44. Wake-Up Call

Death had come to the planet.

Monolithic spacecraft filled the sky, impossibly vast bolts of green lightning leaping from their crescent-shaped hulls to scour the ground far below. A silver tide swept over the land, impassive, skull-faced warriors cutting down all in their path. Frozen images leapt out at him from the carnage – here, an isolated squad of soldiers was overrun, their mouths opening and faces contorting in wordless, terrified shrieks as a swarm of gleaming metal insects dragged them away, there, a family was caught in the beams of the invaders' weapons, the unearthly energies stripping away first skin, then flesh, then bone. Throughout it all, not a sound could be heard, as if some grotesquely vivid silent film was being played out for his entertainment.

Instead, his ears were filled with the screaming of three voices – voices belonging to people he had known and cared about for half his life. He raced through a maze of endless, subterranean tunnels, the final, chaotic hours of his world flashing before his eyes as the agonised wailing grew ever-louder.

There was light ahead – dull, dead, and devoid of warmth. The screams had stopped, leaving only quiet, broken sobs. He couldn't tell who was making them, what state they were in, or even whether all of them were still alive.

He reached the surface, the tunnel floor spreading out into a wide, rocky plain. There was no sign of life, let alone the sources of the screams that had lured him here.

That was not to say that there was no movement, though.

Metal gleamed all around him, thousands upon thousands of elongated, inhuman rictus-masks underlit by the vile green glow of their weapons' focusing chambers. More were gathering with every moment, their sculpted faces staring at him impassively. There was blood on some of them – on their feet, their clawed hands, their polished silver armour. As ever, there was no indication of where it had come from.

A shadow crept over them, shroud-like, silent as a cloud but far more regular in shape. The enemy fleet's flagship had arrived, a nine-kilometre-long crescent that moved with a murderous, alien grace. Gauss-lightning crackled across the spires, pyramids, and other, more bizarre geometric structures jutting from the ship's underside in nonsensical, patternless patterns, pristine and anarchically elegant despite the best efforts of the planet's few remaining defence guns.

He had seen this massive tomb-craft at the forefront of the invasion, long strips of armour peeling from its hull as the defenders' orbital batteries pumped enough fire into it to liquefy continents. It hadn't taken it long to repair the damage – minutes at most. Then the defenders' guns were out of ammunition, and thousands of the fragile, mortal human crewmen (plus millions of slightly less fragile cyborg-clones and daemons) who had so obligingly field-tested the invading fleet's defensive capabilities had suddenly found themselves intimately acquainted with its offensive capabilities as well.

Something was descending from the belly of the ship, a point of darkness, a shadow within the shadow. As one, the immortal soldiers surrounding him lifted their heads to gaze upon it, the distant corpse-lights in the hollow sockets of their eyes flaring with recognition. The voices were starting again – a faint, indistinct clawing at the back of his mind.

The dark figure above unfolded, all flapping, cloudy robes of woven night and dull, rippling metal skin. Its yellow eyes bored into his own, pits of smouldering insanity as old as the universe, and he tugged his gaze away, shaking and quivering uncontrollably.

It was not that he had felt fear in that moment, though he had – sheer primal terror that would stop a mortal's heart and burn into the minds of his descendants for a dozen generations. He had felt something worse, something new. For the first time in his few decades of life, the boy who had become a god, the man who had shaped the destiny of universes... felt total insignificance.

The whispers rose in pitch and volume, becoming screams once more, and he lashed out, a blast of power melting every alien warrior within eight kilometres before surging towards the silent reaper above. There was a gleam of metal, a slight suggestion of a blade being drawn from the depths of its robe... and then the wall of coruscating energy smashed into it, leaving nothing behind as it forged onwards and shattered the gigantic battleship into a billion tiny fragments.

The screaming had stopped. Everything was silent. He took a slow, careful step forwards, wondering why his legs felt so wobbly, and then something started sliding wetly and he thudded, face-first, into the ground.

That was when the second blow from the scythe took off most of the fingers on his right hand.

An invisible force lifted him into the air, flipping him over before slamming him back into the ground. The cloaked figure was right above him, silent and inexorable as death itself. It reached out with the scythe, the blade losing its razor-edge to become something broader and blunter, before punching into his torso. His eyes widened and he tried to scream, but no sound came out.

