The Soul Continuum (42 page)

I eye Demetri nervously. Something about him is profoundly unsettling, as if he is a threat to our cause. It could simply be that his clothing is not clothing at all but a heaving, rippling mass of miniscule black spiders. I cannot imagine why he has them. I find myself distracted by him as Seventy-Seven continues to introduce the others, and I wonder if I should be doing anything about this instinct or if it is simply a latent memory from Salomi Deya's life reminding me of her friend Candice when she was consumed by rogue nanodrones. But before I can complete my thoughts, Qod interrupts us.

“Salem, the quantum battle has reached a critical . . . point.
If I am to maintain the integrity of the protective virus, I must have complete focus. I need to cease communication for a time.”

Seventy-Seven's expression becomes grim, and now we are all looking at each other, waiting, hoping Qod will speak again, but she doesn't.

Seventy-Seven takes another step toward me. “You heard her: we're running out of time, so it seems your summons is quite timely. You say you have a way to close the rift?”

“No, but I have a set of coordinates given to me by Queen Oluvia Wade that I am sure will end the threat.”

The red-suited Ironius looks at his fingernails. “Care to elaborate?”

“I'm afraid I don't know any more than that,” I tell him, “but Seventy-Seven here has something I need if we are to find out more.”

Seventy-Seven looks surprised. “Oh?”

“Keitus Vieta's jewel. Do you have it?”

He pulls it out of his robes, and I notice the twitch of a sly smile on Ironius's lips. “Why do you need it?”

“Transportation. That jewel is the product of a set of physical laws different from the ones we are used to. Vieta, when he came here, was somehow able to bridge the incompatibility between our universe and his. That's how he was able to possess a human body. That jewel”—I nod to it—“can be engineered to work with the Slipstream drive and create an intersection point between our destination and here.”

“Destination?” says Seventy-Seven.

“As yet unknown until the interface with the jewel is made.”

The black-ribbed Shalom says, “You'll need Qod to achieve that kind of interface, and she is busy right now.”

“I can do it.” Demetri stands up, and my skin crawls
when I look at him. The spiders seem to become more agitated
as he speaks. “My nanodrones have been preconfigured with much of Qod's technical knowledge of the systems aboard the Soul Consortium. Manipulating the Slipstream drive ought to be child's play.”

Ironius laughs derisively at us. “I can't believe you're considering this. If the power inside that jewel is unleashed, it could tear your body apart and maybe even take this Consortium with it. Didn't Qod tell any of you what happened to Dominique Mancini?”

“To whom?” I ask.

“Sucked her brain dry.” Ironius makes a fist and then flares his fingers outward in front of his grinning face. “Took an entire village out and that was just because she touched the thing while it was volatile. What do you suppose will happen if you hook it up to a carefully balanced matrix of singularities, hmm?”

“Seventy-Seven is holding it right now and we're still here.”

“So it's dormant for the moment,” he says. “But that could change. My point is that I'm not entirely comfortable with what we are doing here.” His mouth twitches. “You're what, just three cycles old? You're asking us to meddle with forces even Qod doesn't understand, and then you want us to follow you to somewhere nobody has ever been, on the instruction of someone who shouldn't even have been here.
You might think you know what you're doing, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has doubts. Am I right?” Ironius glances at the others who, for the most part, seem undecided.

“Doesn't matter anyway,” Ironius says, crossing his arms. “If something worse than Keitus Vieta breaks through, I'm not going to be here to see it. I'm busy.”

“You're busy?” I say, eyebrows raised. “Busy doing what?”

All he does is smile.

“Salems!” We are all surprised to hear Qod's voice. “No time for argument. Go! Just . . . do what you need to do . . . and
go.”

As soon as her sentence finishes, we feel a trembling beneath our feet and a subtle shift in gravity compensation.

“What was that?” Seventy-Seven asks. “Qod! What was it?”

But she does not answer.

“Control Core,” I call out. “Explain the disturbance.”

