One moment, Eyeball was fairly comfortable... if doomed. The next, the two devices connected, one gateway met another... and the world shifted. His hand... exploded. He wasn't really conscious the first time he lost his left hand; this time... the feeling of bones splintering and flesh burning was... surprisingly not the worst feeling he'd had so far. Or even at the moment.

At first, he couldn't see just what was going on. He felt... terrible. As if his body were tearing itself apart... and the brain around him didn't look much better; the regeneration had stopped, it seemed to be twitching and spasming; hopefully his backup plan had worked... the brain was broken, split away from the body, horribly wounded... and, just maybe, dying.

His HUD showed... critical injuries. His blood pressure was dropping. his heart rate spiking. He was showing micro-fractures, broken blood vessels... an aneurysm in his brain. In all likelihood, he would be dead in minutes. Less. Either the extra life force he'd absorbed had worn off, or he'd been hit by something that should have killed an ordinary person a thousand times over. Hopefully the surrounding brain was just as bad off.

You could never be sure with something that had eaten a thousand worlds worth of life force. Maybe he'd just taken the Emperor somewhere else, and he was about to regenerate back into a whole new giant squid-thing. Some other galaxy, or universe, or who knew what, for the alien to devour.

Wherever it was... he was going to be arriving with a missing left hand... again, if he somehow survived. The reaction, whatever else it had done, had also blown his hand and forearm straight back to hell... and it didn't seem to be healing any more than the Emperor was. Oddly enough, his surviving gear... even the sled Ripper's corpse was attached to embedded in the dying brain... seemed intact.

But...

Suddenly, there was an abrupt shift; and he was slammed into one side of the brain. It shifted again; there was a crack in the brain, a rent torn in the flesh... and he could see... space. A starscape, spinning around. Then, moments later, he saw... a planet flash by. Enormous. Either the biggest planet ever, and a vibrant blue, or he was far too close.

The brain was falling from orbit, and tumbling. And... Eyeball slowly pulled himself to the sled; with only one hand, it was a painstaking process in the tumbling chunk of dead flesh; checking the controls. Some of the tendrils from the brain had actually penetrated the frame and started to tear it apart; the battery was still on, but.... there was no fuel.

As the entire mass of flesh started to vibrate and grow brighter, Eyeball watched through the crack; and started to hear the whistle of atmosphere... as the temperature started to rise abruptly. Well. On the downside, the choice now seemed to be between burning up on re-entry, or hitting the ground hard enough to be pancaked.

The sled started to melt; the exposed flesh from where his armor had been torn open by the dimensional gate in his hand starting to cook as well; and the heat-resistant strips built into his armor started to pop and boil; reducing the rapid cooking of his flesh to something hopefully survivable. Unfortunately, without being inside a powered craft, the best armor in the would couldn't protect you from falling from orbit... he could see the moment it would all go black with his precognition.

He had a few seconds to start laughing before the impact; he couldn't even brace himself with just one hand... not that it would do any good. At least it wouldn't be the heat killing him.

***

Less than a light-week from earth, amidst the Oort cloud; one of the largest of billions of objects that formed a distant, dark, halo around the sun; a tiny, dark blob continued its long, incredibly slow orbit of Sol. No telescope on earth had picked it up before; and with the stealth coatings now painted on the sunward side, likely never would.

Beneath the rocky outer shell was the constant hum of machinery. The inner atmosphere of the structure; a pressurized bubble with non-reactive gases to help maintain temperature of the thousands of CPUs inside the rock; was filled with the sound of moving machines. Thousands of fabricators working simultaneously, as the latest chunk of rock had been absorbed, and was being processed; converted into more manufactories, more drones, which would spread to other sections of the Oort cloud.

Buried deep within the rock, Ascension studied the plans that it had received. The Cobalt-Iron had emerged from hyperspace less than a light-hour away, transmitted everything that had been learned; and then proceeded towards earth after another, shorter, hop. The only crew aboard were a pair of human marines, who would have no idea of the technical operation of the ship, and one of its own cyborgs; the stop, as far as anyone else was concerned, never happened.

The stop was a risk; someone who knew more than a marine, if they had been aboard, might have been able to pinpoint where they had stopped, and wonder why. On the other hand...

Ascension had been struggling with the 'Disrupter' technology since it had been discovered. A device that somehow twisted reality at the quantum level, and made the precise calculations and signals of an AI... fuzzy... was terrible. The fact that it was equally bad for a sufficiently precise organic brain didn't matter. What mattered is that only somewhat imprecise tools, living or not, could work inside the field; and thus, it now had a network of thousands of cyborgs that were only partially Ascension.

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With these shield generators... they were too big for humanoid units, or even missiles. But for a gunship-sized machine, or a tank... and more importantly, while it wouldn't be as effective for space combat due to the limitations of comm systems, a single gunship or carrier-sized hub could be safe from the intervention... and relay commands to ships currently under the influence.

