It was opening up to her.

She sucked cold air through her teeth.

“Finally,” she whispered. It was asking if they were staged correctly, waiting for instruction, for implementation.

“Yes.” She tapped out the variants, forced them through the trinary stream. “We’re waiting for you.”

Althea studied the positive responses, re-wrote and re-scaled the appropriate string of variables. She chose the one most likely to draw the corpore close enough – close enough so that it’s destruction would leave its core accessible.

“Pick us up, please…” she echoed her new commands, translating the trinary. “We have something special to show you.”

Very special indeed. The speed things were falling into place, Althea felt her being humming with success. She looked up again, trying to make out the body of the monstrous thing above the clouds. The shadow over the southern plain suggested a structure at least half the size of Merk’apas. She returned to the glowing display, the point counterpoint of the annotated signals music to her eyes. It sent her additional choices, responses. She worked the interface as swiftly as she could.

“Confirmation?” She laughed, tapped, then repeated – firing all the corrected variances through the open gates.

“Here it is,” she breathed. Alerts came up, peppering the display. She was getting ahead of herself – warnings flashed that her rush to confirm was edging into sloppiness.

“Don’t worry,” she pulled back the volume of her assault. “We are all friendly implants here, just your happy little tools.”

Tools that are turning. She hoped, wherever the greggas were now, they were pleased, approving of her actions against the Macro. She could only pray for a scrap of forgiveness.

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It’s waiting for the last block of confirmation codes.

She pushed through the whole queue of instructions.

“Here,” she whispered, watching the figures flicker, eyes wide. “Hope you like it.”

The stream of commands weren’t cycling properly. She tapped the interface with frustration, reflexively, not comprehending the delay in response.

There is an energy problem.

“What?” She didn’t understand. “I was ready!”

Dorian brought up the statistics on her transmitters power draw and drain. They were shocking.

The strength of our transmission is decreasing, he told her. That was a gross understatement. It was falling catastrophically!

Why? How is this happening?

Althea glanced hurriedly over the physical connections she had built. Nothing seemed out of place.

It is the implant power cells that are failing, Dorian confirmed.

Had she underestimated the amount of bioelectric power the implants required from their human hosts? Got the frequency wrong? No!

Joy of success turned to frantic scrambling to adapt to the situation. Her work bore no results. The system was failing; power was thinning out – evaporating. One of the implants power signs flickered, then faded completely.

“No!” She shook her head, trying to apply compensating current from the other power packs, “No! Not now!”

She reached into the implant connection web brushing snow away, searching for a physical break. Her fingers felt nothing but the smoothly connected line; her eyes saw nothing out of place. Panic continued to rise, threatening to overwhelm her. The corpore was too close, success so close.

Her cold fingers were beginning to go numb again. The wind just would not stop blasting her. Althea swore under her breath, praying for feeling, praying for them to be nimble.

“There must be a broken connection somewhere,” she decided, tried redirecting the flow. It was the only reason she couldn’t apply power over the entire grid. The action added some peaks to the power spikes. They didn’t last.

The corpore is slowing its approach.

The growing thunder began to plateau. South of the city, the main body of the thing gradually dropped beneath the bottom layers of clouds, exposed in the light of dawn. It was as colossal as the dead city around her, but like the terrifying memories Traejan had recounted, was projecting awesome – pulsating – power. She could feel the oppressive presence of the thing, could not resist staring upwards in awe. Beneath it, the ruins disappeared as clouds of snow began to blow up from the plain, unearthed by the constant force of the corpore’s massive stabilizing engines.

“Oneness.”