The Soul Consortium belonging to the Ironius iteration has been consumed by an unknown aggressor.

Silence falls upon us like a cold blanket, but Ironius is quick to break it. “Consumed?” He grits his teeth as if the magnitude of the statement is only now making sense to him. He stands up to look around, upward, just as I do when I am perplexed with something either Qod or the Control Core has said. “Fucking consumed? What do you mean by consumed?” He is almost hysterical with rage. “Bitch!” he cries. “You did that deliberately, didn't you? You did it so I wouldn't abandon these losers. Am I right?”

“Qod didn't do this,” I tell him. “It was the—”

“Oh, it was her all right.” He raises a fist and shakes it. “She's losing. She can't hold off the attack and she let the Jagannath take my Consortium first. Mine was the expendable one because she knew I'd be the first to run. How long do I have to be your bitch, bitch? How long?”

Seventy-Seven lifts his hands. “That's enough, Ironius. This is getting us nowhere. We have to do something
before more of us are taken down, and right now, we don't have any better suggestions than Three's. Demetri, will you work with Ironius and Three to reconfigure the Slipstream drive?”

Demetri nods urgently and Seventy-Seven walks
around the table to pass him Vieta's jewel. Ironius takes a deep breath, eyes it curiously, then nods with obvious reluctance.

“Good,” Seventy-Seven says. “The rest of us should return to our Consortiums to prepare.” He raises a hand before any of us moves. “Listen, all of you. I think it is safe to say that most of us know each other very well, even though we've barely met, and I appreciate that it might seem strange that one of us is taking on a position of governance, but I am willing to step down if it's not my place.” He pauses again, but none of us challenge him, and he nods once. “All this has happened far sooner than I expected, and if we are on the brink of battle, perhaps even a war, it is important to remember who we truly are and why we agreed to come together.

“Our enemy has been given the name Jagannath. It's an ancient title meaning ‘Lord of the Universe.' You all know that, but are we really ready to give that name any credence? Have we simply accepted this name because we think this entity has power over us? I want you to consider that for a moment. I want you to consider . . . is this what you want?”

Seventy-Seven waits, eyes some of us carefully to make sure we understand the train of thought he is leading us along. His last question was not idle rhetoric designed to provoke the opposite response. The tone suggests his question is completely serious. But neither is it an invitation for surrender. It is a call for sincere self-examination. A call to realize the temptation this mysterious invader has brought. It would be so easy to step away from the responsibility of decision. For so long I have avoided death simply because I am afraid to make the choice to end it, not really knowing why, and this entity could provide the perfect escape. It takes away the choice. This is why Seventy-Seven asks the question. He wants to know if we are too cowardly to make the decision ourselves.

“We could be facing annihilation,” he says, “and we could fool ourselves into thinking we will die defending a noble cause. We could tell ourselves that we will die to protect the future of mankind and the eternal cycle of the cosmos, but we would still die believing ourselves to be cowards.

“We know the truth about ourselves and are afraid to face it. We think we are committing the slowest form of suicide as we lose our identities in the lives of those who are now dead. Secretly we think the WOOM has become our death shroud, slowly suffocating our spirits, and that we cannot choose to die because we are already dead inside, but that is
not
who we truly are. Remember!

“Remember the Killing Moons. Remember the Habraxen
Siege. Remember the Chaos Wars. They were holocausts that compared to little else. None of us want to go through anything like that again, but think of who you
were
then. Think about why you felt so alive, and understand that we're fighting for something even greater now. This goes beyond our petty internal struggles, and it hardly matters that we will win back our dignity if we regain our right to choose our future. If this entity is anything like Keitus Vieta, and none of us, including Qod, survives, then we are allowing the destruction of every life that will ever live, not just in this cycle of the cosmos, but every cycle after that. Humanity will be utterly erased!”

He lets this sink in for a long moment.

