A/N: Chap 17 review responses are in my forums as normal. For those who caught the Taylor/Lyta error, that was fixed, thank you. Additional note at the bottom.


Part II: Exodus

Chapter Eighteen: Terra Sancta Est

Tina Chin-Moreau was in the middle of her sermon when news of the Congoline Space Elevator collapse surged like lightning across simspace.

The once great Cathedral of The Living Saint had seating capacity for twenty thousand faithful. On that particular day, there were perhaps five hundred or so adherents to the faith present, and many of them spent much of the sermon in simspace, staring blankly forward as cerebral implants took them across the universe or to a virtual pet store. The possibilities were endless, and endlessly distracting.

Tina knew something was wrong when someone shouted abruptly, interrupting the sermon. The woman stood up, gasping. She blinked away her cyberpathy and seemed to realize she'd interrupted the service. The woman at least had the grace to blush. "I beg your pardon, Holiness! The space elevator blew up! It's falling! It's going to wrap around most of the earth! My son…"

She turned and ran from the cathedral. Her pronouncement caused others to seek out the news, and a wave of gasps and cries rippled over those few faithful who still regularly made weekly services.

Tina knew when her hold was finished. She raised her hands in the ending benediction. "Faithful, see to your families, and may Telos guide your steps."

They left without hesitation.

That afternoon in her cramped quarters within the cathedral, as the automated food server prepared her evening meal, Tina herself swam the currents of simspace, dipping into various reports, until she found one by an actual correspondent of the Church itself that she knew and trusted.

The correspondent provided little commentary other than to say that he was in the space anchor at the top of the elevator, and that the explosion of the 6000-year-old facility that had so revolutionized Terran space access during the great colonization drive was not destroyed by accident or happenstance.

The anchor itself was the size of a large arcology–a genuine city in space that permanently housed two million souls and saw over five hundred million pass through its halls annually. It was built with at the time revolutionary gravitic sciences that had since been perfected over the intervening millennia until the residents of the Anchor lived in an environment as safe and productive as anything left on a crowded Terra.

The grand receiving hall, where the various elevator cars arrived from the surface or departed back to it was considered one of the wonders of the human sphere. Even the Aeldari and Kinebranch delegations admitted it was an awe-inspiring work.

The vast chamber served as the largest interchange of humans and aliens in the entire known galaxy; the first and oldest of the three equatorial space elevators that provided easy access to and from Earth's orbit.

The correspondent, an older priest of the church named Andue Fleiser, was sitting in one of the many balconies that overlooked the vast interchange chamber. The view cut away from the conversation he'd been having with a potential adherent as his eyes, which were the lenses of his recording, turned at a sudden commotion on the floor far below.

Because of his role as a church correspondent, Andue had telescopic optical implants of the highest quality. The first-person perspective telescoped forward and down until Tina, along with all those visiting his simfeed, saw a janitorial bot suddenly lash out at a passing family. It targeted not the adults, but the little girl walking between them. Without sound, it swung its heavy mechanical arm around and struck the child in the head.

The girl fell instantly, unmoving, to the floor. The parents stared down in shock, not realizing at first that their daughter was already dead. The bot was not finished, though. Nor was it alone.

Tina wept as she watched dozens of maintenance, janitorial and food bots storm across the floor of the great chamber, killing indiscriminately. In the feed, she could hear Fleiser praying for Telos to guide the souls to peace even as he stood to flee. The bots did not seem to be attacking the upper levels of the chamber, but instead concentrated on the receiving floor.

But the slaughter turned into something far worse.

The last military conflict Earth had experienced was a trade dispute with the Jovian Mining Collective a century ago. There were no soldiers any more, and the constabulary services of the Anchor had been converted years ago to more bots. It was a thankless job, so why would humans want to do it?

Those security bots came streaming out of their alcoves. They did not attack humans, but nor did they try to curtail the attacks of the other service boys. Instead, the larger, heavier and more armored security bots charged toward the primary receiving gate of a soon to be departing elevator car. They carried something in their mechanical arms that even with his augmented vision Fleiser could not clearly see.

They were security bots. They didn't need to break the doors open, they simply used their security access to unlock the doors into the crowded car that was just about to begin its two-hour long drop to the surface. Everything was timed perfectly.

The car held thousands of people and tons of material for transport, and even from his distance Fleiser could hear their fearful screams as the security bots flooded inside while the other bots continued to kill anyone on the floor of the chamber they could reach.

The doors to the elevator car closed, cutting off the screams, and much sooner than the safety protocols should have allowed, the car dropped down out of sight. Just minutes later, a titanic explosion shook the entire Anchor, throwing Fleiser to the floor. All around, glass shattered, people screamed and alarms blared.