He could see the ends of his severed legs. They were half a metre away, bleeding gently into the dirt.

The colossal alien had sharpened its blade again, using it to idly carve abstract patterns into his chest as its other hand reached towards him. The voices gibbered half-comprehensibly, louder with every fresh burst of pain from his tormentor's weapon. There was nothing he could do. Limbless, agonised, he could not even muster the concentration for another useless psychic blast.

The gigantic, clawed hand came closer. There was something dangling from it. A piece of ragged flesh. An eye, as blue as the day she had stepped onto the deck of the carrier, fourteen years old, the same age as him, her yellow dress flapping in the crosswind...

Tzintchi of the Nine Fingers woke up screaming, sobbing, and covered in sweat, his form shifting agitatedly around the edges as he hyperventilated into his bedsheet. A strong, gentle pair of arms embraced him, pulling him against a warm, soft female body as a hand stroked his hair.

"It's all right, Shinji. I'm here, you're safe, it's all right..."

His breathing slowed, some faint measure of awareness beginning to return as the nightmare receded. "Ma... ma?"

"That's right," Mislaato replied soothingly. "Mama's here."


The Eye was apparently in a military mood this morning, resembling a twenty-first-century sci-fi fan's idea of a high-tech command centre as filtered through a madman's scrapyard, several quarts of bad acid, and the lower intestine of a week-dead cancer patient. Reigle was hunched in the corner, manipulating a cluster of pale, fleshy monitors with her dripping pseudopods.

Tzintchi swept through the entrance portal, suit immaculate and hair neatly brushed, a multicoloured nimbus around his head the only evidence of his inhuman nature. Mislaato followed him, looking concerned. She'd suggested that he take some time to centre himself, to recover from the nightmare, but he knew that simply wasn't an option. Now, more than ever, he needed to see their progress in the project that would make this all worthwhile.

The instabilities, predictably, had been getting slowly worse as he and his wives kept exerting themselves to muster their defences against the various universes they'd stirred up. The clones were getting even more psychotic, forcing the fleshcrafters to reduce their intellect more and more, which was hardly good news considering that they needed the artificial beings in order to have an army of any reasonable size. Entire swathes of the Earth were now uninhabitable, reports of unprovoked daemon attacks were becoming too common to ignore, and even his own mind, that which had once been his greatest weapon and most sovereign property, was starting to be affected.

Eighteen years ago, he would have had a solution for all this. A simple, elegant plan, the precisely-engineered details of its architecture gleaming in the workshop of his imagination. Eighteen years ago, he wouldn't have got himself into this situation in the first place. Now, though, he could barely think, let alone scheme. Ideas, inspirations, trickled away like water whenever he tried to focus on them and turn them into something concrete. An interdimensional empire awaited his command, and far too often he had nothing to give them.

Worst of all were the fugues, gaps in his routine where he had no idea what he'd been doing or even if he'd been doing anything at all. He'd tried to keep track of his movements, to monitor himself, but in the fluid, uncertain time and space in which he now dwelt, it was a futile endeavour.

He wished that his old mentor, Khnemu of the Thousand Sons, was here to offer him advice. The ancient, time-displaced sorcerer had been the beginning of all this, finding a lost, abandoned little boy still reeling from the death of his mother and turning him into a man capable of overturning the universe. He had not merely been a guiding light and an ideal to aspire to – he had been a father to the young Shinji beyond anything that ice-hearted bastard in distant Tokyo-3 could provide.

Seeking him out now would be impossible, though. There had been an argument, an exile... at least, he thought it had been an exile. He vaguely recalled a little bit more screaming and bloodshed than the typical exile involved. Warp's teeth, it's so hard to remember anything these days...

All he had to hold onto now were the reports from the Eye, the tiny, incremental assurances that they were making a difference, that their plans were still approaching fruition. The dream had almost been welcome, a reminder of the evils of the multiverse that they had devoted themselves to ending.

So he smiled at his sister-wife, patted her gently on the head, asked for the usual update, and sank his fingers into the room's phantom furniture until his knuckles turned white.

