LIII.
They looked like people from so high above, like people wading into a swarm of ants – the angels. BP was almost in awe that something that had been so impossibly big before appeared so small now, and smaller yet, if all went according to plan. Her awe was steadily subdued by the fear welling within her. He was down there, Vagari, and she wasn’t. This was the furthest she had been from his side since the day they met. So far away, she had little hope that she could reach him if he needed help – when he needed help.
The angels advanced in a seemingly random spread. They had no need for tactics, no need to be unified in their assault. BP could feel their footsteps now, small earthquakes that shook her heart more and more the closer they got. The Tevat was in sight now as well, carrying up the rear. It looked just as vast as she had imagined. Even at its great distance it made her feel as if she were stuck aboard the rotting hulls of Esh’s domain again. BP looked behind her, at the dormant body of the Amalgamation and the horrid being floating next to it. “Patience,” Tehom uttered over her shoulder, “patience. I’ll be done when I’m done. You don’t want to try bonding with it until I’ve placed all the markers. It may be a clone of the Blessed Mother, only a fraction of her even, but this is no time to roll the dice.”
“Right,” BP replied with a sigh. They would only get one shot at it, the whole world would. They had to do it right the first time – no matter how much she wanted to close that distance between them. “What will it be like?”
“Don’t tell him I said so, but I don’t know,” Tehom answered honestly. “It might hurt. You might feel nothing at all. Or, if rejected, it might kill you outright.”
“Well, that’s comforting…” BP returned with dread-addled sarcasm.
“Oh – did you want comfort?” Tehom asked darkly. “Then, take comfort in knowing that if you fail, no one will hold it against you because we’ll all be dead.” BP threw her arms in the air in disbelief, rolling her eyes as she let out a long hiss through her teeth. “Jeeeeez no pressure!”
“Tch – now you’re even starting to sound like him,” Tehom added with a sneer. “Careful you don’t deflate.”
BP grumbled and turned her back. Propping up her elbows on the rooftops bordering wall, she stared off across the city at the great colossi drawing nearer by the second. “What exactly are they?” BP asked curiously. “Vagari said they were biomechanical – meaning some part of them is alive, right? Are they… like me? Like the Synbios?”
“Yes,” Tehom said flatly over her shoulder, “and no. They are similar in that they too were grown to wage war.”
“Do they think? Feel?” BP pressed. “Are they alive?”
“Does it matter?” questioned Tehom. “Will you try to reason with them if I say they do? Don’t be so naïve. They are weapons made to scour planets, burning out all the life they find. You are nothing to them but a bug under heel.”
BP turned away from the edge and the armies below, back to the task at hand. They had told Vagari what they were going to do – build a bridge between her, the Amalgamation, and their progenitor - but not how far they had to go. The part they left out was that the bridge had to be a physical one as much as a psychic one. “It’s done,” Tehom announced, floating away from the Amalgamation’s inert body. “Hurry now, we haven’t much time.”
BP stared up at the raw wound opened up in the Amalgamations back, expertly grown by Tehom’s psychic suggestion. Her stomach churned at the sight of it, at the idea that she had to entomb herself inside it. It wasn’t enough to form the psychic bond, she had to BE the Leviathan. Tehom had assured her, that this was the only way to accomplish that. It wasn’t much different than Aan, the city’s A.I., BP rationalized. She would just become the Mother system that told all the nodes and branches what to do – and that’s how she would take control of the massive creature before them. BP paced back and forth, trying to convince herself that it wasn’t utter insanity. “Alright… alright… here it goes,” BP said, taking one last glance to where she suspected Vagari might be, uttering under her breath, “be safe…” She climbed up upon the back of the Amalgamation. She gagged a bit as she looked into the her sized hole. It was full of bristling hair-like tendrils, which reminded her all too much of the Udug’s face, a connection that wasn’t entirely inaccurate in Tehom’s design.
“Don’t let fear stand in your way,” insisted the gravelly voice of her companion. “My psychic imprint states that this chamber is to be maintained and protected over all other systems.”
“Right…” BP uttered, her stubby fingers clinging tightly to the circular edge of cartilage and muscle. “So, I… I just go in?” she asked with a nervous laugh that did a poor job at covering the anxiety bubbling up within her.
“Unless you want our dear Vagari and that auspicious dream of his to die,” Tehom answered in a devil-may-care way before adding with cold sharpness, “which he will if you don’t do what must be done – what only you can do.”
BP stared back at her, bulging eyes searching. For what she didn’t know. She nodded and began lowering herself into what very may be her tomb. Before fully committing, she would look over the rigid lip of the hole and uttered, “Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Tehom made to say, but something seemed to catch her attention. Floating in the air between them was a red light, a beam no wider than a hair. Tehom quickly looked from it to BP, pushing her inside with a frantic thought. Stone and fire erupted around them as the string ignited into an explosive beam of energy.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The next thing BP knew was she was falling, peering out from the toothy maw of that portcullis of flesh, watching as the skyscraper was cut in two by the heavenly sword of light. She could see Tehom, holding back the fire with a psychic projection, bending the energies with her mind. Tehom saw her, saw her falling away, away from the Leviathan, away from their salvation and hope. She let the shield fall and projected her mind elsewhere. Before the doors of cartilage knit shut BP could see Tehom engulfed in plasmatic energies and scouring flame. “No! No – no – no – no!” screamed BP as the darkness consumed her. She pleaded frantically as the biomass around her swelled to hold her in place, as the millions of hairline tendrils pierced her flesh and nervous system, the pain of which was nearly overshadowed by the fear of the sudden violent stop that was sure to arrive any second now. Thankfully, it never did.
