A/N: Chap 19 review responses are in my forums. And, finally, this chapter should clear up any confusion on Kratos/Big E.
Chapter Twenty: Ascenditque Clamor Eorum
The old man cried out in pain as the six youths kicked him viciously. A seventh was busy stealing his ration packs, while the man's old wife looked on screaming at them in Portnish.
"Don't," Taylor warned her.
Tina blinked back tears. "We're just going to let them get away with that?"
"There are five separate bounties on your head," Taylor hissed back. "We've had three high priests assassinated in the past six months. DON'T."
Everything inside Tina fought against just walking away from the horrifying injustice, except cold, hard logic. Taylor, as usual, was right. In the years since she assumed her role as Pythia, Tina found the living saint to rarely be wrong about such things. She forced her eyes down and kept walking, just like all the other desperate, hungry residents of Recif, the Braguay region of Somericum.
Never in her life had she imagined that things could go downhill so quickly. Taylor warned her, repeatedly, but it just seemed so impossible that their civilization could be so fragile. That the veneer of civility was so very thin.
When the so-called "AI Virus" began targeting food production facilities around the world, Earth faced a food crises unlike anything seen in a millennia. Facilities that routinely produced a hundred million tons of food product between crops and protein farms, whose entire production line was automated, either shut down or, like the Anchor, had bots suddenly turn on the owners and destroy the facility. In the span of four days, almost forty percent of world-wide food production came to a halt.
Somehow, even this event was twisted to attack the Church. The Church of Telos had its own food production facilities. They had their own food lines to help fund the church itself; and they had Taylor Hebert to warn them to go manual for food production or risk everything.
"What I want to know, Eminence, is why the Telosian church knew to deactivate their agrobots before the AI virus took over completely? Why was the Telosian church the only food production entity in the North American continent for the past six months?"
The Federal Council committee meeting two weeks after the collapse of Earth's food production was a raucous affair. The political realities of the Church of Telos made it a rare thing for a sitting Pythia to speak to elected officials. She was technically a head of state under the Namex-Telosian Treaty of 10241. She agreed to testify, though, because unfortunately despite a growing list of terrifying disasters, Earth continued to try and deny what was coming.
"Councilman, that is the wrong question," she told the man. "The right question would be to ask why the Merix, Confab, Derim Corporations, or the dozens of other companies, did not do the same thing. I personally had our Warden staff contact the security officers of every major food corporation to warn them about the AI virus, and we did so six months ago. I will gladly share that documentation with this committee. The Rothschild Consortium acted accordingly, which is why we still have some mining capabilities.
"I would also like to note that while we may be the remaining food producers right now, we are actively assisting those corporations in replacing their bot fleet with humans and non-AI harvesting machines from the Order of Sigils."
Councilman Taogni sneered at her with theatrical suspicion. "Yes, how fortuitous that you have such close connections to an order dedicated to the preservation of old farming machines."
"Councilman, the church of Telos is over twenty thousand years old. Those of us today can't truly grasp that stretch of time, but the Church has weathered comparable disasters before. Thousand-year periods of internecine warfare; of plague and starvation. Alien and insurgent invasions that killed hundreds of millions. The Abernath Pandemic killed almost a quarter of the world's population, and almost an eighth of the entire known human hegemon. That it happened six thousand years ago is, for the Church, relatively recent history.
"The Sigillites aren't dedicated to preserving old farming machines. They are dedicated to preserving the human experience, as the Lord Father of our Goddess directed twenty thousand years ago. And the fact that we can now help feed people across the continent simply confirms the wisdom and foresight of my predecessors."
They didn't ask her to testify again after that, but the simspace attacks grew more vitriolic despite her best efforts. The church was feeding anyone who came to them for free, yes, but the fact remained that church facilities around the world had food, while the authorities were having to ration what stored goods they still had and beg close celestial neighbors to risk an increasingly turbulent Warp to bring food.
Was it any wonder that violence followed the constant, divisive attacks on simspace?
The poor man and his wife fell far behind as crowds of people pushed her and Taylor toward the door of the vac tube car. Her escorts were around, supposedly, but in the sheer density of people she couldn't see them.
