The Spirine promised her everything: glory beyond compare, power without limits, and life, eternal. Gorged on such dreams, Yole the mad, Yole the desperate, actually started to believe them. Had started to think that she, and she alone, might ride their awakening, and ascend her immortal throne as their Queen.
Blinded by her hope, she did not know what she was doing when she pried open the Shell. Not until it was too late did she understand, not until it opened her. It—whatever it was—climbed up into the Breaker, and spread itself through all the veins of her Spirine.
It clawed a hole into her mind.
Like a ship filling with water, she sank under waves of ancient purpose and secret truths, truths that had formed beyond the veil of her reality.
Time ripped asunder, dropping her consciousness between the treacherous valleys of black waves. Swallowed by the vast, lonely emptiness of a space that should not exist, she could not drown. Where am I? Armies of dark stars wheeled overhead, and the oceans of the void heaved and crashed and spit up her useless form. What am I?
Strands of light swept below her, resolving into the grand filaments of the universe, bursting with new-born galaxies that slashed and ripped each other in their spinning dance. She could sense, more than see, the first stirrings of life. Of peoples, tribes, and empires struggling to make meaning out of this violent nothing. With stone tools and leather loincloths, they looked to the forming stars. With stacks of smoke and iron machines, they reached. Then, in pathetic hops and skips, made their first forays into outer space (and, in some cases, after so much pointless commotion, returned to their stone and loincloths).
What were they, compared to the colliding planets and moons and glittering, dusty rings? And she—she was a mote of matter, caught spinning in an eternal, celestial dance.
She was there when the Dys bridged the gaps between the stars, and their newborn structures—not dead obsidian, but vibrant and burgeoning—began to sprout from ten thousand worlds, and more. She watched as the Great Elders gathered all the shapes of the universe—dwarves and giants, lifeless stones and spatial tunnels—like shepherds gathering their flock. They moved the arms of galaxies.
Her mind could not contain it all, and the Spirine trembled as it struggled to supply her with more power, more life, and she could do nothing to stop it.
Help, she begged.
Help me, she whimpered.
If the Dys was listening, it did not care.
Cosmic clouds, impossible in their scale, dimmed the stars and blotted out the galaxies. Pulses of far away light, infused with strange and baffling colors, reverberated through the darkness, across trillions of light years. Pointed vectors (of what?) burst out of those formless shapes, dragging wretched arcs across the darkening skies. Arrows, with glittering, eon-long trails.
They did not come for her, and yet, she was in their path.
“Please!” she cried out. “Help! I beg you!”
The Shell could hear her, because it was inside her, devouring her from within. It filled her mind with the weight of knowledge so vast and painful to comprehend, her mind cracked beneath the weight.
But the Shell did not deign to answer. Why should it? I am nothing but a vessel.
There was no agony. There was only life, her life, being sapped from her body.
“I don’t want to die!”
But her scream was less than the buzzing of an atom, lost among the whole universe of stars. No one would hear her. No one would ever know she existed.
Still, she clung to life, even at its most futile. “Please! Let me go!”
This time, the voice did not whisper.
“NO.”
The void shook. The stars trembled. The astral arrows were severed at their source, and their piercing tips disintegrated. Something held her, pulled her out of the ocean, and as the dark worlds faded, a new vitality rushed into her mind. Tides of consciousness returned as the nightmare dreams sloughed, like the sand cascading off the shell of some long-buried crustacean scrabbling its way back to the surface.
She awoke just in time to feel the glass head fall off the end of the Breaker. Her Breaker. Its diaphanous fins still spun, even as it plummeted to the jagged rocks below. It shattered against the surface of the Shell, pieces of delicate material cracking and sliding down the semi-submerged Dyssian sphere. The runes on its surface faltered, furiously oscillating through shapes and urgent colors, enraged even as they became inert.
The column churned with pent-up energy, and she had to pull it back to prevent it from draining out of her.
The human stood at the base of the ramp, or what was left of its ragged remains. It crawled with stony brambles and mutated branches, clawing and grasping at nothing. She could almost feel his warmth, as he stepped over the vines, and approached her column. Razor-thin strands floated back to his body, clinging to him like silver hairs drawn by static electricity. They lay over the scratches on his face, making them shine.
“I heard you calling,” he said. “I didn’t know how else to help.”
***
Tawaquenah, like so many of the Post-Discovery Generation, was designated at birth for the line of duty. He, along with millions of other soldiers and officers (combatant or otherwise), were born, algorithmically selected, and bred for a kind of conflict unlike any Humanity had faced before. Taws was destined to become an Agent, long before his DNA was ever cultivated.
