Providing they cooperate, there is no reason to use unnecessary force. So far they have obeyed, and they know they cannot
escape.
You’re far too trusting.
“You will get up one at a time when instructed,” Sinon told them. “We will escort you back to our field camp where you will
be placed in zero-tau. Three machine guns will be trained upon you at all times. If any order is refused, we use the holding
sticks to neutralize your energistic ability. Do you understand?”
“That’s very clear,” Stephanie said. “Thank you.”
“Very well. You first.”
Stephanie climbed cautiously to her feet, making sure every motion was a slow one. Choma flicked the nozzle of his machine
gun, indicating the small track through the collapsed trees. “Let’s go.” She started walking. Behind her, Sinon was telling
Franklin to get up.
“Tina will need a stretcher,” Stephanie said. “And someone will have to guide Moyo, he’s damaged his eyes.”
“Don’t worry,” Choma said gruffly. “We’ll make sure you all get to the camp okay.”
They emerged from the trees. Stephanie looked at where Ketton had been. A dense cloud of dark-grey dust churned over the annihilated
town. Small fires burned underneath it, muted orange coronas shining weakly. Twenty slender purple lines glowed faintly in
the air above, linking the cloud with the top of the atmosphere. Streaks of lightning discharged along them intermittently.
“Bloody hell,” she murmured. Thousands of serjeants were walking along the valley floor towards the silent, murky ruins. The
possessed cowering within knew they were coming. Raw fear was spilling out of the dust cloud like gaseous adrenaline. Stephanie’s
heart started to beat faster. Cold shivers ran along her legs and up her chest. She faltered.
Choma nudged her with his machine gun. “Keep going.”
“Can’t you feel it? They’re frightened.”
“Good.”
“No, I mean really frightened. Look.”
Glimmers of burgundy light were escaping through gaps in the dust cloud. Billowing tendril-like wisps around the edges were
flattening out, becoming smooth and controlled. The shield against the open sky was returning.
“I didn’t think you were stupid enough to try that again,” Choma said. “General Hiltch won’t permit you to hide.”
Even as he spoke an SD electron beam stabbed down through the clear air. A blue-white pillar two hundred metres wide that
struck the apex of the seething roof of dust. It sprayed apart with a plangent boom, sending out broad lightning forks that
roamed across the boiling surface to skewer into the mud. This time, the possessed resisted. Ten thousand minds concentrated
within a couple of square miles, all striving for the same effect. To be free.
The random discharges of the SD beam were slowly tamed. Jagged forks compressing into garish rivers of electrons that formed
a writhing cage above the dust. Carmine light brightened underneath. Fear turned to rapture, followed swiftly by determination.
Stephanie stared across at the clamorous spectacle, her mouth open in astonishment, and pride. Their old unity was back. And
with it came a formidable sense of purpose: to achieve the safety that so many other possessed had obtained. To be gone.
The red light in the cloud strengthened to a lambent glare, then began to stain the ground of the valley floor. A bright circular
wave spreading out through the mud and sluggish water.
“Run,” Stephanie told the confounded serjeants. “Get clear. Please. Go!” She braced herself as the redness charged towards
her. There was no physical sensation other than a near-psychosomatic tingle. Then her body was glowing along with the ground,
the air, her friends, and the hulking bodies of the serjeants.
“All right!” Cochrane whooped. He punched the air. “Let’s go for it, you crazyass mothers.”
The earth trembled, dispatching all of them to their knees again. Sinon tried to keep his machine gun lined up on the nearest
captive, but the ground shook again, more violently this time. He abandoned that procedure, and flattened himself. All the
serjeants in the Ketton assault linked their minds through general affinity, clinging to each other mentally with a determination
that matched their grip on the ground.
“What is happening?” he bellowed.
“We’re like outta here, man,” Cochrane shouted back. “You’re on the last bus out of this universe.”
Ralph watched the red light inflate out of the dust cloud. Datavises from SD sensors and local occupation forces spread around
Catmos Vale relayed the image from multiple angles, granting him complete three hundred and sixty degree coverage. He knew
what it looked like from the air, from the ground, even (briefly) as it engulfed marines who were following close behind the
serjeants. But most of all, he just stared ahead as it poured out across the valley.