"Our remaining contacts in the allied universes sent us a message three hours ago," Reigle stated in the dead monotone she'd been adopting increasingly frequently of late. "The collaborative military exercise codenamed 'Operation Guardian' is now underway, and a combined invasion fleet comprising several thousand vessels from at least three different civilisations is headed for Bloodhaven. In accordance with our earlier predictions, they appear to be attempting to close our only remaining route out of the Great Wall. Estimated time of arrival – three weeks."

Tzintchi winced. "Well, that's faster than we'd anticipated. Any guesses on how they managed to untangle their heads from their backsides and assemble a fleet of that size so soon after the pounding we gave them?"

"Conjecture only. However, there has been passing mention of a new technology called the 'Spiral Driver'. Details are vague-to-nonexistent, but the name, I believe, is suggestive enough."

"No kidding. The Spirals have started sharing their technology? I really hope you've got some good news about the Stargate Project, because it's safe to say that we are running out of time here."

Reigle's expression changed in a manner entirely unfamiliar to him. On anyone else, though, it would almost have looked... playful.

"There is... something," she replied slowly. "An encoded communiqué from Bloodhaven, intended for the eyes of Lord Tzintchi and Lord Tzintchi alone."

Something went crunch inside the chair Tzintchi was clutching.

"A top secret communiqué, eh?" he asked mildly, reaching over her shoulder to grab the indicated dataslate. "My word. Any idea what's inside it?"

"It was intended for the eyes of Lord Tzintchi and Lord Tzintchi alone," she repeated placidly.

"... but you had a look anyway, didn't you?"

Reigle's only reply was a look conveying an air of injured innocence that should have been quite impossible for anyone in such an advanced state of decay.

He turned to his other wife. "Misato, have you heard anything about this?"

"Sorry, Shinji. I'm as much in the dark as you are."

"Oh, I see what's going on. You're in this together, huh? Don't try to deny it, I know how you think. You're setting me up, aren't you? Aren't you?"

There was silence for a moment, and then someone giggled. Improbably enough, it sounded like Reigle.

"Fine, fine," Tzintchi sighed theatrically. "Here I am, turning on the slate with no idea of what I'm going to find because of the cruel betrayal of two of my very own wives. See? I'm doing it. Not a hint? Not the slightest peep? You wound me, my beloveds. You wound me most grievously."

The slate beeped to life, intricate holographic displays jumping from its gleaming surface. The god flicked through them with short, practiced gestures, nodding his head as he mentally sculpted the reams of data into something halfway comprehensible. Thirty seconds later, he looked up, eyes wide.

"Holy crap, does this say what I think it does?"

"You tell us," Mislaato replied, smirking.

"Well, if these guys' calculations are correct... hold on, are they? Let me check their maths... ha, knew it, forgot to carry the y on the third line, and if you look here... see, this is why you don't let mortals do a god's work, let me revise my projections, now, if we filter Plan G through timeline number seventeen, then... oh, wow. That can't be right. That cannot be right."

He was next to his older wife now, waving the slate in her face. "You see this? You see these numbers? Do you have any bloody idea how far off this is from our initial estimates?"

She stepped back, her eyebrows raised. "Uhh... Shinji? You do realise not everyone in this room can think in six dimensions, right?"

"Right, right, sorry. OK, breaking it down now. Now, the basic thrust, about the estimated time for the Stargate network to be up and running? Right on the money. Should be getting it all warmed up by the time the bad guys pop up to say hello, which I think we can all agree is a net positive. What they got wrong, though, was the power output from all this." He chuckled, a slight touch of hysteria in his voice. "And boy, do I mean really wrong."

"So the project will be somewhat less effective than anticipated?" Reigle noted calmly. "Very well. I have already prepared a list of workarounds and alternate strategies that should recoup some of our-"

"No, no, that's not it. You don't get it, do you? The output – it's going to be bigger than anticipated. Like, orders of magnitude bigger. Girls, this is a ruddy paradigm shift we're looking at here."

"Wait – so we've won?" Mislaato asked. "Is that what you're saying?"