As an agent of the UIA, his destiny was pre-determined. He, and the rest of his squad, were chosen to start a war.
But Taws was no machine, nor clone, nor semi-organic construct. He was a human.
And once, not so long ago, he even fell in love. Her name was Heron, and as an Intelligence Officer, she floated across the boundary between the world of the Agency, and the real world—humanity—which existed just beyond the layers of camera-laden trees and fences lined with concertina wire and the redundant bubbles of EMC shielding.
For someone like Taws—who, since birth, had been fed a world painted in clear, sharp borders, no hint of gray anywhere—Heron gave him glimpses into an unknown universe. In only a few words, she could paint an idea that recolored his whole worldview. She had the capacity for insight that, at the time, Taws was convinced bordered on genius. Not only could she empathize with both sides in any situation; she could invent new factions out of thin air, and list a dozen compelling reasons why theirs was the right way. And just when Taws was convinced, she could cut her own arguments down.
Taws loved when Heron talked for hours about the nature of countless xeno cultures. It made him feel both more educated and more ignorant, like going out for a swim in the ocean, and discovering that when the sand drops out, you’ve lived your whole life on nothing but the shallowest surface.
“Anyone can change their mind about anything,” she told him, once. “Belief is a fluid system.”
“Think so?” Taws asked. His head was on her lap, his hand resting on the outside of her thigh, feeling the smoothness of her skin. They were in her room, because his was always off limits. Agents were given free time, but they were never given time alone.
“I know so,” Heron said. “Your beliefs feel constant, but that’s only because you’re swimming in them. It’s like a river—as long as the water flows, the river exists. But change its flow, and your mind changes with it.”
“Right now, the river is telling me to kiss you.”
She was used to his stupid jokes, and sometimes she even laughed at them. Not this time. This time, she had something she wanted to say. “I’m serious, Taws. Sometimes, its words. Sometimes, it has to be more than words. But for every person alive, for every belief they hold, there is a set of circumstances that will make them rethink everything.”
“Is this from your espionage training? I love when you talk Intelligence to me.”
He lifted his head from her lap, and though it wasn’t the most advantageous position to kiss her, Taws’ valiant efforts did not go unnoticed. She tasted sweet, and like spearmint gum, and she tasted like … like Heron. If physics or time had allowed, he would have kissed her forever. But his position conspired against him. The muscles in his neck strained, and after too few minutes (and too few kisses), he fell back into her lap. Her fingers stroked idly through his dark hair. This was almost just as good.
Taws, still half-lost in her scent, sighed. And then opened his eyes, “What about the xenos? You think we can change them, too?”
“Them, most of all,” her eyes glittered. “If we could just talk to them …”
“You think they’d listen?”
“Just because they’ve developed slower than us, doesn’t make them mindless. Their environment and history, and countless other forms of chance, held them back.”
Taws arched an eyebrow. Held back was an understatement. There were quadrillions of xenos in the Synod, and that ancient government had existed since humans were still starting fires by bashing rocks together.
“But we could change that,” she said, furrowing her brows, staring hard at him as if she could force him to understand the depths beneath her words. “That could be our story, Taws—that humanity helped them change. That’s who we could be.”
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“Impossible,” Taws said. “Some people just can’t grow. They plateau, and never change. If they could, they would have done it already.”
“We haven’t even tried.”
“They are the enemy, Heron. There are four quadrillion of them. If they ever discover us—”
“If we can change, then so can they.”
“We have a duty. We must protect Humanity at all costs.”
She blinked. And sniffed. And looked away from him. “Protect Humanity. Yes,” she said, and then, with sadness. “Yes.”
She forced a smile, and Taws, ever the fool, couldn’t see it for the mask it was.
The last 10,000 years were evidence enough for the xenos’ plateau. How could an entire civilization change after stagnating for so long? It seemed impossible. Things were the way they were. Beyond a certain age, people sort of settled into their beliefs, and some species would never escape that cycle. Evolution hadn’t been kind to them, and it wasn’t humanity’s fault. No, it was humanity’s prerogative to defend itself from them. Just like epidemics, and cosmic radiation, and so many other threats before.
The last time Taws saw Heron, he thought little of her leaving: they were both on strict schedules, created by the Powers That Be, and it was common to go without seeing each other for weeks at a time. Until he found her note. Not a message, not an audio recording, but a handwritten note, scrawled on a half-crumpled piece of paper.
