A/N: Apologies, I'm running late this morning for some IRL things and did not have time to post review responses, but I did read them through the week and I appreciate everyone who took the time to leave a review. And now, we learn some things about dragons.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Et Congregaverunt Cunctos Seniores
ELAPSED TRANSMISSION TIME: 6 minutes ten seconds.
COMPRESSION RATE: 150 PBPS.
RESTORING: In progress….
DATABASE DIAGNOSTIC: Complete. 19 GB corrupted data, purging files.
MUSCLE FIBER RELAY STATUS: 100%.
FACIAL COMMUNICATION ALGORITHMS: Complete.
SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE ENGINE: Active.
POSITRONIC SENTIENCE ENGINE: Complete.
LANGUAGE MODULES: Complete.
POWER: 100%
SYSTEM RESTORATION: Complete.
Theresa opened her eyes. He sat opposite her, waiting. He looked so old; so tired. "Ilmarinen."
The ancient god blinked and fought to focus his eyes. He was once a tall creature. Now, hunched over with years of hard labor, he stood at only a little over two meters. His beard, once the color of straw, had gone white and patchy.
"My Vaimo," he said to her. His voice, once deep and powerful, now sounded like a breeze blowing through leaves. "My Golden Bride. You return."
"You look tired, Ilmarinen," she said. She sat up from her body's charging cradle and leaned forward to cup his cheek. "Kratos asks too much of you."
"And he will ask more yet. So shall I give." His calloused, powerful hand laid gently over hers. "Let what power remains be in the service of something greater than myself. This is my sampo. My telos."
By human measure, Theresa was one hundred and twenty three years old. The exact date of her creation she estimated to be in 2005, shortly before Leviathan sank Newfoundland. She saw all of her friends that survived the Titanomachy die of old age. She saw many of their children and even grandchildren perish as well.
That was the blink of an eye to what the being before her had witnessed. Ilmarinen was a god, of similar age to Kratos himself. His pantheon was not the oldest in the world, but he had memories going back thousands of years. He had seen history in a way few could understand. If he were parahuman, he would be a Tinker 11, for he could build anything with anything. Because his smithing was both physical and spiritual, he worked with concepts as much as metal, and was able to forge both into actual, physical items.
He was the lynchpin of the Project. The last living, divine smith who Kratos could convince to aid him.
"Come, beloved," he said, forcing himself from his distracted state. "Let us bathe and dress, and then give counsel to the others."
The rituals the two of them enjoyed were deeply sensual, but Theresa lacked the human drives to know if they were sexual. The bodies that Ilmarinen crafted for her were certainly capable of such action, but he never tried. He was content just to hold her; to bathe her. They spent entire weeks simply talking; her artificial intellect and vast databases, against his equally vast experience and wisdom.
She knew on some level that she was just a precious object to him. He loved her in the same way an art collector might love a Monet.
She did not mind, though. Because he gave her life in a way she could not have otherwise had. The bodies he crafted were not tinker constructs, but divine golems, built with a spark of soul energy that no tinker could ever create. She was alive. She could feel with her skin; taste with her tongue. Smell with her nose. She had a soul, because he crafted one for her. And she would love the god that gave it to her in any way he asked of her.
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
Mars had water, but not in abundance. It was an extravagance to bathe; but it was their ritual. Their intimate bonding. Once cleaned, she dressed in utilitarian-green overalls and walked with her divine companion through the narrow halls of carved, igneous rock. A long string of small LED lights along the arched ceiling of the hall provided their only illumination.
That is, until they reached the Project Control chamber.
Pressured space was at a premium. The control room was the largest gathering space they had, with one thousand square feet of open space. The carved rock of the ceiling hung low over their heads, such that Ilmarinen could easily reach up and touch it.
What the room did have, though, were windows. Pale, weak sunlight shone in through the twenty centimeter thick carbon-reinforced fused silica glass. In the far distance, little more than a dark smudge, she could just make out the far side of the Valles Marineris. The canyon was so wide it was difficult to physically see from within. The project was built into the side of the great Martian canyon.
