Blind
In the depths of the Gobi Desert, the sun set on a dry and barren world. One by one, the interlopers vanished – their infernal machine carrying the Acolyte’s body, their strike teams returning to their ceaseless, voiceless roles. The area was scanned, thoroughly, by satellite and by telepath, and nothing remarkable was found. The question of how the Black Death’s necromancy functioned over such great distance remained a mystery unresolved.
Then in the dead of night, once all watchers were gone, from beneath the desert sands a sand flea pushed through grains of rock and silica, and vanished in a pinprick of smoke.
The Black Death hurtled through the teleporter’s tunnel, finally emerging in his true form out in the darkness of space. Immediately, the infinite abyssal cold clawed at him, siphoning away his heat and oxygen, but Heydrich paid it no heed. His body shimmered, encasing itself beneath a strange protective film that adhered to him like a soap bubble, and, so protected, he began to move.
Heydrich loathed space. Despised its vast, screaming emptiness – the precautions it forced upon him, the sound of blood rushing through his skull. He despised that he’d been forced to retreat here, use it so often as a refuge, to exploit the sheer quantity of its nothingness to find places within which to hide. Just another slight for which he would break every bone in Mentok’s body. Alone, floating through nothing, he envisioned standing triumphant, and the endless satisfaction he would take in mutilating the filthy Russian every day for the rest of his miserable life. Crucified outside his imperial palace, fresh wounds healed every morning at a touch. The modern-day Prometheus. The thought gave Heydrich strength for his next, most arduous task.
In the depths of space, millions of kilometres from the nearest planet, Klaus Heydrich’s body began to grow. Bigger and bigger, more and more, scraping the very limits of gigantism, until finally he could expand no more. Hundreds of feet tall, still insignificant in the nothingness, the Black Death grit his teeth beneath his thin protective covering and clenched inward with destructive force. His swollen flesh began to glow in violet splotches, rippling with a sick magenta hue as he pushed it, further, further down and deeper down, until every fibre of his body vibrated with power and death.
For hours he continued to hold it – his arms trembling, his head spinning, waves of nausea shaking through his guts. His skin blistered, cracking and shifting until it was almost molten, spilling blinding amethyst light as with furious effort he continued to infuse, until every atom of his gargantuan flesh was engorged on the power to destroy. It was more, by far, than he had ever attempted. It was maybe enough to destroy Earth.
Finally, with his flesh splitting at the seams and veins of purple pulsing across his skull, Klaus Heydrich unclenched his fists. Brow heavy with sweat, body wracked by tremors, he severed his mind from the pulsing titan and stepped back into a body his normal size. The giant replica’s head sunk, and its eyes fell. Unmoving, it drifted amongst the nothingness, seething with unnatural energy and encased in the same pearlescent, soapy bubble – a second skin so completely fragile yet somehow immune to space.
Heydrich – the true Heydrich – allowed himself a moment’s pause. He doubled over, panting hard, forcing his pores to puff out oxygen as he desperately sucked for fresh air. Finally, he steadied himself. The Black Death closed his eyes – then spread both hands towards the behemoth and opened in front of it an enormous red oval. Immediately, the vacuum around them churned with light and scathing heat. Heydrich floated behind the portal, shielding his eyes. ‘Go,’ went his simple commandment – and through whatever link remained between them the replica wordlessly obeyed, floating through the ellipse and heading towards the light.
Where it would continue, for weeks on end, descending intangible towards its destination. Where it would be pulled ever downwards, until it hit its mark.
Until the seal cracked.
*****
“Something’s coming. I can feel it.”
Rakowski’s words crackled across the network. A private communication. It was night time locally. Mentok glanced briefly from his many eyes.
“You’ve relocated.”
“Yes.”
“Seeking a change of scenery?”
“Diversifying our assets.”
Alone on his throne of twisting cables, Mentok nodded. He had granted Edward, alone, the freedom to move autonomously, deemed him worthy of the privilege of self-determination. His neural implant still continued to function – merely set to a passive and monitoring role, rather than an active one.
“You fear discovery?”
“I fear Heydrich. It’s been three weeks now. We’ve heard nothing.”
“He’s a coward. Hiding amongst the stars or the ocean or deep underground, trying to cook up some plot. It’s his only conceivable option.” Mentok’s eyes lolled back, glancing brief forethought towards his ceaseless duties. “This is a war of attrition. This time, when he returns, we’ll catch him. The days of being eclipsed by his powers are forgotten in the dust.”
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“Still,” came his protégé’s quiet, steady reply, “I feel uneasy. What’s that old saying about cornered wolves?”
“I have killed wolves Rakowski. Real wolves. They are flesh and blood and die like any animal.”
A long silence. Over their connection, Mentok sighed.
“Go. Enjoy your isolation. I cannot fault you for being cautious. Just remain on the link and monitor your sectors. We’re still at war, wherever you are.”
“I know,” the genius’s mind murmured, and for a brief instant there flashed from within him the picture of a dark-haired girl. The image faded as Edward withdrew. Viktor grunted. Strong minds held tight to grief.