“I don’t want this to be us. I love you, but I have to try.”
It was signed with an H, and the words “Burn this” scribbled on the back.
For a long time, he didn't understand what she meant. She was just gone. He even asked the higher-ups, but their faces went stony, and they clipped his questions like birds to be caged. Don’t know. Don’t ask. Don’t bring her up, not if you know what’s good for you.
He thought about her every day and every night. His instructors noticed, but thought it wiser to let time heal this wound.
He tried to bury it. He put his head down, and sank into his training. But some wounds only deepen with time.
And then, came the mission. The Big One.
His squad had waited for weeks, out in the void. And when the signal came, they infiltrated the celebration—the Anniversary of Peace between Auran Arais and Khuus. Taws found himself, face to face, with a xeno, the Arch Minister of the Auran Arais. He knew what he was supposed to see: a leader of a lesser (yet vastly more populous) species. His target. The enemy.
The call of the Agency echoed in his mind, reminding him of the utter necessity of getting the job done: You will give them no mercy. You were born to annihilate. You will destroy the greatest threat to all Humankind. This is your duty. This is your honor. This is your right.
Kill the enemy.
Was he a coward? Why did he hesitate?
The Arch Minister, a fleshy, hovering “jellyfish” thing, draped in alien fineries, gazed out over the crowd where Taws and his team were hidden, interspersed between the Khuus and Auran Arais and myriad other Synodic species, come to celebrate.
There was a look in the xeno’s black, alien eyes. A look of hope. Nothing like an animal. Nothing at all.
His finger hovered over the trigger. His captain whispered, “Taws? What are you doing? Take the shot.”
And when he didn’t, she tried to finish the job for him.
That was when the river in him changed.
Here, below the Spirine, Taws believed he could shift the Queen’s mind too … if only he could find the words. He had to keep trying. Because if he didn’t, how could any of them be saved? How could Heron’s death have meant anything? It had to mean something.
Had to.
Taws thumbed the safety on his PFR-8, extinguishing the accelerator within. He held it up, making sure the Queen would see it. She was still alive—the Spirine was still alive—but she hadn’t said a word to him since he’d saved her life. If he hadn’t severed the Breaker, the Shell would have eaten her alive.
“I told you,” he shouted up to the column, hoping she was listening, “I’m here to help you.” The column’s metal was torn and scarred with fresh holes, and its protruding branches swayed drunkenly, still trying to grow new limbs, but more ponderously now, as if they weren’t sure what they wanted to do.
Taws had to himself before speaking, he felt half-drunk from jumping too fast, too many times. The world kept spinning, and he had to hold it still. He shouted into the darkness of the cavern, trusting that the Spirine’s sensors would pick up every word.
“You think you want it all? The Synod, the stars, and all the worlds between? You won’t find satisfaction. All that power means nothing. I know what you really want, because I want it too.”
Branches and vines coiled tight against the pillar, creating a chorus of hissing scrapes and shrieking tones that formed a single word: “What?”
“Meaning cannot be taken, it can’t be conquered. You think, if you have more, you will find more! It never ends, Yole. You are already enough. You are alive.”
Taws watched the curling of her vines, the uncertain growth of her branches. He put a hand against the pillar, letting her feel him. All he’d wanted was to stop some mad xeno from burning down Gran’s orphanage. But now that he was here, he had to finish this, if there was to be any hope at all.
“Talk to me, Yole. Let me show you a different way. Let us find it together.”
He had to make her believe it, that she could change. That it wasn’t too late for her … or, for me.
The column sprouted new vines, tiny tendrils that touched, cautiously, at the tips of his fingers. He exhaled, his breath turning to vapor in the cold cavern air. His nevers were stretched from too many nights, laying awake. Too many days, thinking about all the ways he could have saved her.
Heron.
Tendrils wrapped around his fingers, and squeezed. Thorns pierced his skin and when he dragged his hand away, they cut jagged lines down his wrist. More whipped out, latching onto his vest, his pants, tearing fabric and hooking into his flesh. With no other choice, he flickered. For the hundredth time, he jumped. How many more times could he do this? Not forever. Blood seeped into his torn sleeves, dripped down his elbows. He was too exhausted to feel the pain as anything more than dull burning lines. And all the while, the words of the Agency sang in his thoughts: no mercy. No chance.
Kill the enemy.
Yole had an ocean of power, and her waves tore and bit at his cliffs.