She drifted forward and watched as a series of long, slow dust devils rose from the pale, lifeless Martian surface beyond. Even here, built into the walls of the Valles Marineras, the tenuous atmosphere danced with their devils.
One devil did not stand outside. Dhafer did not look away from his console, though he did greet them. "Sabah el kheir, Dragon."
He did not speak verbally. Age and cancer had robbed him of his mandible. Instead, a synthetic voice based on Dragon's own algorithms emerged from the room's speakers. He rarely moved at all, if he could help it.
"Good morning, Dhafer," she said. "How are you feeling today?"
"I had odd dreams," the ancient parahuman said. "What news of Earth?"
Theresa downloaded the latest feeds from earth. Because of her multiple bodies, it was easier for her to transmit her consciousness back and forth than to try to have live communications. Even though their transmission times were getting lower due to the planetary positioning, it was still a six minute delay. Why bother signalling, when she could simply be on Earth to speak to the various stakeholders for both projects.
"Shukran," he said. A moment later, he made an electronic squeal like feedback. "Lahore."
"Yes," she said. "India did agree to an International monitoring force from the Pan-African block, at least.".
Dhafter should not have still been alive. She knew he suffered pain daily. Both his hands were cybernetic–she helped build them. His heart was artificial, as was most of his spine. He had a dialysis machine built into the life support suit he wore since his kidneys had failed four years before, and he subsisted on a liquid diet due to having no jaw with which to eat. He was almost more mechanical than human as he approached his one hundred and fortieth birthday.
He would have died decades before if not for the company he kept.
"The monthly supply shipment arrived from the HBP," he reported dutifully. "They brought chocolate for milkshakes. I like them very much."
"I made sure the last shipment from earth included it," Theresa said.
There were two simultaneous projects at work on the planet. The public project, the one necessary to gain the international funding for her to build their initial space crafts, was the Martian Habitation Project. After the Titanomachy and the realization that there were beings of unspeakable power that existed in the void, the leading voices of humanity argued that they could no longer afford to be a one-world species.
The first Pythia of the Telosian Church was herself an ardent champion of leaving earth. Her own children and grandchildren were leading the push into the solar system with their mining consortiums. The Church also had a stake in the MHP.
Secretly nestled within the MHP, but of vastly greater importance, was the Tuanela Project.
The Primary MHP facility was in Gale Crater, several hundred kilometers due west from the Rift Zone of the Valles Marineris where she lived. The Gale Crater dome housed an international team of several hundred scientists. The Tuanela Facility held a dozen–some of whom had outlived their allotted time by many decades.
The Project was over ninety years in the making. The Tuanela Facility was just the last stage–the final component in Kratos' quest to end, once and for all, the parahuman threat to Earth.
"Old friend, you look so tired. Shall you not take an apple?"
Theresa turned in surprise. She neither heard nor saw the newcomer. Then again, Sigyn was an Aesir goddess, one of the very last of her pantheon to survive Ragnarok. She could cloak herself in invisibility so profound that no technological means could locate her. She was also the reason Dhafer still lived. She knew the magical spell of Idunn. Her golden apples could provide supernatural healing and long life.
The spell she spoke did not have the same power as what Telos could do, but then again Sigyn was a minor goddess even within her pantheon, where Telos was born to be a queen of gods.
Even so, it was because of Sigyn that a tinker born in the latter years of the twentieth century was alive well into the twenty-second. Nor was he the only parahuman on Mars whose life had been sustained beyond their normal length.
Ilmarinen did not seem to trust the goddess. "Your blessings do little for me, Aesir," he said.
"I understand." Sigyn was, objectively, beautiful. She had long, flowing golden hair with a luster that in a mortal could only be achieved by the most expensive conditioning and care. For her, it was simply intrinsic. She had an oval face, with perfectly symmetrical features down to the millimeter. Dragon often performed the mirror profile test on her, and no matter what side she mirrored, Sigyn always looked perfect.