"No, that's not what I'm saying. That's like saying that Third Impact ended the Middle Eastern Conflict. I mean, it did, but..." He paused and rubbed his eyes. "This isn't about the enemy universes any more. It isn't about justifying what we've done to get to this point. It isn't even about the C'tan. That's irrelevant now. All of it is irrelevant. Everything we have seen, every injustice that we have had to witness and accommodate... it ends here. We," – he gestured expansively – "have just been granted the keys to the multiverse."

"I might still point out, though, that Suzuhara still has the combined forces of several universes descending upon him," Reigle said. "We may wish to formulate some countermeasures."

"Oh?" Tzintchi grinned. "Did you have some suggestions?"

"Not suggestions – progress reports. Asukhon is currently overseeing the creation of a backup fleet, representing a sixty per cent drain on our powers and requiring Class-H resource allocation." She pulled another (slightly sticky) dataslate out of somewhere that he didn't particularly want to speculate about, and tossed it over with a greasy flipper. "Details are here."

"Hah – knew you'd read the message. Was wondering where Asuka was, too. Still, good call. Always nice to have a Plan B. Don't think we'll be needing it, though."

"You're planning something, aren't you?" Mislaato asked. "That's your I-know-something-that-you-don't-know-and-I'm-loving-every-minute-of-it expression. Don't lie. I've seen it before."

Her husband laughed. "OK, OK, you got me. To be honest, though, it's not like I was hiding anything particularly big – just a little side-investigation, one of those 'wouldn't it be nice if' pie-in-the-sky endeavours. With this data, though, especially the figures on psionic transference... we don't even need to set up auxiliary transmitters on the surface. If I didn't know better, I'd say the whole planet was rigged for this sort of thing from the get-go. So keep at it with the contingencies, the countermeasures, and so on. It's good to be prepared, and we've been blindsided too many times already. But in the meantime... I need to make a few calls."

He felt another queasy memory of the nightmare surface, and brushed it aside. That won't happen. By my father's maggot-ridden corpse, I will not let that happen.

A desk and chair emerged from the roiling netherstuff of the Eye, folding up to accommodate the leader of the gods as he sat down. He rested his elbows on the hard metal surface, folding his hands in front of his face as a pair of gleaming orange sunglasses perched themselves on the bridge of his nose.

"Everything is proceeding according to the scenario."

"So how long have you been waiting to do that for?" his older wife asked, amused.

Tzintchi chuckled. "Misato, you have no idea."


The armoured convoy rumbled along the battered, potholed road, the remote-operated turrets nosing blindly into the sky. They had already fired off two warning salvos to scare off swarms of feral daemons – not strictly necessary, given the current passengers, but after two subjective months on this shift, the crews felt it better to be safe than sorry.

The lead vehicle was a World Raider superheavy tank, a typically overengineered lump of technology with the durability of a nuclear bunker, the firepower of a battleship, and enough transport capacity to hold an entire platoon of soldiers. At the moment, though, the only troops occupying it were a single squad of Space Marines, who were busy keeping a respectful distance from the two women sitting near the front of the passenger compartment.

"The target is Frenchburg, a small town – well, they call it a city – in western Kentucky," Hikari Horaki, daemon princess of Chaos, explained diffidently. "Warp-storms have effectively shut down civilian transport in the southern United States, and we've been hearing rumours of famines and crop-failures in the region... which is pretty much absolute confirmation of that sort of thing, given what we saw in China. Plan is to drop off the equipment and supplies they'll need to stay self-sufficient a while longer, as well as a couple of trained sorcerers to figure out a way to hook them back up to civilisation."

"Well, that sounds neat and all," Asukhon replied, stretching her inhumanly long legs across the tank's cavernous interior and nonchalantly scraping runes into the opposite wall with a clawed toe, "but I really don't see why we couldn't just manifest there, teleport the stuff in, and mix some daiquiris up for the locals whilst they bask in our presence. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. This pussyfooting with convoys just seems... inefficient."

Hikari sighed. "We tried that in China. It... didn't work out so well. You've seen the feral swarms, right? Turns out that having an extremely powerful daemon pop up in your midst doesn't result in the world's greatest first impression. The second town we tried it on, this little place on the Yangtze delta? They had a failsafe, an N2 mine they'd looted from somewhere. If their town got overrun... boom. They probably figured it would be more merciful than what the daemons would do to them, and I can't really dispute their logic. I showed up in their hospital, and... well, you can probably figure out the rest."