When the Amalgamation’s sorrowful eyes became her own, darting about in dread, she found that she was nowhere near the ground, but in fact was further up than before. Tehom, rather than shielding herself from the devastating blast, had instead used her mind to throw BP up onto the Leviathan’s back. BP quickly glanced over the immense thing’s flank in an attempt to spot her savior, but all she could see were the blackened bones of the ruined tower. The bulk of the Leviathan was far and wide, disallowing her a view of anything else below. BP spat a string of curses, hoping Tehom had somehow survived.
Dread began to well up within her again as she turned to look out over the battlefield. The Leviathan seemed to be unprovoked and unharmed by the fiery beam, however, BP doubted either of her bodies would survive a direct hit if they fired again. She cursed again. “Damn – damn – damn – damn!” she spewed in rapid fire, steeling herself for the challenge to come. Vagari was right, it did make her feel better.
If she was being targeted, if the Godhead somehow knew of their plans, she had to work fast. BP did her best to throw away her fears, to throw away all her reservations and second thoughts, and climbed. Yard by yard she crept along the Leviathan’s stony gray flesh, over lumps of imbedded constructs: cars, walls, fences, lengths of road – all half absorbed as if swallowed by the bark of a tree. BP yelped as a flock of green crows burst from their nesting spot in the bowels of an open manhole, sunk deep into the fatty flesh like a pockmark. She cursed again as she reached over with the Amalgamation’s gnarled limbs, hastily dragging her form past it, lest something else leap out and send her tumbling down the cetacean monstrosity’s side.
Each lurching step forward became stiffer and stiffer the closer she got to her destination. At first BP feared that perhaps the body was rejecting her but fear itself was the truer answer. The Amalgamation was afraid. While the battle within it was over, its tormenting mental conflict put to rest, fear was pulsing throughout the city of its rebuilt mind like a lighthouse’s beacon. It was primal fear without rhyme or reason, just instinct. BP’s own instincts told her as much as well, to run away, far away from where she was and even further still from where she aimed to go. A chill washed over her, seeping deep within the merging of bone, through feet of hot flesh to strike at the core of her.
It wasn’t familiar to her, but she knew of that fear, of that cold aversion, that near overwhelming desire to flee. Vagari had described it before – foreign, invasive, alien. It was the feeling that came with the being Ti’amat. It was watching her. But why? BP craned the looming maw of her second body in a bid to spy her surroundings, to spot the eyes she could feel upon her. She saw nothing of the spectator she knew was there. “I’m not afraid of you!” BP hollered into the lashing wind. She didn’t know if that was true, but she refused to let its instilled fear deter her, not for another second. Determination radiated through her second body, pushing back the cold dread. She told herself, if Ti’amat was there, it only meant she was on the right track.
The Amalgamation’s gnarled limbs moved further and easier with each jolt of her will. Fear, instilled or otherwise, wouldn’t stand between her and her goal. It couldn’t stand up against all the other emotions that filled her heart, as daunting as it may be. Hope and love, her curiosity and wonder, always stood taller within her. No matter how much that fear screamed, how much it swelled inside her, pushing and pulling for her to break under the strain and flee, she would press on. She wouldn’t break, even if it killed her, because she didn’t want to live in the world that fear would create.
BP reached the head of the Leviathan, a long and wide plateau of knurled callous that resembled more the face of a shattered roadway than that of a living thing. Cracked and windswept skin crunched under her palms as she dragged her bodies towards the center, to where she felt ‘thought’ strongest. All the while, that coldness stayed close behind her – always out of reach, but never far. She could feel the piercing gaze of the eyeless being watching her every move, always watching, but just that. With gasping heaves, BP tried her damnedest to push that unwelcome distraction from her mind. She needed to focus, to help the Amalgamation do what it needed to do. She raised a wiry clawed hand and sunk those claws in deep, clawing away at the immense creature’s flaking hide until she spied something soft and pink about a foot in – something not part of its dead shell.
As she had with her own body, BP having dug out a hollow, crawled inside until flesh was against flesh. Once connected physically, the true work would begin, the work on bending its mind to her own. BP sent her will through the body, telling the Amalgamation to use its unique ability to integrate biomass to merge with their progenitor. BP had been expecting some kind of resistance, some kind of anti-body response, but found their intrusion entirely unopposed. The bodies linked and she could feel the immeasurable vastness of their quasi-connected minds within reach. She built an image in her mind, one that fit the feeling, one of her standing at the edge of a cliff looking down at the black depths churning below. She stood one step from drowning, one foul step from the divine abyss, full well knowing her only option was to jump.
There would be no going back, no retreat, not if she wanted to stop the Tevat, to make that dream of a better tomorrow a reality. As much as anything she wanted to see that world Vagari spoke of, a world without all the terror and pain of today. Her thoughts went to her sibling, to the countless Synbio soldiers fighting, dying, never truly knowing life at all. It would be a world for them as well, one for them to live in, to become more than what they were destined to, just like she had become. BP reached out with her mind, for Vagari’s dream, for her own, and all those who have yet to bloom in the minds of her kin. BP reached out and jumped.