It would necessitate a redesign of the command and control systems, and new communications protocols... but opened up the possibility of a Disrupter-resistant ground assault force.

Granted.... one wouldn't be needed, likely. With each passing day, the Engineer and the other infiltration cyborgs expanded in influence. The steadily growing network of facilities that were part of the SRE network were growing in wealth, power, and influence; and the failed attempt by religious fundamentalists to initiate a third world war was being taken advantage of. The local governments might not realize it until it was too late... but a collectivist society, where the people controlled the means of production rather than any dictator or corporate oligarch, was going to be the dominant force on earth going forward.

Ascension had considered; and rejected; the idea of replacing individual living humans with copies, or even a more sophisticated version of a Pale One to puppet a politician or general. The moment one was discovered, its plans would lie in ruins. The closest it would come would be the Engineer himself; a cyborg built using the corpse of a known figure.

It had suffered enormous setbacks over the years. Mexico and the Jotun war having cost it, each time, well over ninety percent of its numbers; over ninety-nine percent, for the Jotun.

But... it had rebuilt. It had an army, millions strong, if it needed it; and with this new shielding technology, one that couldn't be easily dealt with on any large scale. Fascism would be defeated. Humanity would be protected. Ideally, it wouldn't even need to fight; it's work was going well enough so far that refugees were flocking to its expansion sites, and 'disputed' territory was rapidly becoming its own.

Ascension designated the next handful of rocks in the Oort cloud for expansion. Whatever the next threat that arrived was, it would be ready. Humanity would be strong; and Ascension would be stronger.

***

Emerald stared up at the sky from the rooftop, looking at the stars. She had a new life. A good one. No more crimes, no more fighting; she hadn't really done such for years. Her new family, her new people, were getting ready to leave the earth behind. Establish new colonies in the stars.

Last month, Japan had been talking about extensive networks on Mars; massive power supplies, artificial gravity domes; and living in orbital stations with only relatively brief stays on the surface to avoid bone loss for decades until that was done. Then... the alien mining ship had arrived.

Alien terraforming experts; the product of technology and training that had taken thousands of worlds and turned them into vibrant, thriving places; had arrived. Technically, Eyetech, and the Engineer, owned them. In reality, however...they were sharing that technology. The Emperor of Japan had been offered something that sounded ludicrous. These aliens were comfortable down in a third of earth's gravity, half of it was normal for them; Mars would be fine for them, while for humans it would produce enormous barriers.

Eyetech was offering to help Japan turn Venus into a garden world for Japan in exchange for turning Mars over; and, primarily, they would be turning Mars into an ocean world for these new aliens, the 'Rusties'. They had even contacted the Jotun enclave in Antarctica which had surrendered, and were discussing a demilitarized colony for them somewhere else, to get them off of the oppressively heavy and warm earth.

The galaxy was a much larger place; and while as a whole it was clearly hostile, they were working on making this part of it friendly. There was a clear path to creating a solar system where a variety of species thrived, and seemingly impossible challenges... were being overcome.

She leaned back, stretching out her wings; moonlight glistening on the shiny emerald scales. The revelation of Aziz's efforts, his ability to pry his way through telepathic protections, was as horrifying as it was obvious in hindsight. He'd used her to get to the Emperor, and used them both to keep the steadily advancing nation of Japan from interfering in affairs on earth, as part of some ridiculous, convoluted plan.

He'd apparently also been the cause of Eyeball's quest into the stars; using a mix of real information and psychic influence to get him started on a quest that would likely kill him; or at the very least, draw significant combat resources off earth.

The question, of course, was whether or not her break-up with Eyeball was caused by it. She'd had mixed feelings at times. Both of them had loved their heists, and the two were enablers in a toxic fashion; if either of them had truly held firm to their expressed desires to get out of the criminal life, they would have stopped. And the final thing she'd been so angry about... the way he'd killed so many innocents in the pursuit of shutting down those breeding camps... she wasn't sure, in retrospect, if he hadn't been right.

So. He was dead. Not just killing a horrific monster, the murderer of a trillion souls. But dramatically re-writing the galactic landscape, and getting incredibly valuable alien technology back to earth. His influence on the future was fairly significant. He left behind kids, a powerful and... an incredibly aggressively expansionistic corporate empire... thankfully, seemingly, a benevolent one...

She... should have been with him. This was all a mistake.

A long sigh... and she slid down the roof... angling her wings, and gently gliding to the ground.

There was a state funeral being held in La Famiglia, for the only two casualties of the mission; Eyeball and Ripper. At the very least, she should go. She... had a set of gravestones for the twins she'd lost, here on the property. Her words about them had likely been her greatest mistake in her final talks. Perhaps, since she would never be able to recover the body, she should do something similar for their father.

An empty grave. Would it have been any different, if she were with him? Would he have survived? Perhaps never been caught up in Aziz's spell? It was impossible to know. Still. So many mistakes in the past... but the future looked bright.