Their anonymity was what kept them safe, so she stifled her panic and pushed forward with the rest until they boarded the car. While the vac car south from Bostan was crowded, the crowd did not exceed seating capacity. The vac car east from the Recife Arcology on the easternmost continent of Braguay was something else entirely.
Whenever she traveled into the southern continent, she always did so by skycar. It was her very first time traveling with the crowds. She saw that the only individuals who sat were the elderly, or those with young children. Everyone else stood and clutched the support bars as the vac car began to accelerate to its top speed of eight hundred kilometers per hour.
The people were all hungry and desperate, something that just seemed wildly out of place on the center the human hegemony.
Soon the light of day was smothered under the heavy weight of the southern Lantic Ocean, replaced instead by the dull streaks of artificial luminosity just outside.
A jostle beside her made her look, and with relief she saw Taylor move closer to her side. She still looked like a teenager, but the three years since her return had seen her fill out and mature to her adult height. She was a muscular, fit young woman, and despite her apparent youth was now head Warden for the entire Church. Those who never worked for her balked at her youth; those who did understood that she was far more than just another teenager.
For the day, the head of the Consolidated Neo-Telosian Church and the spiritual leader for several hundred trillion human beings wore casual synthsuade slacks that had been intentionally distressed and frayed to make them look older, and an old shirt of polycotton under a frayed sweater. She looked like a lower-income woman of limited means, but the sweater hid a personal reactive shield generator, the biometric scatter field to disable monitoring bots, and an emergency teleportation signal booster for a Church satellite in orbit.
If it came to teleporting, the whole point of the journey would be lost. The new defensive measures the Earth Federal Authorities had put in place would react poorly to an unauthorized teleportation.
Someone began singing. It was a familiar song–a Hymn to Telos for peace–sung in Portnish. A few others picked up the hymn, and Tina couldn't help but smile at this small reminder that some hope remained.
"That used to be called Greensleeves," Taylor said softly. "It's been around in one form or another for twenty-five thousand years."
"I've always liked it."
Taylor chuckled. "Most do. That's why it's been around for twenty-five thousand years."
By the time the three and a half-hour ride finished crossing from Braguay to Guileone, Tina's back and legs ached. The songs had gone through a rotation–there was no entertainment, no background music on the vac cars. And the people around her likely couldn't have afforded sim implants, even if they were still available, and so had limited access to simpspace. So, they sang to each other, or talked.
Officially, Sabbatina, Fifteenth of that name, by the Grace of Telos, Pythia of the Consolidated Neo-Telosian Church of our Savior and the High Priestess of Humanity, was back at the Vates Pythia, giving a sermon to the faithful and helping coordinate food distribution.
Unofficially, she was on her way to a meeting with one of the most secretive organizations in the human hegemony. It was an organization almost as old as the Church itself, and one indelibly linked to Telosian lore.
The Sigillite Order.
The trip across the Lantic took just over three hours. When the car doors opened, humanity spilled out like blood from a wound, filling the platforms of the Guileone transit hub beyond. The heat and humidity of the late afternoon struck her with near physical force, but she couldn't dare let herself falter.
Nearby, she saw a group of men carrying stub guns in poorly fitted carapace armor. Local militia. Even as she watched, the squad of five stopped a man and began frisking him despite his protests. When he tried to resist, he received the butt of a gun to his jaw, while the other militia laughed.
A far more familiar face emerged from the crowds ahead of them. Nadis was a senior warden from Dume's diocese. He saw them but did not smile or react openly other than to simply fall in beside Tina, opposite Taylor.
"The Chadan line is down," he said in perfect, unaccented Anglish.
Taylor gave no outward reaction. "Do we know why?"
"Gyptia was using the Chadam line to make emergency food shipments to Karthum. We think pirates intercepted one of the shipments."
They continued walking as if nothing was the matter. All around, others continued to disperse throughout the vac car hub. The once prosperous city seemed to be experiencing the same unrest that was rippling through the rest of the planet.
"Hey, you there!"
The voice called out behind them in Portnish. "Keep walking," Taylor said to Tina, while Nadis whispered, "Firewall. Firewall. Firewall!"