"Telos save us!" Fleiser declared right before the feed cut.

Desperately, Tina swam the feeds to find out what happened next, and the news came in waves.

Heroic ship navigators and captains used their fleet of trade and transport ships to physically halt the Anchor from falling into an unsustainable orbit and eventually falling to the earth. But they could not stop the 22,000 kilometer-long, hundred-meter-wide tether that the bots had somehow severed from collapsing back to earth.

The only thing that saved potential millions was the Federation defense forces. Though they were on peace-time footing, there were still a few corvettes within quick access to earth. The military ships deployed gauss cannons at various points along the tether, themselves dropping low into the atmosphere in an effort to vaporize as much of the tether as possible.

Their efforts reduced the catastrophe to just the African continent, rather than spanning across the ocean to South American and the Pan-Lantic Arcologies. Instead of billions dead, only millions died.

Tina felt, though, like something fundamental and important had been damaged. Not just essential infrastructure, but also the sense of security Earth had enjoyed for the past thousand years, since the last major interplanetary war.

Why had humanity's machines turned against them? Had some new enemy circumvented the machine's programming?

~~Revelation~~

~~Revelation~~

The summons came two weeks later. A notice flashed against her left retina, alerting her that the Holy Pythia had requested she come. She was one of five High Priestesses in the American continent, and one of thirty world-wide.

Her husband wandered into the business office of the cathedral, their two-year-old son Jakob in his arms. "I saw you sit up. Anything from the Vates?"

Tina sighed tiredly–she'd been working to organize a relief mission to assist with the dead and injured–pieces of the tether fell for nearly four days before it settled, and the full scope of the disaster was known.

"Yes. The Pythia probably wants to discuss relief efforts," Tina said.

"Why didn't he just sim you, then?"

"He's the head of the church, Davin. He does whatever he wants." She joked about it, but Pythia Colbert was a good man, and had been a reasonable shepherd of the church for almost a century, now.

"Do you need me to handle the liturgy classes this afternoon?"

"If any one shows up, would you? That would help a lot."

"We could always do it by sim, you know"

It was an old argument, and he expected the shake of her head almost the moment she said the words. "The heart of Telos' message was fellowship. A hug in simspace isn't the same."

He waved her on. "Go, Jakob and I can handle the classes. He has very insightful critiques, you know."

She gave her boys kisses, and then grabbed her coat.

The Bostan Arcology was not a true arcology, not like the massive structures in Cinopac or the Panpacific. It was just one of hundreds of ancient cities that had grown up over the bones of their predecessors, growing to fill in the vast spaces between or shrinking back during the long periods of intercine war or hardship that the last twenty-thousand years of human history had produced, until the entire northwest coast of the North American continental shelf was one massive metropolitan area.

The so-called Arcologies were growing out of that mess. The Cathedral of the Living Saint sat on what was once a coast, but now was nearly five kilometers away from the continental drop off and the still vast but much shrunken Lantic Ocean. In the nearly twenty-one thousand years since holy Telos ascended into heaven, her homeworld had changed drastically.

Still, as she stepped out into the slight chill of a mid-winter morning, Tina could smell the ocean. She found herself touching the ancient, weathered stones of the cathedral as she made her way to the nearest transit hub.

The crystal spires of the nascent arcology itself rose like a spear into the morning light, flashing brightly. Its base was roughly pyramidal, serving as a platform for the dozen or so spires that rose to brush the sky above. The self-contained community collected its own water; it had the most advanced agroponic and food production facilities available and recycling capabilities on a molecular level. It was truly a self-contained city of ninety million people, and was one of five in the region. She had no doubt that, in another thousand years, they would just be one giant hive of humanity.

She hated it, and dreaded the day when city planners tried to strong-arm the Vates to close the cathedral and let them build another arcology.

Almost from the moment she stepped into the pedaway, crowds pressed against her. All were fed; all were clothed. In an era where food could be vat-grown or agro-stimmed, no one starved. In an era where implants monitored health at all times, no one was, or was even allowed to be, unhealthy.

And yet so few people smiled.

She stood in a line with thousands of others waiting for the transit car, but it never came. For more than an hour, they all waited, until a message from the transit authority broadcast over their sim feeds that the system had experienced a malfunction and was unable to run.

"This is the second time this week!" a man behind her proclaimed angrily. "What are my taxes even paying for?"

That morning, Tina was on a sim call with a delegate of the Congolian Central African district whose entire city had been destroyed, with two million dead. And he thanked her for trying to help. The man behind her was inconvenienced for an hour, and sounded as if he were about to go into a murderous rage.

Wait…

"I don't want to calm down, damn it! Don't touch me! Don't…damn you!"