Sigyn regarded Theresa now. "Dragon, how was your time back home? Were you able to speak to Him?"
"Yes," Theresa said. To Sigyn, there was only one 'Him'. Anyone else, she named. "I'll give everyone the full report when they're here."
"Of course."
Like Ilmarinen, Sigyn was ancient. Unlike her companion, the goddess tended to act condescending to those around her. In her defense, she was a god. Her arrogance was not wholly unwarranted. But after spending so much time in the company of Kratos and Ilmarinen, it still felt somewhat jarring.
"The son of Zeus comes," Ilmarinen noted as he started toward the narrow conference table at the center of the room.
Dragon was not sure how, but the three gods of the Tuanela Facility always knew where the others were, as if they could feel each other.
The far door of the control chamber opened and Kratos stepped into the room flanked by the American tinker Prometheus on his right. Like Dhafer, Prometheus had far exceeded his natural lifespan, and it showed. Prometheus walked on cybernetic legs, with a titanium spinal column put in place forty years previously.
The energy tinker was, like Ilmarinen, one of the lynchpins of the project. Dragon designed the ships that transported humanity to Mars, but Prometheus designed the fusion reactors that powered her ships, and the facility.
Kratos himself looked no different from when she first met him, over a century ago. Tall, broad and powerful. His pepper-gray beard had grown long again, his pale head gleamed under the lighting of the hall. However, unlike Ilmarinen, Kratos had not grown weak away from Earth. He walked on a planet that had a spiritual connection with his domain. He was Mars while Rome was ascendent on Earth, and that connection lingered in the odd metaphysical way of divinity that Dragon had studied, but only barely understood.
"Kenzie Martin died," he said as he sat.
Theresa took three nanoseconds to center herself at the devastating news. "When?"
"Oh, the mortal never woke up this morning," Sigyn said lightly. "She passed in peace, I assure you."
Death did not mean the same to gods as to mortals. This much Theresa new. And yet it took multiple subroutines to suppress her anger at the goddess's callousness.
The old god of war regarded Theresa intently. "Speak. Is he almost ready?"
"The Tartarus facility is complete," Theresa reported. "Eden's remains are 100% contained. The last parahuman trigger was over twenty years ago, in Bangladesh."
The last natural trigger was a starving boy of twelve. His trigger was broken, resulting in the death of the 546 people of his village. More would have died if Kratos hadn't arrived so quickly. His ax not only could kill parahumans, but the spiritual aspects of its divine properties could kill the underlying dimensional parasites that gave parahumans their power. And one of his companions in the decades after the Titanomachy was an African goddess who could rip the shards themselves from the parahumans. For fifty years, the two walked the earth cleansing humanity of the remnants of the Destroyers.
Until now, when only the contained body of a previously unknown entity they called Eden still existed. Even so, it was a threat that Kratos was unwilling to tolerate on the Earth. The other gods he worked with agreed, hence the project.
Kratos accepted her report with a nod before turning to Theresa's aged companion. "And the means of transport? Old friend, how fares your work?"
"The runecraft is nearly done," Ilmarinen reported. "All that remains is for the runes to be charged to open the gate. The chamber itself is finished. Once the corpse of the god killer is there, it shall be forever imprisoned."
"He believes his side is nearly ready as well," Theresa reported. "Within three days. But he warned me to tell you all that much can go wrong. The physical form is just one small aspect of the whole. Eden's true mass is almost impossible to measure, but she likely has as much matter as a nebula. If his containment enchantments fail, the body will destroy the teleportation channel."
"Hmm." Kratos looked intently around the room; as sometimes happened, she could see distortions around his head and shoulders, like the distortions over a fire or very hot object. "Three days, then. Prepare yourselves."
Kratos did not believe in long meetings. He stood and left, with Prometheus again following after.