"How many were there in the town?"

"Trust me," she said quietly, "you don't want to know. So that's why we're going the slow route. At least armoured convoys are recognisably human. Besides, if you turned up out of the blue? We'd be looking at heart attacks. Multiple. Divine intervention isn't something that most people are used to."

Asukhon nodded. "I see. How long 'til we get there?"

"Ten minutes. We should have a visual shortly."

One of the Marines raised a hand politely. "Ah, that might be a problem, ma'am. This old girl took some pretty heavy damage while we were clearing out Louisville, and what with the tight schedule, the passenger compartment's external monitors were sort of low-priority on the repair list. You may have seen the fresh paint when you were getting in."

Asukhon nodded. "I see. I've got to admit, I've only heard about Louisville – the storm over Kentucky shut down the scrying pools in the Eye for over an hour, and by then, it was all over. Matter of fact, it's half the reason I popped down from orbit to see what was going on. So what were you up against? Can't think of many things that could cut through a World Raider's armour like that, especially after the adamantium shipments from the Stargate universe started coming in."

The hulking, power-armoured super-soldier shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. "Um... with all due respect, Lady Asukhon, they were Valkyries. Your people. The one that sliced the Raider open was about the size of a barn."

Silence fell, muting out even the rumble of the enormous tank's antigravity engines, as the Goddess of Rage's aura expanded to fill the passenger compartment. It was not a physical sensation, per se. There was no pressure between the ears, no prickling of the skin. It simply imparted a thorough, bone-deep understanding to all present that they were currently in a small, confined space with a being who could crack the planet open like an egg if she so chose. Hikari could have sworn that she heard a distant scraping, as of blades being sharpened.

Asukhon, for her part, just smiled, her face twitching as if she wasn't quite sure what shape her skull was supposed to be. "Well, gosh. You learn something new every day, don't you? Still, we'd best fix that monitor business. Can't have us walking in unprepared, can we? Or driving in. Or – heh – floating. Here, let me."

Gosh. Hikari couldn't remember the last time Asuka Langley Soryuu had used such a mild oath, and in some ways, that was far more frightening than the effects of her aura, or watching as she drew a claw across her own wrist, thick, arterial-red blood pooling unnaturally into a perfect circle on the floor. The seat's arm-rest dug into her side, and she realised that she had unconsciously edged away from her old friend.

The blood cleared and changed colour, an image swimming into focus beneath its surface. The view was from the air, showing the shallow valley in which the little town resided.

"Huh," another Marine noted. "It didn't look like that in the briefing."

That, Hikari felt, was something of an understatement. This is going to be another of the bad ones, isn't it?

Inasmuch as it had been anything, really, Frenchburg had been a tourist town, a stopping-off point from which to explore the surrounding Daniel Boone National Forest, renovated into a bizarre, alien, and strangely beautiful wonderland by the power of the Warp, and the tranquil waters of the nearby Cave Run Lake. Neither the forest nor the place's tourism-friendliness were much in evidence any more.

The three hills surrounding the town had been stripped of vegetation, trenches and fortifications stretching down from their crowns to the highways below to form a rough, uneven defensive line. Some buildings had burnt down, others had simply been hammered flat by some vast, unknown force, and even the mostly intact ones were hardly in the best of repair. Tiny, thankfully-human figures moved along the ground, scurrying towards the nearest hard-points with automatic, practiced efficiency. Unsurprisingly, it appeared that they had seen the convoy coming.

"This town went dark a week ago, right?" Asukhon asked. "Look at those earthworks there – they must have taken months to build. That deforestation doesn't look too recent, either. What the hell's going on here?"

"That'd be one week subjective," Hikari replied. "A warp-storm – a bad one – can screw with the time/space continuum in ways we still haven't fully grasped, and the temporal weirdness has only been getting worse since time-squeezing became standard practice in the orbital factories. All that ship construction up there, turning years into days so we can match output with whoever's trying to kill us this week? Sometimes, it leaks. Rough guess? I'd say this town's been out of the loop for more like a decade from their perspective. Not the worst we've seen, but definitely up there."

