Abby raced through the midnight streets of Bulcephine like a ghost. Her ethertech boots made no sound as she swept over the cobblestones, translating the noise into conceptual energy and storing it in the force batteries that powered her exosuit.
She wasn’t conceptually undetectable—the technology to completely obscure your presence had to be built into your actual soul, like mine was—but a hundred and fifty years of infiltration experience made up for that. It was the art of moving where people don’t look, of choosing darker paths and skirting peripheral vision, even leaping onto the walls of buildings when it presented the path of least resistance.
She’d started on ceilings, leaping from one flat-roofed building to another, but the roofing style changed as she went deeper into the city. A second ring of walls towered over the one- and two-story buildings that were common further in, and unlike the larger buildings at the city limits they tended more toward arched roofs. The streets grew wider, too, to the point that an exosuit-boosted leap powerful enough to clear the distance might damage the buildings. So she’d dropped to street level, using skill rather than elevation to escape notice.
Abby’s insertion point was near the Merchants’ Road, so named because it was the path by which most overland trade would enter the city. We saw snatches of it far to her left whenever a cross-street intersected it; it was illuminated with ghostlight and tiled in brightly-colored mosaic. A display of wealth and power to those who had come to enrich the empire’s heart.
But this area was less important, or poorer anyways—which was often the same thing from a city planning perspective—and there was no illumination to be had. That didn’t stop the occasional midnight drunk or nefarious prowler from going about their business, but they had to make do with torches. Abby encountered several fellow night owls, all of whom noticed a brief wind at most.
Her target was a watchtower, which was affixed to some larger structure about two miles out from her position. The streets seemed to narrow in that direction, darkening the ambient moonlight and giving everything more of an ominous feeling. Abby didn’t hesitate, her eyes efficiently tracing out possible paths of traversal as she moved to the vantage point.
“Crappy part of town,” I commented.
The commander replied with a neutral ping.
There was a young couple on the road in front of her. They were inconveniently positioned to sneak past unnoticed. The commander frowned slightly, then spiked the exosuit’s output power. It felt like kicking off a trampoline as she flung herself into the air, clearing the civilians’ heads with something like five feet to spare.
She looked down as the boy leaned in and bit the girl’s nose off, then landed and wait what the fuck—
The commander kept running.
“Did you see that?!” I shouted.
The commander pivoted into an alley, ascertaining it was empty, and crouched in a shadow.
“See what?” she subvocalized.
“That dude, he just—is he a fucking zombie or something?”
The commander pulled up the memory on her comm. I watched as the boy leaned in and kissed her, then they passed out of the commander’s field of vision.
“That’s not what I saw,” I said. “Is that what you saw?”
“Yes,” said the commander. “What did you see?”
“He… bit off her nose. There was a lot of blood. What the hell’s going on?”
“Let me confirm the situation.”
The commander leaned around the corner, increasing the zoom on her eyes. The couple was still standing there with their arms around each other. That… was not the kind of face-eating I thought I’d seen. No evidence of blood.
“Situation normal. How’s it look on your end?”
“Negative over here.”
“Check the contamination filters,” said the commander. “I’m going to keep going. Let me know if it happens again.”
Then she was off again, threading her way through the wind of her own passing. The cobblestones flew underneath her, the exosuit cradling her body and pushing it faster than evolution had ever dreamed we upstart apes could go.
“The hallucination is stable in the ops recording,” I said. “That has to be some kind of interference, right?”
“The tunneling on the ops console is rated for anything up to progressive biphase.” The commander paused to run up a wall, her boots silently fixing her to the brick. “Alcebios is the only god here with the passive output to interfere with the connection.”
“I thought Alcebios hates the other gods. What’s she doing in Varas’s holy city?”
“That’s the mythology. Never forget the character of Alcebios is a fiction created by the true entity to guide souls back to her. Remember, she helped design the wall. Whatever mask she wears in this culture, what she truly wants is to feed on the etheric energy filtered out by her aspects. There’s a lot of death and conflict in a city like this, and if she ever gets out of progressive biphase, she could find scraps for her battle aspect when the soldiers come home.”
“But then we’d have bigger problems.”
“Much bigger.” The commander darted down a sidestreet to avoid a party of drunk women, hopping from wall to to wall like she was fucking Mario or something. She ended up on a rooftop—flat in this case, and being used to dry laundry—and took a moment to survey the area.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“What actually happens if Alcebios hits triphase? Like, I know she’s not stable enough, but what if?”
“We don’t have empirics,” said the commander. “But we have well-tested mathematical models for conceptual bleed, and at triphase it would be strong enough to drown out everything else. The interference you experienced would become physical reality across the world. The best case is that the other gods would fight her and win, but they would be starving and she would be nearly omnipotent.”
“How would she sustain that level of power expenditure?”
“She wouldn’t,” said the commander. “She’d burn through the population in a matter of hours. Then she’d need to expand to other worlds, and each expansion would increase her metabolism.”
“Shit,” I said. “There’s gotta be a point where she can’t eat fast enough to hold herself together, right?”
“Some researchers think so,” said the commander. “But we’re so deep into conjecture by that point that even a slight difference in initial assumptions drastically affects the end result. The question is academic. The only way to ensure Veles doesn’t lie in the blast radius is to prevent the scenario from happening. So here we are.”
It wasn’t clear she was referring to the deicide mission itself or to the watchtower that was now towering above her. It was a long climb. The commander took a deep breath and settled her heart rate with a thought.