"Avoid a fight if we can," Taylor muttered.
Behind them, the local militia grew flustered at not being responded to. The handful of men sped into a light jog. "You there! Woman with the scatter field! Stop, or we will…"
He never finished. Tina saw from the corner of her eye as a robed figure stepped out of the crowd and backhanded the leader of the militia. She did not understand why the militia officer flew away in a broken, rag-doll somersault as if shot from a cannon, only that when he landed twenty feet away he did so as dead weight.
The remaining militia stood frozen in place as the robed, cowled figure stepped into their midst. He didn't speak, nor act against them. He simply stood and stared until the four remaining militia stowed their weapons and left to see to their shattered leader.
Rather than join them, the bulking man somehow disappeared back into the crowd.
"Well, that happened," Taylor muttered.
"Who was that?" Tina asked.
"Al-Khidr, probably. Nadis, any leads on alternate transport?"
"Yes, Warden. This way."
Al-Khidr was a title, similar to her own title as Pythia. The head of the Sigillite Order was always named Al-khidr, which as far as she knew meant "teacher" or something similar in one of the thousands of lost languages of Earth's past. For the head of the Order to be here was wildly unexpected.
Except Taylor did not seem surprised.
The alternate transport waited for them on the edge of the transit hub, just a few hundred meters from the first of the Guileon arcology towers. It looked like an old, beaten short-bus. Its old rubber wheels had almost no tread, and pain flicked off around cracked or broken windows.
The moment they stepped in, though, Tina realized the exterior was a lie, just like the old, distressed clothing she wore. The seats were newly upholstered in synthleather. The floor between the luxurious seats were perfectly clean, and despite the rough exterior, inside the curved cabin was spotless and intact.
The driver was a small man with the darkest skin Tina had ever seen.
"Chameleon field?"
"Just so," the driver said. "Please, my friends, sit and secure yourselves."
"Will Al-Khidr be joining us?" Taylor asked.
"The Sigillite will make his own way," the driver said.
They began slowly puttering through the city. The island-city of Sherbro on the cost of Guileone had grown wealthy over the millennia as a hub of the great vac car network that helped ferry billions of humans about their birthworld, but when the equatorial space elevators were finished, it diverted some of that wealth away to the Congoline.
It took almost three hours of driving at slow speed before they cleared the outer edges of the city into the urban sprawl. Even so, they were able to speed up until, finally, they left behind the highest density of human occupation into the endless green jungles of forests of Guileone.
The bus sprouted wings, accelerated to twenty times its speed fast enough to push Tina and her security escort into their seats, and shot into the sky.
"We will fly to Sukkar," the pilot announced. "A vac car will take you from there."
Tina tried her best not to be a sullen person. But she felt her son's absence, and the frustration of the day tried even her patience. "Explain again why we couldn't just go directly?"
"The Sigillite Order is being watched by the Federal Authority, and the Federation Command," Taylor said, speaking low. "As you've seen, Al-Khidr doesn't always play nice, and the recent AI issues are more pervasive and dangerous than anyone's letting on. We don't want to give the authorities an excuse to go after the Church legally."
"They couldn't, anyway," Tina said.
Taylor, though, shook her head. "They have in the past, Tina. Those in power determine what's legal. It's always been that way."
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
It was nightfall when they reached Sukkar. In the darkness, it rose up as a glittering forest of lighted crystal from the edge of the Indus River, now little more than a trickle fed by artificial glaciers maintained in the Himlay Mountains to the east.
The bus came down in a dedicated landing port near the edge of the city towers, and they continued on the ground until they reached a large transit hub. Even at night, there were crowds of people there waiting for their vac cars east or west.
Their driver led the way out of the skimmer bus and through the crowds. Taylor, Tina, Nadis and the rest of her security continent followed as they moved through the platform and into what looked like a security station.
"It is a long walk down," the nameless driver warned.
He stepped to a narrow door at the far side of the security room, which itself bristled with dozens of monitors and biometric scanners. Just beyond the door was a set of metal stairs leading down.