Bodies jostled against her as the angry man slugged another in the face. That prompted a few screams and angry calls for the constables.

Tina let her coat drop and jumped between the fighting men. She was not a large woman. With blonde hair and blue-gray eyes set in an Asiatic face, her husband assured her she was beautiful, but she was very small compared to the man she faced.

She didn't care.

The man started to swing at her, but she stood unmoving and just stared him down. Whether it was her small stature or the white vestments of her ordained clothing, something broke through the anger and he stopped himself.

"Go home, brother," she said in her proselytizing voice. "There's already so much anger and fear in the world right now. In Telos name, don't add any more. Please go home."

He stared, his lips moving with unspoken anger. Finally, though, he sagged. He was an older man; heavy set. His shoulders slumped and he shook his head, and then walked away. She looked around for her coat, and smiled at the other woman who had picked it up and handed it to her.

"Thank you."

With the fight resolved, people began breaking apart either to return to their homes, or find some other means of transport. For Tina, that meant walking. The Vates was only three kilometers away, after all.

The Vates Pythian held untold wealth just in its land. The heart of the Consolidated Neo-Telosian Church of our Savior, the Vates was the permanent home of the Pythia–the head of a church that, even in this day of science over faith, counted over five hundred trillion souls as registered members across human space.

And at its heart were two ancient trees, and the lands around them where their goddess once walked.

Dwarfed by the nearby silver spires, the golden domes of the Sacristy peaked just over the security walls. The walls proved necessary that day–protesters packed the plaza in front of the Vates.

She couldn't even tell specifically which of the two hundred known anti-Telosian movements the protestors belonged to. Only that they were loud, and pushing against the security line kept in place by Church-funded private police.

"Good morning, Holiness." The warden stepped out from a hidden kiosk beside the main doors of the campus. He wore the forest green of his office as a guardian of the church, with a plasma staff at his hip and a personal magfield hanging around his neck.

To her surprise, he carried an older hand-held scanner, something she'd not seen since she was a child.

"Good morning, Warden. Is the security system offline?"

"Yes, holiness. We detected some anomalous code in the facility VI. After what happened last week, the Pythia decided not to take any risks." He quickly held the scanner to her eyes and, having confirmed her identity, waved her into the Holy City.

Once past the walls, Tina found herself taking a deep breath. The Vates Pythia, a functional city within the larger Bostan Metro Authority, retained the largest open parkland in the entire eastern coast of the Nomerican continent. The air just smelled better.

A startled fawn sprinted away from a clump of ancient oaks as she approached, bounding over the grassy lawns. Every one of the fifty structures within the Vates were surrounded by a mown lawn, and paved pedaways for easy passage. But every other part of the fifty square kilometer grounds was preserved as it once existed–with grasses and trees, and animals that were lost in almost every other part of the continent.

Birdsong filled the air. Nearby, she saw a choir composed of students at the Telosian magnet school practicing a hymn. Saramass was approaching, she knew. It would be celebrated with hymns and a public feast for any who came.

She made her way through Saint Taylor's Basilica, and the Eldgard Chapel with its famous three dimensional murals of past church leaders. The Aldebaran Fountains celebrated the lives of all those Church Wardens who died defending the faithful during the Astorex Incursion, fourteen hundred years ago.

So much history. So many untold centuries. Millenia. It made her feel small, in a way, but also beloved. It wasn't the church's history. It was hers. She was a part of it–a part of a family that could trace its roots back over twenty-one thousand years.

She was halfway to the Pythian Palace when a familiar face stepped from around a copse of trees, flanking by priests and acolytes. High Priest Dume saw her and smiled. Like the dawn, his smile seemed to brighten the day, and she found herself returning it instinctively.

"My sister, it is so good to see you again!"

"And you, brother," she said, accepting his gentle hug. Dume was a huge man, towering easily two feet taller than her. But like many large men with gentle souls, he always moved with deliberate slowness so as not to alarm those smaller than himself.

"You have done excellent work for my people in the Congoline."

"Is that what brought you, brother?"

"No. I have been summoned, like you. The Pythia is not well, sister."

"I'd not heard! Telos preserve him."

"Indeed. Come. He is not at the Sacristy. He prays on the Mount."

They had to clear the corner of the Pythian Palace before they could see the Mount. It was the highest point in the whole Vates, with ancient stone steps leading the faithful up its gentle slopes. But what made it holy were the two ancient, massive trees that dominated the center of the Vates Pythian. There was a time, she knew, when the leaves of the two trees were green, like any other. But over the millennia they had turned to a gentle gold color.

At sunrise or sunset, they seemed to glow and shimmer, as if the spirit of Telos herself resided within. The massive trunks were easily five meters in diameter, and the top of the bows rose higher than the palace bell tower.

