MIndscar had occupied the catacombs beneath Paris after the Monarchs made themselves the rulers of Earth. From there she fermented her rebellion, taking control of Belisarius and eventually Liberty. She had forced Belisarius to build all the bombs and had had her mind controlled slaves emplace them where they would do the most damage. Turning the portal network into a weapon that would ravage the Earth had been her doomsday option, meant to be used as a threat if it came to it and never put into action.
She had still made sure to relocate her main base of operations to a small island in the fjords of Norway, hidden behind Scunner cloaking fields and enslaved powers. She had emerged relatively well from Belisarius' Revenge. People thought it was his revenge against the planet, the entire population, but she knew who it had been aimed at: herself.
She had raided various seed vaults across the planet and had built underground farms, vast constructions of hydroponics and halls filled with grass to support small herds. Hiding away for so many years had been difficult. She was the rightful ruler of the planet, the head of the Council of the Accords and watching everything she’d built fall to ruin due to the spite of a petty man was agonising.
“Lady, You must see this,” said one of her coterie. Mindscar didn’t bother to move, she rarely did these days and it was becoming increasingly difficult as her muscles had gradually atrophied. Instead you reached out with her power which was stronger than ever and looked out through her minions eyes. She riffled through the woman’s recent memories and emitted an audible gasp.
Arcs of fire were falling all across the sky to smash down onto what was left of her planet. Bob had fucked up again somehow and was finishing what Belisarius had begun. Fucking tinkers and crafters. She should have had them all killed or enslaved before the Monarchs showed their filthy faces.
A swarm of drones, hidden in stealth, was always orbiting her safehold and she used the woman’s body to tap in some orders on the console she was grafted to. A dozen of the tiny machines flew off to investigate the nearest crash site.
As the smoke and debris cleared the drones observed creatures made of shadows lurching out of the crash sites, the vessels and fragments of vessels that had “landed” were strange, organic looking machines that reminded her of gothic architecture made of midnight.
The creatures themselves were a nightmarish assortment of coal black shapes. Some were insectile, others mechanical seeming and these types constituted the majority of the creatures. She watched in shock as the insectile ones, blind, mouthless faces twitching in the gloomy light, began squeezing out sacks of gooey looking matter from their oversized and bulbous rear ends.
Within seconds of hitting the ground the sacks split open and long dark centipede-like creatures shrugged their way free and began spreading out around the nesting places of their mothers.
“The Void? But it’s too soon!” she snarled from her palanquin, deep underground. “I’ve got years yet! Damn that bloody tinker in the sky!” She reached out and ordered the pair of bruisers she kept for the purpose to lift the handles at either end and move her towards the docking bay. She had a flyer, a stolen and heavily modified BME egg kept ready and waiting for her. The men were tall and strong and completely void of any thoughts. She had scrubbed their brains clean and left only simple hypnotic commands in place. It freed her up from having to maintain a grip on them, making more power available for keeping those who needed to retain some intelligence under her control.
The bruisers ran quickly down the dark corridors, jouncing her about on her cushioned seat hard enough for it to ache where she had connected herself to the machinery built into the chair, but she mentally urged them to speed up even more. As they rattled down the corridor she was accessing the minds of her minions, the most vital of whom were being ushered to their own escape vehicles while others were flagged to form phalanxes to hold the site for as long as possible. Most of them weren’t fighters but they would throw their lives away to protect what was hers, just to let the others process a little more food and send it down the vacuum tubes to her secondary locations.
She burst into the docking bay and smiled a thin smile at the sight of her more valuable minions loading themselves onto her escort craft. These were a mish mash of different designs, some sleek and smooth, others clunky but still effective. Her charioteers, as she’d come to think of them, lengthened their strides and they shot across the blank metal floor to the entrance hatch at the rear of her Egg. As the outer doors to the docking bay began to slide open bright light shone in and threw the place into reflective brilliance.
“Mindscar.” She knew that voice but it wasn’t possible that he was here… “I should have put you down after the Shadeworm. It was obvious what you were, even back then. All those soldiers dying pointlessly to buy you a seat at the table.” Her bruisers spun and lowered her palanquin into the grooves built into the passenger section of the Egg. They locked and she slid deeper into the darkness as they dragged her chair into the flight position. Outside, illuminated by the blinding light of the cold Norwegian morning flooding in from outside hung John. She took in all the changes he had gone through and tried to identify him.
Name: ???????????
Level: ??????????
Ability: ??????????
That couldn’t be right. He was a caster but he’d been limited. In the sense that his power wasn’t variable, his teleportation power had been one of the most potent on the planet. She reached out with her own ability and it was like trying to grasp an eel, she couldn’t find any purchase on his mind. Even the implant technology was bypassable when she was in her chair and she shivered in fear, as where his eyes should be, the purple flames glowed more brightly.
“John. Your portals ruined our world,” she accused.
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“Come on Sarah. That’s your opening argument?” John sighed. Weapons emplacements built into the surrounding walls were tracking round on him but he waved a hand and they went dead on Mindscars systems. Minions and slaves dropped what they were doing and rushed at him but he glanced about and they too vanished from Mindscars mental map of nearby consciousness. Her mental fingers were scrabbling against the barriers in his head and finding no purchase.
“Stop that.” She was suddenly back in her own head in a way she hadn’t been since before the Advent. She felt tiny and vulnerable and she squirmed in her chair, trying to find the strength to stand. What had he done to her? How had he done whatever the hell he had done? “It’s no use. I can see some of your mind, you know. You always were a broken thing but your thread has come to an end. There’ll be a lot of that soon, cutting the threads, I mean. But then we can have a clean start. I’m going to use you, like I did Magic and like I will with the others who are too far gone. All that strength will go into our bridge to freedom.”