"You mean... we caused this?"

Well, I don't see many other people around here capable of trashing Einsteinian physics with the wave of a hand, do you? "Pretty much, yes. Judging by the timing, I'd peg this one – and the recent batch of storms in general – as resulting from the Bloodhaven relief force you've been working on, though to be honest, it's hard to tell. They're kind of all over the place these days. Could even be another aftershock from the Divine Assassin training programme all those months ago, for all I know. Yes, I know, I get it, necessary, important, vital for the survival of our civilisation and humanity as a whole, just a step on the road to a brighter tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera. And the fact that it's going to be helping out my husband is nice, too. Let's... just clean up the mess we've got here for now, shall we?"

The goddess nodded. "Yes. Let's."

A piercing whistle sounded from above the tank, culminating in the thud of an explosion off to the side of the road.

"Huh. Seems like they have mortars." More explosions. "OK, make that lots of mortars. Excuse me, Asuka, I need to take care of this."

Hikari made a brief gesture, and a flash of white light emerged from the palm of her hand, vanishing into the vehicle's roof. A silver-white dome of energy formed over the convoy, the remaining artillery rounds pattering onto it like rain.

"Hrm. Good fire-pattern. They seem to be pretty well-organised. Captain, see what you can find on the local frequencies. With any luck, they have a comms network we can tap into."

"Aye, ma'am," the tank commander's voice replied from the other side of the forward bulkhead. "Hold on... looks like we're in luck. They're using pre-Impact military headsets, and the signal's coming in loud and clear. Seems they reckon the convoy's an illusion, and they're trying to flush out whatever's hiding under it. Apparently, it's not the first time that's happened, though never on this scale. They're... pretty freaked out, ma'am. We might be looking at some sort of last-stand protocol here."

"Let's... try not to let that happen, shall we? Get on the line, try to talk them down, and see if we can arrange a meeting. We haven't lost a town on this continent yet, and I don't want this to be our first."

As she glanced again at the scrying pool, something caught Hikari's eye. Frenchburg was the local county seat, the administrative centre of the surrounding area, and as a consequence, the courthouse at the intersection of the two main highways was one of the largest and most impressive buildings in town. After Third Impact had irrevocably wedded church and state across the planet, its significance had only increased. She had seen the photographs taken before the storms, showing the lovingly-detailed devotional murals that wound over the walls like painted vines.

Now, though, the walls were whitewashed. An artillery nest had replaced the older half's central tower, with no sign of the intricate stained-glass windows illustrating the gods' ascension. And the sculpture in front of the main entrance, depicting the eight-pointed star of Chaos in the finest white marble, had been shattered and turned into an impromptu barricade. OK, that was probably just pragmatism. They needed to fortify the place, and they used the materials available. Besides, I've heard rumours about those murals eating into the side of a building if you leave them too long. Perfectly sensible, logical explanation, right? Right.

I just hope Asuka hasn't seen this yet.

A hand landed on her shoulder, and she jumped in her seat. When she turned around, Asukhon was grinning at her.

"Hey, Hikari, settle down there. Things're going to be fine. I hear that there's six thousand frankfurters in the front truck alone. The original German ones, pure pork, not that American crap they scrape out of the gutter and put in buns. If that doesn't work as a peace-pipe, I don't know what will."

The daemon blinked. "Hold on – wouldn't an American town prefer the American version?"

A contemplative pause. "Huh. You know, I did not think of that. Anyways, if you're worried about me going all backseat-driver on you, don't be. This is your show. I trust you. Just... try to imagine I'm not here, eh?"

Hikari nodded, smiled, and looked through the scrying pool again, noticing the swarms of feral daemons on the distant horizon. Even her warp-enhanced vision had its limits, but she could swear she saw flashes of red and bronze in the dark, ever-circling clouds. Forget you're here? Sorry, Asuka, but that might be a bit tricky...

Above their heads, the next mortar salvo rained down on the shield.


Author's Notes: That's right, you lovely, lovely people, your eyes do not deceive you. This is indeed another update of the Doorstop, and this time it's here to stay. Questions will be answered, further questions will be posed, and the madness will get even... erm... madder.

Have fun!