Dume turned to his people. "Brothers and sisters, this summons was for Sister Tina and I alone. Please give us space."

Thus he and Tina walked alone up the steps. The Pythia himself sat on a stone bench set between the trees. Someone sat beside him, holding his hand. From the distance, Tina could not see who it was. She never knew he had children of his own.

They continued walking until they reached the gentle warmth of the heart of Telosian spirituality. It was, in a very real sense, why the Telosian Church had not shattered or split apart over the millennia. How could any truly question the church's teachings when the proof of their faith existed for all to see and feel?

Pythia Colbert looked up at their approach with a tired, wistful smile. "Ah, you came. Forgive me if I do not stand to meet you. The spirit is willing, but the knees are nearly four hundred years old."

It was such a Cobert expression. The man's gentle, self-deprecating humor had been a mainstay of church communications for over a century. Tina curtsied low, and Dume bowed in equal respect.

"Eminence, you're not well?"

"Oh, my daughter, I am very well," Colbert said. The ancient head of their church had a quiver in his voice. "My body is failing, yes, but my spirit is whole and refreshed as if young again! Even now, as a terrible darkness descends, I find myself filled with hope. So odd."

"I don't…"

"My dearest friends, our saint has returned to us. This is Taylor Hebert, the Living Saint."

The woman stood, but she wasn't a woman. She was just a girl, thin and gawky with the awkwardness of a teenager. She was a perfectly ordinary looking girl, with shoulder-length black hair tightly curled, and eyes the exact shade as Warden robes. Her clothing looked odd, but there was nothing remarkable about her. She couldn't have been more than fifteen.

"My friend, perhaps we should discuss in your chambers," Dume said.

The girl snorted in a distinctly unsaintly way. "Do you remember saying the same thing when you were a kid, Vace?"

The ancient Pythia laughed–it was a dry sound, but joyous regardless. "I do. How could some knobby-kneed teenager be our living saint?" He turned to face them. "My friends, you see her now. If you were to examine her clothing, you would find the blouse made of a cotton that has not existed in ten thousand years. The leather of those silly shoes of hers came from an ancient cow. She is reborn the same with each of her lives, wearing the same clothing as her last day as a mortal. This is the mortal aspect of our beloved goddess, whom I knew well in my youth. She last died over two centuries ago, and only now returns to us. At her request, this information is limited to the Pythia and select high priests. You stand before the mortal aspect of holy Telos herself."

As her old mentor spoke, Tina studied the seeming teenager, and in her sim feed began drawing up classified liturgy from ages past. She was the high priest of the Cathedral of the Living Saint, of course she would have access to everything. Her home was built directly over the supposed site where Telos was raised. Where this girl, if she was indeed Taylor Hebert, was born.

And the images matched. Tina found herself unable to breathe as centuries of images came, each of this same young woman, often in the exact same clothes. Of ancient preserved video, where the girl spoke with the same unusual accent, regardless of the language.

"You know, your brain implants kind of take the fun out of this," the saint noted.

Colbert chuckled. "Well, that won't be an issue for long, will it?"

Tina couldn't breathe. Her knees locked. Image after image, text after text. Saint Taylor had been pythia many times. She'd led the church during five major interplanetary wars over thousands of years. She'd returned during the Thousand Year's Darkness to preserve the church grounds, and personally resolved two great potential church schisms. She wasn't just a saint, she was a savior in and of herself!

And Tina couldn't…

The saint gently took her shoulders. "I'm not Telos," she said softly. "Only a mortal reflection. You carry more of Telos's grace in you than I do. Breathe, sister."

"You're her," Tina said, finally finding her voice. "You're really her."

"I am. Awkwardness, acne and all."

Dume, silent all this time, began to laugh. It was an utterly joyous sound. "My friend. What better way to leave this world than to have living proof of your eternal reward. You couldn't have planned it better!"

"Why are you here?" Tina said, finally. "Why now?"

"Because I need your help to save our people," Taylor said. "Before the darkness comes."


The next 4-5 chapters will be set during the very last days of the "Dark Age of Technology" as its known in the 40K universe. I was unable to find any good source material for this period, so this is all original content. If anything contradicts 40K canon, consider it AU. And some of you may be noting how the flashbacks work. Taylor sees the POV of the primary motivator behind whatever source of the flashbacks she sees. While Gallen Sidozie might have prepared the reports, the words were from Stein, so she had Stein's perspective. And in this section, with one major exception, she is reading words translated by Tina, who will be the last Pythia of the united Telosian church. And believe it or not, those of you who've read this whole series have seen her before. This sequence is very important for the End Game of this story and series.