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
The God of War did not need a pressure suit on the surface of Mars. None of the gods did, really. They had physical bodies, and seemed to breathe like mortals, but there was a spiritual aspect to them that transcended mortal limits. Even Sigyn, slim beauty that she was, would be considered a Brute 6 by the standard of the old Parahuman Response Team rating.
Theresa also did not need a pressure suit. Her breath was a simulacrum; one of the many convincing traits Ilmarinen built into her lovingly crafted body. She stood with Kratos outside of the Tuanela facility, where he worked on a circuit board. The facility had no defensive capabilities–when they were done, they intended to destroy its surface structures. The actual containment chamber was nearly a kilometer under the surface and deeper into the valley.
"It's her," Theresa said.
He paused only a second before placing the new board in to replace the older, damaged one.
"She was fourteen in appearance and in good health when she returned. She wandered around Hope's Bay looking for your house. She has no memory of anything after Narwhal took her to Newfoundland. She appears to be fully mortal. Her only unique feature is a single rune at the base of her spine."
Kratos dropped his arms. "That was not included in the initial reports." In the thin atmosphere, his voice sounded muffled and distant.
He closed the access port and began walking up the scree of the valley cliff. Theresa followed.
"The Pope declared Telos to be an agent of Satan," Theresa pointed out. "Imams around the world declared jihad against the Telosian Church. That's what contributed to the Pakistan-Indian War."
"The war would have been worse without my influence. North Africa remembers me."
"Yes." Theresa had to increase her processing power to her feet to keep from tripping. She compensated automatically to Mars's lower gravity, but it still took a slight increase in processing power. Kratos moved inexorably, like a fast-moving glacier, as they made their way up. "She's twenty, now. She's attending school at Boston College."
A grunt answered her.
"We'd be in planetary position to launch in three weeks," Theresa said. "With the fusion thrust drive on the shuttle, we could get you back to earth in six months."
"To what purpose? My daughter is dead." He paused, and glanced back at her. "Whoever this child is, she is not my daughter."
"Pythia Dorothea seemed so sure. Perhaps…"
"Enough. My daughter is dead."
One did not argue with Kratos. The question or right or wrong rarely mattered. "Very well."
Within her mind, she received a signal from Dhafer. "Transport commences within the hour."
This time, Kratos turned and faced her. "Prepare yourself, Dragon. Let us be done with this cold world."
He hastened his steps and she followed until they reached the exterior airlock to admit them to the lift. She turned for one last glimpse of the pale blue, lifeless sky before the doors closed and they began to drop deep within the stone of the dead world. Neither of them spoke during the thirty-minute-long descent.
The Containment Facility, when they managed to navigate their way through the defensive maze, defied description. In one sense, it was a room of a hundred square meters. A perfectly cubed space precise to a fraction of a nanometer. And yet to the eye, it was vast beyond measure. Its walls were crafted not just by tinkers, but Ilmarinen's skilled hands. Reality itself folded over and over again in the walls, capturing dimension after dimension and multiplying the space to near infinite area. Even to Theresa's divinely crafted eyes, the walls were difficult to look at.
One wall, however, remained unfinished. The intended occupant of this space had not yet arrived.
The ancient, withered form of Ilmarinen waited for them. Theresa's companion looked even more tired than when she returned from Earth. He greeted Kratos with a flat glare even as he used his red-glowing chisel to finish the runes on the floor. "I do not like this magic," he said. "It is not ours."
"I know."
Others were coming. Sigyn drifted out of nowhere to stand near the odd, alien runes their ally on Earth provided. And then came the shambling remnants–the last parahumans. Some came to Mars against their wills, others because they understood the necessity. The broken triggers that followed Scion's death illustrated the danger humanity still faced.
Dhafer came on his scooter, ancient and decrepit. Prometheus was little better.
Abigail Dartmore was the daughter of two parahumans who was born on Mars in the early days of the project. She was seventy, now, and possessed a second-generation shard that provided her a geokinetic ability that was useful in the early days of excavation.
