At the same time...
An image of an empty box flashed in Bath's head, transmitted by the giant dragonleaf plant that embodied the city. The image quickly shifted to a desert, then an ocean, and a bottle bobbing on cresting waves.
Bath sighed, transmitting thoughts of his own back. Patience. Plants experienced time in a warped, accelerated manner. Soon, people will come. He transmitted the experience of waiting, when he was younger, and the oceans dead and empty. Waiting for the cycle to renew itself, like a giant, turning wheel: the passage of thousands of years might equivocate the turn of a single spoke.
He transmitted the feeling of loneliness, and calm: the calm of anticipation.
As Bath left the proximity of the mountain, he took on the form of his now-iconic feathered dragon. His wings pumped through the sky, casting a rainbow on the ground below as the planet's rising star peaked out from nearby crags.
We'll return. He mouthed the words of the city's name, mimicking the movement of Fartuun's lips hours before. New Mogadishu.