“So draw upon that man you once were and be that man again. I know we have absolutely no idea truly who or what we are up against when we arrive at this destination. It could be waiting for us. We don't know its agenda or motive, and we have no clue how to fight it, but any and every possible weapon we can make available, every fighter drone that has been sent to storage, every tactical interface and defense mechanism we can find needs to be reinstated, and every mote of defiance, guile, and cunning we have left inside of us has to be drawn upon now. We have to win. And we
will
win.”

There is no rousing cheer. No sign of affirmation at all, but as each Salem turns his back to leave, waiting for teleportation, Seventy-Seven smiles the sad smile of a man who believes we have reached our end. He knows his words have hit their mark.

D
emetri estimated it would take us at least thirty minutes to interface Vieta's jewel with the Slipstream drive, and ten of those have already passed. During that time Qod has not spoken, and a curious golden glow has crept over all the Consortiums, including ours. Lightning-fast ripples flow through the light, and when I catch a glimpse of them, I see multitudes of sparks like tiny pins pricking and testing our defenses. Their momentary patterns look uncannily like fingers pressing against the edge of the Consortium's orbs: a hand reaches out to squeeze us and then, pained, withdraws. Three other Consortiums have already succumbed. I watched helpless as two of them collapsed in on themselves to ignite like supernovae, and the resulting shockwave rumbling beneath my feet made me wonder how many explosions like that it would take to shatter my Consortium. Interfering gravitational pulses also followed the destruction, rushing through me, making me sick to my stomach. Though I know each of the Salems within the fallen structures will be resurrected in the genoplant of a neighboring Soul Consortium, their homes are gone forever, and when the last Consortium is eventually taken out, there will be no more resurrection. Death—real death—is certain.

Soul Consortium iteration two hundred and eleven has been consumed by an unknown aggressor.

“That's the fourth,” Ironius says, straightening his tie after the gravity shift settles. “Can't you two work any faster?”

“The interface is complex and the jewel's structure is
alien to this universe,” Demetri says. “Many of the nanodrones
are experiencing software crashes when they encounter paradoxical structures. We're not dealing with atoms, remember?”

“So compensate,” Ironius says through clenched teeth.

I want to tell Ironius to shut his loud mouth and get on with the task that Demetri gave him, but I need to concentrate. “Demetri, can you cross-reference that last algorithm
with mine? I need to use them in the Control Core software. It keeps collapsing the singularity containment registers.”

Demetri nods. “One moment.” Nanodrones drop like trickling streams of black oil from his fingers, disappearing into his keypad. “There.”

“Thanks.” A metallic spider tickles the back of my hand and I brush it aside, disgusted. It clinks across the chrome decking and runs up Demetri's leg to join the rest of its brood. “When we're done here, I'd like to hear the story behind your nanodrones.”

Demetri doesn't bother to look at me. “You wouldn't,” he says and then follows up with, “You.” By his tone I know he is not talking to me. “Are you ready with the field calibrators?”

“The name is Ironius, and yes, I've—”

Without warning, a roaring howl tears through the Navigation Sphere, and a massive gravity surge crushes us into the floor. I cannot breathe. Blood rushes away from my head, making me feel dizzy, and above the rushing in my ears comes the fierce bass rumble of a nearby explosion. A few seconds later, we are released as the gravity is completely removed. The three of us drift upward, desper
ately reaching out to grasp at something for stability, heading toward the dead moon at the core of the sphere. Demetri's
nanodrones scatter like a cloud of flies, disoriented by the disturbance.

“Qod! What the . . . ?” I yell.

Normal gravity returns and I drop four body lengths, landing awkwardly on my back and crying out. Pain lances my spine and I realize our situation must be getting even more serious. Pain is only ever felt when the Control Core is damaged. I look to my left to see that Ironius is already on his feet, moving to scoop Demetri from the floor.

“Dead,” he says through gritted teeth.

The spiders jostle around the body at terrifying speed, as if Demetri's death has sent them into a panic.