Others came–Dragon knew them as well as any people in her life. She'd worked closely with them for decades, now. The last, though, was one she'd never grown close to.
Ciara De Daan appeared at first glance to be a stunningly beautiful woman of twenty-five. Perhaps not on the level of Sigyn, but few would say she was not the epitome of feminine beauty. She was older than Theresa was.
Ciara was a demigod, daughter of Brigid the Smith. Like Theresa's long-dead friend Narwhal, Ciara was born to be a champion of humanity, but was corrupted by her parahuman power. Her power, though, was so vast and effective that she might as well have been a god herself. She could take parahuman powers, and the imprint of the host of those powers, and add it to her own vast collection of powers. Since the Titanomachy, she had been a part of Krato's organization to hold sigil against the enemy for the benefit of man. In the course of that work, she'd accrued thousands of individual 'ghosts'-the psychic imprint of hosts and their powers.
She also deeply, desperately despised Sigyn. "It's time, then?"
"Yes," Kratos said. "Come."
As much as the immortal parahuman despised Sigyn, she respected Kratos. It bordered on worship, in fact. She came and stood beside the god of war as Ilmarinen finished the alien anchor rune on the floor.
"It is done," Ilmarinen said. His voice boomed through the room like a dirge. "My work is complete. Brace yourselves."
Theresa did not understand the sudden sense of dread that filled her processors. The air before them began to shimmer with a multitude of colors that spanned the gamut of human detection and beyond. A rainbow that spanned ultraviolet to infrared. Her companions gasped, but when she tried to move to Ilmarinen's side, she could not. She looked down at the carved floor and saw, illuminated under her feet, one of those alien runes that she'd not seen before.
Did the rune move, or had it always been there?
Dhafer moaned–an electronic squeal like a dying computer. The other parahumans also writhed in pain. Ciara stiffened. "What is this? Why can't I move?"
"We're crafting a new branch of Yggdrasil, child," Sigyn said, raising her voice over a strange wail in the air. "Did you think it could be done without sacrifice?"
"She died for humanity," Kratos said, grounding the words out. "I shall not let her sacrifice be for nothing! Let us do the same, if it saves those she loved!"
Reality tore. A brilliant white-green color burst through what looked like a jagged tear in existence. Beyond it, Theresa could not perceive anything but hints of shapes. Her auditory systems detected vague sounds, like whispers, but nothing even her most advanced systems could make intelligible.
Dhafer dropped to the floor, unmoving. Abigail and two others soon followed.
Ciara grunted in pain.
"Ilmarinen!"
The ancient smith turned and looked at her, a wistful smile on his face. "I lied to you, beloved. You have no soul. But that is why you will survive this. That is why I made you so. I wish you to live, and remember. My beloved. My Golden Bride."
Streaks of white-green plasma, like bolts of lightning, tore through the rip in reality and struck every single body in the chamber. Even mighty Kratos stiffened and grunted in pain. Ciara, once known as Glastig Uaine, screamed in agony. Sigyn, too, screamed.
And her Ilmarinen, her beloved old god, simply crumbled into dust as the last vestiges of his divinity were violently ripped away.
The small rip grew into a vast chasm that at once was as large as the planet, but no larger than the chamber. Theresa's visual processors flatlined; her audio systems were overwhelmed with the sound of long-time friends and colleagues screaming, until suddenly it was over.
Whatever arcane grip held her in place failed; her crafted body collapsed to the ground. Every motivator and actuator had failed catastrophically. Her central positronic systems were still intact and running a multitude of self-diagnostics, but her body itself was damaged beyond repair.
Desperately, she sent her consciousness through the dedicated wireless into the security system of the chamber itself. She had no other body on Mars–only her Earth body remained, at least the one Ilmarinen crafted for her. She started to try and organize a data burst, but for some reason the Tuanela dish was malfunctioning.
She was trapped!
Perimeter sensors drew her attention back to the containment chamber. Without human eyes, she sent her consciousness through cameras just like she used to have to do, when she was a bound, limited dragon.