“You’re mad then?” she hissed, fingers grasping at the controls on the right arm of her chair. Belisarius had built it for her and naturally his paranoia had only been encouraged as this related to her own personal safety. The device was bristling with hidden weapons, field projectors and enough explosive to level her redoubt if she had to.
“I’m not the one trying to vaporise a chunk of Norway right now,” he chuckled. Her fingers had reached the controls and tapped in the code. She took a breath expecting a flash of white and then nothingness but John’s face continued to float just outside her intact egg. “It won’t work. Because I don’t want it to. I shouldn’t have stopped to talk. Time for us to move along.” John held out his hand and Mindscar dissolved into motes of light that floated into his palm.
He vanished from the now silent lair and appeared in the sky over what had once been Normanby. Evie had grown up here, before the system and he still remembered the small town that had flourished into Wayfaire once the System arrived and changed the world.
The deep burns from the ricocheting power of the Revenge passing back and forth through his portals looked like some thousand clawed dragons had scoured the land. Even now swarms of Void creatures were boiling towards him across the desolation below. He ignored them. They couldn’t stop him and he would only be leaving them a husk of a world to rot on. All the people would be coming along for the ride.
“So you return as an agent of Chaos and choose to abandon your world.”
“Hello old fiend.” John turned without moving and looked at the golden reptilian floating behind him. “Want a smoke?” Fasshtal nodded and John did the honours.
“You didn’t break, then.”
“I didn’t have a choice.” John blew out a cloud of smoke.
“What came for you is only the edge of the blade. Beings capable of withstanding even the most powerful of you will be sent. Beings like I used to be. You wouldn’t have liked it if the original me had paid you a visit.”
“I’m sure it would have been a good fight.” The reptile grinned, flashing long incisors and fangs. “What will happen to you?”
“My counterpart from the Void will take my place. This copy will be… retired.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps I could-”
“No thank you, John Borrows. I am what I am. It has been interesting watching over your species. I think the gods may regret ever assimilating your world.”
“Why did they come here? Why not just leave us alone?” John asked.
“Limitless growth cannot end without everything breaking apart. It’s in the nature of the System. It must grow.”
“So it truly is like a tumour on the side of reality? That was how their bridge felt but I couldn’t be sure. We’ll find settled worlds and stop them being snapped up for your eternal war,” John said fiercely.
“You will try but it won't make a difference. The universe is vaster than even you can imagine. Should you ever truly become a thorn in the side of the gods, more than you already are, they’ll join together to summon the force needed to crush you. You should follow your oldest instincts, little mammal, and hide away in the shadows until you’re strong enough to face their power for real.”
“You always do give good advice,” John grinned at Fasshtal who shrugged and blew out his own cloud of smoke.
“Good luck, John.” Fasshtal tossed away his cigarette butt and vanished.
“Farewell, Fasshtal Ah Nafruk,” John whispered as he turned his gaze to the ground below him to watch the butt spin through the air and be snatched up by a voidling before it hit the ground.
Deep beneath the ground in the stripped out remains of Bob’s bunker and BME showroom he could feel as much as see the handful of portals he’d left open after Belisarius’ madness. With a thought they vanished, the one connecting to Bob-world was moved to a hold aboard the Warspite while the others were simply closed. He took one last look at his old home and moved himself back to the Warspite. He sat down and a chair of purple light he conjured, mimicking the powers of the twins, and sent his gaze down across the world.
Every remaining human and monster stood out like sparks of light in a sea of intangible grey. He moved them all into holds, snapping collars around their necks as he did so.
“Jesus John. A little warning next time?” grumbled Bob from a nearby speaker.
“Ok. I’m getting the people off the moon and Mars now,” John chuckled as he reached out again and brought the last humans in the solar system aboard the vast ship. “We should have called you Rama, shouldn’t we?”
“No. Warspite sounds much better and this isn’t a sampling ship. We’re a colony ship and a warship rolled into one. Where will we go? After you’re done?” asked Bob gently. How much had his friend figured out? If Bob was most of the way there then Vic almost certainly knew it all.
“Head to Bob-World and hook up with Life and the others there. You’ve got the ability to strip Essence and create interfaces, Simon will figure it out as well.”
“Time to say goodbye then?” asked Bob.
“Not yet. I’ve got one more thing to do. Any chance we can bring out some proper food and drink? A decent whisky from before the Advent perhaps?”
“Sure buddy. I’ll set something up in the engine room.”
“Nah dude. Let’s do it under the sky of our first free world. We can use the portal, I moved it aboard you,” John replied.
“I noticed. OK I’ll get everyone through and we can have a bit of a going away party.”
John didn’t bother using the portal. The threads stretching from Warspite to Bob-World were thick and strong, reinforced by his portal, so he rode down the edge of reality directly to get to their new world. As he lost more of himself to the bridge his powers grew stronger but soon enough he would have to leave reality behind almost completely.
It was how he'd always teleported, he’d just never been able to see the mechanism, and now he could go anywhere he liked if he chose to. He couldn’t though. He had to complete the bridge but before he did that he’d allow himself a little time, despite the Gods bridge shifting and starting to fight back against his own fragile construct more efficiently as every second ticked by.
He appeared on the other side of the portal to find his friends and family waiting for him and he gave them a crooked smile. Ryn and Evie rushed over but Vic hung back as his girls threw themselves into hugs and swung from his neck. He fought down his sadness and went forward one last time to share a drink and some good food with his friends and loved ones.