He consciously returned to his work, allowing his mind to be swept away in time’s passage, the endless machinations and administrations of a god. Always more to do, always more pawns to move. His feudal scaffolding of geniuses, his nodes of information and authority, heeded and commanded and reported their results, and he sifted ceaseless through their findings. Sitting here, atop his iron tower, he did not begrudge Edward his independence – endless work drained the soul, truthfully. And it was hard to just sit and wait, with trepidation and with patience. Many of the younger geniuses especially shifted with slow frustration. Would this simply now become a waiting game? Heydrich’s stolen regeneration squaring off against the Mindtaker’s artificial longevity, destined to continue in perpetual stalemate until one of them finally dropped dead?
It was a possibility, Mentok admitted. Regenerators could stay young far beyond a normal lifespan. How far, exactly, was anyone’s guess; nobody in the superhuman world had been regenerating for more than forty years. Eventually, probably, the base processes would start to break down at a cellular level, or some kind of fatal side effect would occur, in the same way that Mentok’s rejuvenating formulas would probably, someday, stop being able to postpone his advancing age. Yet if patience was Heydrich’s plan, then so be it – with every passing day the prosperity of Mentok’s empire blossomed, and the potential for new inventions and discoveries grew. Left untouched for years without conflict, who knows what they could uncover, what ideas he could dream up to scour the Black Death from this Earth. He lost, most likely, the waiting game in the long term – but the period of interregnum stretched so far that the fruits of untold possibilities loomed far sweeter than the rot of eventual death. At least in Mentok’s calculation.
And then there was the other element of waiting. The silent, unspoken aspect. The payoff of patience that might come to fruition far sooner than anybody thought.
There were six hundred million children under his guardianship.
How long before one of them manifested as Divine?
“Sir?”
A direct communication. Azleena. How much time had passed? A storm now raged outside, though in here they were all safe. Mentok gave the girl his attention.
“What is it? Something detected?”
“No,” came the confused, somewhat hesitant reply, “The opposite. We’ve lost contact with a deep space satellite.”
“And? What of it? Heydrich has found and destroyed units in the past. Send a replacement.”
“But…” Alarm started creeping into the Bangladeshi girl’s voice. “It’s not just the one. We… we’ve lost contact with multiple. 58%. Every sensor on the sunward side.”
In his command centre, Mentok frowned. A coordinated attack? Is this what you have been doing, you Mudak pig? Finding all his deep-space scanners so he could destroy a host of them at once?
“Reroute geosynchronous satellites and set mid- and low- orbit sensors on alert. Prepare defences against bombardment.” His mind moved amongst the incoming data looking for signs of earthbound debris. If Heydrich had gone to the trouble of destroying all the long-range scanners, it stood to reason his next step would be simultaneous meteor strikes along the breached line. Less time to move, harder to guard against, but not impossible. The net would hold.
“Yes Grandmaster,” one of his subordinates confirmed; then a moment later, “No gravitational anomalies on scope.”
Mentok’s frown deepened. That didn’t make sense. Simultaneous, hyper-coordinated satellite attacks followed by a lag in missile strikes? Why work so hard to effect a one-two punch only to delay the decisive part?
“Review footage from the destroyed satellites,” he ordered. His mind raced ahead of his geniuses, diving headlong into the data. This one showed nothing. This one, nothing, only darkness, then static and fuzz. This one, also nothing. This one, facing half towards the sun…
Wait. No. What was that?
For an instant, Mentok’s breath caught in his throat.
“Recalibrate mid-orbit satellites!” he bellowed, already racing, already turning, already spreading the mental command – sending his empire running, flying in panic downwards, taking cover, seeking land. “Abandon stations! Take shelter!”
Alarm raced across the neural network. “Sir, mid-orbit satellites are ready for configuration,” stammered one subordinate, “But there’s nothing in Earth-space range, we-”
“Not in, out!” shouted Mentok, “Out, out towards the sun!”
“Sir!” came Azleena, “There’s something on the geo-sync sensors, we’re getting static-”
And then like a poison washing through his mind, half the high-Earth-orbit satellites went out. Gone. Silent. A wave of darkness washing cold across his sight.
The scanners closer to Earth turned, their lenses readjusting. Some had even been designed for this, originally, for watching the cosmos, before he had commandeered them to guard Earth. Before he had left the galaxy unobserved. Now, turned or returned to astronomical purpose, they picked up on it. It was impossible to miss.
A coronal discharge. A titanic sunspot. A flaring instability across the surface of the sun, a nuclear chain reaction bigger than the Earth. Launching the greatest solar flare in human history.
For a moment, time seemed to stop. Mentok’s myriad connections drifted, and for the briefest, barest instant he was completely, utterly alone.
“No,” he whispered; and then he roared.
“NO!”
*****
The Earth stood helplessly aware.
Silent and alone, a blue-green marble floating in the black. Across its surface teemed humanity, in their silent, sleepless union; stripped of all freedom or conflict, of personality or life. From out here, from far enough away, the Mindtaker’s machinations faded into irrelevance. Watched from afar, there was no way to tell the Earth was not peaceful.
A silent sphere swimming through an ocean of stars.
To the people who called it home, it was their everything. They could not look beyond it, enslaved as they were in ceaseless servitude to the empire – stripped of neighbours, of nations, of needs, of enemies, of families, of dreams. Every fragment of their new existence had been focused on protecting the world beneath their feet, and so their eyes had never been turned to stare beyond its borders. Until now.
Helpless, their single mind looked up as it drew close.
The date by human time was July 6th, 2003.
And a wave of burning light was billowing towards the Earth.