Through all the scripts he’d unleashed upon first contacting the Spirine, Taws could see the data. The structure had run out of its immediate reserves, and now drank from the planet itself. Given time, it would consume enough matter to make New Nowhere collapse.
And yet, he couldn’t do it. He had to keep trying.
This had to work.
The column erupted with fresh, mutating jaws that snapped and spat black thorns, and spewed lethal gas. Taws flashed and flickered and jumped-without-moving. Each time, it took a fraction more effort to realign his body in real space.
Maybe the Queen wouldn’t have to kill him. Maybe he would do it himself.
The Spirine churned through matter, turning raw rock into energy, and energy into that near-sentient metal, and the Queen screamed in that voiceless, grating shriek—“Die!”—while she flooded the ramp, the column, the cavern with rivers of vines.
“You can’t kill me,” he lied over the grinding shriek of all that metal. “You know this!”
For less than a moment, the onslaught ceased. And the vines pulled back.
“But I can kill us.”
Her branches snapped and bent and reached up to the cavern ceiling. They grew into it, splitting the stone and tearing it down.
Taws flickered from vine to vine, gripping nanowires in clutched fists, and flung them at her branches, trying to cut her down before she could render her final ruin. Internal systems screamed at him, and his auto-injectors refused to spike his system any further, and he had to gasp for breath and fight to keep the world from going dark. Every movement, agony. He was bleeding in a thousand places, but he didn’t feel anything except the pain in his lungs.
“Taws!” a voice shouted somewhere up the ramp.
At first, he didn’t recognize the girl who half-ran, half-slid down the ramp. She was young, perhaps as young as him. Pretty. Even for a xeno. Even for a human. Though why he should think that right now—
Is that Caly? She wore one of the slave’s frocks, and it was twisted around her like an ill-fitting poncho, torn and ragged. Two hard bumps protruded from her forehead. Where was her helmet?
He wanted to shout at her to run, to get away from here, but he couldn’t find the breath.
Caly held the creature’s staff held in front of her like a lightweight battering ram. All the vines and branches bristled out of her way, or rather, out of the staff’s way, like crowds parting before a monarch. Some of them reared up on her, but when she waved the staff at them, they melted back into the mass of vines.
“Taws,” Caly screamed, “If you can hear me, we need to get out of here!”
The staff worked, until it didn’t. One branch caught her heel and sent her sprawling. She almost lost the staff over the edge of the ramp, where more branches were crawling up from the depths like skeletal hands. She caught the staff, and swung at them. She didn’t see the vine, rising up behind her like some huge, fat cobra, gyrating before the strike.
“No,” Taws whispered. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but exhaustion had destroyed his filter.
The Queen whispered back, a knowing, “Oh.”
“Taws!” Caly shouted. “We have to go! The Spirine—”
The cobra’s black trunk whipped back. To her credit, Caly didn’t even look behind her. On instinct, she dived, and the cobra’s bulk whipped over her, grazing her spine. But there was only one of her, and countless vines. They pulled out of the ceiling, and crashed down around her. The Queen’s laugh was rust grating on steel.
Caly grasped the staff in both hands, and rammed it into a gap in the pillar.
Fresh obsidian growth grew over the staff, bubbling and bursting and raising black tumors that tried—failed—to form into new vines. The Queen’s laugh became an agonized shriek as raw energy arced out of the column. Taws’ nanites weaved webs over his ears, muting the sound, but Caly clapped her hands over her ears and crumpled to the floor.
She dropped the staff.
Thin, brittle tendrils erupted from the tumors. They sought out the couran, spreading their roots over the ramp.
Taws didn’t remember jumping in front of her, shielding her with his body. Nor did he remember thumbing off the safety, and aiming his PFR at the widening gap in the column. All he remembered was feeling that familiar hum in the pistol’s grip, and the way the trigger felt when he squeezed it.
The accelerator diverted a stream of particles out of the chamber, causing it to glow with a light that made the cavern seem black in comparison. As if this world had never known light before this moment.
But this light was nothing, compared to the one that bloomed when all that energy was released.
The Spirine could have thrived upon the residual energy for decades, if it had survived. The ceiling evaporated. The column, super-heated by the blast, expanded at the opening where Yole was entombed. The column ruptured.
I tried, Taws told himself. I tried.
Above, the trunk of the Spirine shivered as kinetic energy rippled up from its roots to its branches. Its gargantuan limbs exploded in obsidian shrapnel and bursts of steaming ash, until there was nothing left of the Spirine but dripping, molten puddles.
The ground began to collapse.