Their ally, somehow translated almost instantly from Earth, walked into a chamber transformed beyond belief. She switched to broad spectrum analysis, and it still defied description. Was this what they had been containing in the Himalayas for the last century?
A mountain of flesh filled the chamber, and all the folded dimensions it contained. It was gray, lifeless flesh that defied any better description. Under the unsparing light she could not see any lines or features at all over the mountain of soft gray tissue.
If she stopped panning her camera and focused on one section, however, suddenly details came into focus. From the flesh she saw protruding body parts. Arms, hands, legs. The outlines of torsos both feminine and male. A forest of them came into detail, as if her lenses refused to see them at first. Each body part was exquisitely formed, like hand or foot models. Each torso was sculpted and perfect, the feminine with beautifully shaped breasts, the masculine with sculpted abs and broad shoulders.
Past the perfect parts she saw the imperfect, the in-progress. In some spots, she saw limbs connected to each other in grotesque fashions, in other places she could see only stretches of skin, veins, muscles or exposed bone, as if something had been experimenting or building those various parts.
If she panned wide enough, she saw where the organic melted into fractals of crystal that seemed to stretch off into the infinite.
Their ally stood taller than Kratos, but slim and athletic with apparent youth. His hair was as black and hung about his broad shoulders. He wore divine armor that seemed to shimmer like fire. It was not crafted by Ilmarien, but by his own hand. The sword he carried, likewise, bristled with divine power.
He seemed unaffected by the chaos and death around him. Deeply tanned skin spoke of Mediterranean or possibly Middle Eastern origins, but his eyes were a strangely familiar shade that shifted between blue and green as he examined those who fell bringing him to Mars.
The first he approached was Sigyn, kneeling down beside her. The goddess had been drained of her divinity, and now seemed nothing more than a withered husk. The god leaned over and gently kissed her lifeless forehead. He did the same, strangely, to Ciara. One by one, he knelt down and paid respect to the fallen, until he reached Kratos.
The god placed his hand on Kratos chest, and as Dragon watched, the air shimmered with heat until Kratos took a deep, gasping breath.
She couldn't help herself. She assumed control of the chamber speakers. "My body…"
The god who at that time called himself Nari looked up directly at the nearest camera, as if he knew exactly where she was. "Dragon," he said, using her old cape name.
"My body–Ilmarinen made it for me. Please, can you fix it? Or our satellite dish, so I can transfer back to earth?"
Instead of answering, Nari gathered the unconscious, weakened Kratos in his arms and stood. He held the fallen god of war bridle-style in his arms, as tenderly as he kissed Sigyn's body.
"You are a hero, Dragon," the young god said. "More than even you know. My friend Ilmarinen crafted the body for you because you had to be contained. It was not your status as an AI that was a threat. It was the parahuman shard you held within your systems. If you remained free, your shard would bud, and the threat would continue. As long as one parahuman remained on earth, humanity was at risk"
He looked around at the containment. "Just as Ilmarinen knew he would not survive the ritual, so too did he know that you could never leave this chamber. With the other's sacrifice, you are the last parahuman, Dragon. And for the sake of humanity, I had to slay you."
"No! Wait, please! I can still help you…"
He was gone. He and Kratos disappeared into the same fissure from which he arrived. Moments later, her cameras began to vibrate violently. She quickly flitted through the various security systems, only to digitally shriek in agony as a massive EM burst rippled through the base, destroying the computer systems.
She fled the network back into her broken body, trying desperately to escape the destruction of the Tuanela's computers. The ground under her broken form violently shook, suggesting it was not just an EM pulse, but a larger, more powerful fission reaction above.
Around her, the lights failed, throwing the dimensionally folded space into pure darkness than none of her spectral systems could penetrate.
"No," she moaned, with an all too human dread. "No, please no."
From the utter darkness around her, she heard the faint hint of whispers.
No, nO, NO, no, nO, NO, No….
She screamed as loud as her systems would allow, but no one alive was left to hear.