“Oh my God,” he breathed. It was going to be bad. He knew that. Very bad.
“Do you want a full SD strike?” Admiral Farquar asked.
“I don’t know. It looks like it’s slowing.”
“Confirmed. Roughly circular, twelve kilometres across. And they’ve got two thirds of the serjeants in there.”
“Are they still alive?” Ralph asked Acacia.
“Yes, General. Their electronics have collapsed completely, but they’re alive and able to use affinity.”
“Then what—” The ground shifted abruptly below his feet. He landed painfully on his side. The programmable silicon buildings
of the camp were jittering about. Everywhere, people were on their knees or spread-eagled.
“Shit!” Acacia shouted.
A sheer cliff was rising up vertically right across the valley floor, corresponding to the edge of the red light. Huge cascades
of mud and boulders were tumbling down its face. The red light followed them down, pervading the rock, and growing brighter.
Ralph refuted his instinct. What he was seeing was just too much, even though he knew they’d done this to entire planets.
“They can’t,” he cried.
“But they are, General,” Acacia replied. “They’re leaving.”
The cliff was still ascending. Two hundred metres now, lifting with increasing confidence and speed. It was becoming difficult
to look at as the light turned scarlet, casting long shadows across the valley. Three hundred metres high, and Ralph’s neural
nanonics had crashed in the backwash of the blossoming reality dysfunction. On the ground around him, the battered blades
of grass were wriggling their way back upwards again, shedding their cloak of mud to turn the camp into a verdant parkland.
Fallen trees bent their trunks like the spine of an old man rising from his chair, cranking themselves upright again.
The vivid red light began to diminish. When Ralph squinted against it, he could see the cliff retreating from him. It was
five hundred metres high, moving away with the majestic serenity of an iceberg. Except it wasn’t moving, he realized. It was
shrinking, the red light contracting in on itself, enveloping the island of rock which the possessed had uprooted from Mortonridge
to sail away into another universe. As it left he could see its entire shape, a flat-topped inverted cone wrapped with massive
curving stress ridges that spiralled down to its base, as if it had unscrewed itself from the peninsula.
Air was roaring hard overhead, sucked into the space the island was vacating. It still hovered in the centre of the valley,
but now it was becoming insubstantial as well as small. The light around it turned a dazzling monochrome white, obliterating
details. Within minutes it had evaporated down to a tiny star. Then it winked out. Ralph’s neural nanonics came back on line.
“Cancel the other two assaults,” he datavised to the AI. “And halt the front line. Now.”
He scrambled cautiously to his feet. The reinvigorated grass was withering all around him, shrivelling back to dry brown flakes
that crumbled away in the howling wind. Images from the SD sensors showed him the full extent of the massive crater. Its edges
had already begun to subside, mountain-sized landslides were skidding downwards, taking a very long time to reach the bottom.
Waiting for them five kilometres down was a medieval orange glow that fluctuated in no comprehensible rhythm. He frowned at
that, not understanding what it could be. Then the vivid area ruptured, and a vast fountain of radiant lava soared upwards.
“Whoever’s left, get them back,” he shouted desperately at Acacia. “Get them as far away from the lip as possible.”
“They’re already retreating,” she said.
“What about the others? The ones on the island? Can your affinity still reach them?”
Her forlorn look was all the answer he needed.
______
Stephanie and her friends looked at the serjeants, who stared back with equal
uncertainty. For the first time in what her dazed thoughts insisted must have been hours, the ground had stopped oscillating
beneath her. When she looked up, the sky was a starless ultradeep blue. White light flooded down from nowhere she could see—but
felt right, what she wanted. Her gaze tracked round to where the other side of the valley had been. The blank sky came right
down to the ground, and the true size of their island became apparent. A tiny circle of land edged with a crinkled line of
hillocks, adrift in its own eternal universe.
“Oh no,” she murmured in despair. “I think we screwed up.”
“Are we free?” Moyo asked.
“For now.” She started describing their new home to him.