“According to my comm scan, this place is sacred to Javei,” she said. “I’d like it recorded in the mission log that I’m attempting a temple breach, given a subjective assessment of minimal risk.”
“Noted,” I said. “You’re clear on ops.”
That didn’t mean anything in this case, because I didn’t have access to any sensors that she didn’t, but you had to say it anyway.
The commander stepped onto the blessed ground. It felt just like any other ground.
There were sentries posted, but their attention was elsewhere as the commander flitted across the open ground. She reached the concrete base of the tower and began to climb.
It was like climbing a ladder, but the rungs were a sheer face that her boots and gloves clung to with the implacability of thought. She kept her weight on her boots; the gloves adhered to her hands with the same stubbornness as the walls, but your skin isn’t quite that strong. The worst case there was pretty bad.
As I thought that, the commander’s hand slipped and a wet ripping noise accompanied a tearing pain—
“Ow fuck!” I yelled, grabbing my arm in sympathetic pain.
“Lilith?” the commander asked. “Are you okay?
“Mhm,” I said, not trusting myself to open my mouth. The commander’s hand was still in its glove. Her arm was covered in sleeve, rather than finger bones poking through glistening, bloody muscle. She was fine. Everything was fine.
“What happened?”
“Interference,” I managed. “The glove skinned you.”
“The ops console should have blocked the pain signal,” said the commander. “Was that ‘ow fuck’ out of sympathy?”
“No, I felt it,” I said. “I don’t know if it was dampened or not. Uh, no comparable experience.”
“It might have been dampened,” the commander said, confident tone belying a touch of concern in the underlying emotions. She had to know I knew. “I’ll abort if the problem gets worse.”
“Just get your vantage point and get out.”
The tower’s face became brick, then wood as she hit the fourth story. She didn’t climb all the way to the top—although her glances at it had an evaluative feel to them—but stayed a couple feet below where the sentries were watching. They talked in soft voices as the commander surveilled the city.
From here, she could see over the city’s inner walls. Despite the imperfect vantage point, the variable elevation of the inner city exposed a lot of it. The commander was able to mark out several important-looking buildings, one of which we were pretty sure was the imperial palace.
Then she switched to etheric spectrum analysis and braced herself in shock.
The protections on the palace were even brighter than the ones on the walls. Abby’s comm tagged divine signatures from every god in the pantheon. I boggled at the readings—the output was spiking at a hundred eleven tetrons; the Ragnar’s engines only ran on eighty.
A single spike of radiance towered over the city, ascending into the heavens until it left the range of Abby’s comm. The signature was fainter, and there were fewer divine signatures, but we’d seen that frequency before.
“Lilith—”
“It’s a match,” I confirmed, having run the comparison already. “The palace is connected to Kives’s orbital shield.”
“So that’s what they’re protecting in there,” said the commander. “Cracking that target is now our top strategic priority, but let’s finish the strike first.”
With one last look at the palace, she began her descent.
*
“Good morning,” Markus called. “We’re about a day from the city, according to the caravan folks.”
“Morning, big guy,” I said. “What’s up? How’s it going?”
“Oh, just checking in,” Markus said. “We’ve been missing you guys.”
“We have actionable intelligence,” Val cut in.
“Good morning to you too,” I laughed. “The commander’s building our entrance into the city right now. Commander, are you online?”
“Listening,” Abby replied. “I’m occupied. Report.”
“Cades and ‘Thala’ aren’t the only contenders here,” Val said. “There are five other athletes in the caravan, representing three other towns, and there have been some concerning implications.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Cades wasn’t the only athlete with a Merisite shadow,” Markus said. “The men themselves won’t say anything, but the attendants gossip.”
“So they all had individual whispers assigned to them?”
“The athletes from Heirou have come the farthest; it seems unlikely that a singular operative was traveling from there to the other towns.”
“Oh, Darwin,” I said. “What the hell do they want?”
Abby’s voice answered. “There’s only one game in town right now.”
“Quite,” said Val. “Meris is after the same conduit event that we are.”
“I thought we were done with whisper bullshit,” I groaned. “So what, the Cult of Silence is messing with every athlete in the Kabidiad? What does that even get her?”
“Meris seems to traffic in open secrets,” said Val. “If everyone knows that the man who wins the Kabiadiad is a Merisite plant, then Meris can edge Kabiades out of the conduit event. That allows her to symbolically marry Varas and reap the rewards of worship.”
“Fuck.”
“On the bright side,” Markus said cheerfully, “it means we would have run into a whisper wherever we went. So Kives didn’t set that up for us specifically.”
It wasn’t lost on me that if we succeeded, it prevented Meris from grabbing a hefty powerup. Was that something Kives could time? How deep did that fucker’s plans go?
“It should go without saying,” said the commander, “but we can’t allow Meris’s operation to succeed. We’re going for the throat on this one.”
“Yes, commander,” I answered along with the guys.
“Markus, I need you networking. Identify the competitors who don’t have Merisite associations so we can get them in a position to win if you can’t.”
“I will,” he said.
“Your other job is influence. Val, this will be your primary objective. We don’t have time to do this the safe way. I need direct-level influence on every noble involved with decision-making. Get me blood.”
“By your command,” Val said, deadpan.
“Lilith, once the access tunnel is complete, let’s see if we can get you into the city.”
“I thought I wasn’t going into the city.”
“We’re still keeping you off social infiltration, but I’ll need a second knife. I want every whisper in the city killed or compromised before the opening ceremony.”
“I think my birthday just came early,” I said.
“This is it, team. We have a god in the crosshairs. No mistakes. No mercy. They fall!”
“They die!”