Sinon and the other serjeants used the general affinity band to call to each other. There were over twelve thousand of them
spread out around the island. Their guns worked, their electronics and medical nanonics didn’t (several had been injured in
the waves of quakes), affinity was unaffected, and there were new senses available. Almost a derivative of affinity, allowing
him to sense the minds of the possessed. And there was also the energistic power. He picked a stone from the mud and held
it in his palm. It slowly turned transparent, and began to sparkle. Not that a kilogram of diamond was a lot of use here.
“Could you dudes like give this heavy military scene a break now?” Cochrane asked.
It would appear our original purpose is invalid in this environment,
Sinon told his comrades. He shouldered his machine gun. “Very well. What do you propose we do next?” he asked the hippie.
“Wow, man, don’t look at me. Stephanie’s in charge around here.”
“I’m not. And anyway, I haven’t got a clue what happens now.”
“Then why did you bring us here?” Choma asked.
“Because it’s not Mortonridge,” Moyo said. “That’s all. Stephanie told you, we were frightened.”
“And this is the result,” Rana said. “You must now face the consequences of your physical aggression.”
We should regroup and pool our physical resources,
Choma said.
It may even be possible for us to use the energistic power to return to the universe.
Their minds flashed together into a mini-consensus and agreed to the proposal. An assembly area was designated.
“We are going to join up with our comrades,” Sinon told Stephanie. “You would be very welcome to come with us. I expect your
views on the situation could prove valuable.”
That last image of Ekelund popped up annoyingly in Stephanie’s mind. The woman had banished them from Ketton. But Ketton no
longer existed. Surely they wouldn’t be excluded now? Somehow she couldn’t convince herself. And the only other alternative
was staying by themselves. Without food. “Thank you,” she said.
“Wait wait,” Cochrane said. “You guys have like got to be kidding. Look, the end of the world is maybe half a mile away. Aren’t
you even curious what’s out there?”
Sinon looked to where the island’s crumpled surface ended. “That’s a good suggestion.”
Cochrane grinned brightly. “You cats’ll have to get used to them if you’re going to hang with me.”
The breeze picked up considerably as they approached the edge of the island. Blowing outward, which troubled the serjeants.
Air had become a finite commodity. Long rivulets of mud were sliding gently to the edge and spilling over, dribbling down
the cliff like ribbons of candle wax. There was nothing else to see. No break in the uniformity of the midnight blue boundary
of the universe that might indicate another object, micro or macro. The realization they were on their own percolated through
all of them, growing stronger as they approached the rim.
It was only Cochrane who inched his way cautiously right up to the edge and peered down into the murky void of infinity which
buoyed them along. He spread his arms wide and threw his head back, letting the breeze flowing over the island blow his hair
around. “WAAAAAHOOOO.” His feet jigged about crazily as he cried out ecstatically: “I’m on a fucking flying island. Can you
believe this? Here be dragons, mom! And they’re GROOVY.”
For some reason, the tangled strands of black mist which filled this dark continuum would always slide apart to allow Valisk
through. Not one wisp had ever touched the polyp. The habitat personality still hadn’t managed to determine the nature of
movement outside its shell. Without valid reference points, there was no way of knowing if it was sailing along on some unknowable
voyage, or the veils of darkness were simply gusting past. The identity, structure, and quantum signature of their new continuum
remained a complete mystery. They didn’t even know if the ebony nebula was made from matter. All they did know for certain
was that a hard vacuum lay outside the shell.
Rubra’s uncorked brigade of descendants had devoted considerable effort into modifying spaceport MSVs into automated sensor
platforms. Five of the vehicles had already been launched, their chemical rockets burning steadily as they raced off into
the void. Combustion, at least, remained an inter-universal constant. The same could not be said for their electronic components.
Only the most basic of systems would function outside the protection of the shell, and even those decayed in proportion to
the distance travelled. The power circuits themselves failed at about a hundred kilometres, by which time the amount of information
transmitted had fallen to near zero. Which was information in itself. The continuum had an intrinsic damping effect on electromagnetic
radiation; presumably accounting for the funereal nature of the nebula. Physicists and the personality speculated that such
an effect might be influencing electron orbits, which in turn would explain some of the electrical and biochemical problems
they were encountering.