And down. Six flights of stairs found them on a narrow platform facing a vac tube channel. A single vac car waited for them. It was a dull, metallic gray without any insignia or numbering. Within, they found well-appointed bench seats.
"So, we're going into the mountain?" Taylor asked.
"Just so," the driver said. He sat facing them, since the cars were automated. As soon as everyone was seated, the doors closed with a pressurized hiss, and suddenly they were barreling through the earth at hundreds of kilometers an hour.
"So, is that an actual chameleon field, or one of your newer tricks?" Taylor asked the driver.
Tina was staring right at the driver when he changed. There was no shimmer of any type of field. One moment, he was a slight man with dark skin and a friendly smile, and the next he was a hulking figure in a featureless brown robe and cowl. With one hand, he threw the cowl back to reveal a heavily lined, aged face with an iron-gray beard like thistles growing from a strong, wide jaw. His head was bald, though with a curtain of gray hair in the back.
"Gods, when did you start trying to grow hair?" Taylor said, as if speaking to a family member. "It looks awful!"
"The hair does not care, and neither do I."
This was Al-Khidr, the head of the ancient Sigillite Order. He examined each of the Wardens before focusing on Tina. "The child speaks highly of you."
"Child?"
"He means me," Taylor said. "And that says something about him, that he calls the twenty-thousand year old woman 'child.'"
"You are not so old," Al-Khidr said. "In terms of actual life lived, you are barely ten thousand."
"Oh, because that's so much younger," Taylor said dryly. "I'm fairly certain after the first thousand, you're just old."
Every leader of the Order of the Sigil was named Al-Khidr. A title, Tina thought, like Pythia. Only…only.
It struck her then, like a fist to her stomach. Her breath didn't catch in her throat, it was pulled from her lungs by a deep, abiding shock.
Taylor took her hand, but said nothing.
"You're…" she couldn't even say it.
"You sit holding the hand of the mortal aspect of your goddess," Al-Khidr said. His voice was very deep. "You have felt the power of the trees. Why does my presence shock you?"
"Be nice, Dad." Taylor said, as if she were not speaking to the ages-old god of war. "She's a good one. She carries more of Telos' grace than any of her recent predecessors."
"That is why she is here," Al-Khidr–Kratos–said with a nod. "There is much to discuss."
A bench over, Nadis paled, while behind him other wardens gasped as they realized they were in the presence of a god. It was, for Tina, even stranger than that. Because he was not only the lord father of her goddess, but also the mortal father of the woman sitting beside her. Taylor Hebert carried neither awe nor fear of his ancient, powerful being.
The vac car ride still took many hours despite the speed. They had no way of knowing precisely where they were going, but Tina suspected that was the intent. No one knew for sure where the Sigillite Order was located, and the Al-Khidr made sure to keep it that way. It was, ultimately, the reason for the secrecy of their travel in the first place.
When they finally came to a halt, Al-Khidr stood. "Only the Pythia and head warden may come," he said. "Food and drink will be provided to the rest."
Nadis looked ready to argue, but Tina shook her head. "If I am not safe here, then all is lost," she told her other protectors.
Al-Khidr stepped out of the vac car, and Tina and Taylor followed into a dimly lit cavern with a machined stone floor. Eternal lights–small balls of contained plasma that could last for hundreds of years–it the way down a long, seemingly endless corridor of stone.
Not all of the cavern looked artificial, and as they walked Tina saw shapes on the rock. She slowed, gaping at what looked like hand-painted figures. "What are these?"
"The shamans of the earliest humans did not paint walls to depict past events, but to try and shape future ones," Al-Khadr said, having paused at her distraction. "You look now at some of the very first prayers. At the very first glimmer of divinity."
"Lord, if I may? Are these as old as you?"
"They are far older," Al-Khidr said. "As much older than me as I am older than you. Come."
They continued down the endless stone corridor until a brighter light began to illuminate their destination. After almost an hour of walking, they finally arrived at a large, cavernous space illuminated with gravitic bulbs that floated freely in the open space above. The walls of the cavern were lined in sleek medicinal and industrial-style fabricators, with the accompanying Virtual Intelligence boxes containing enough computing power to run an empire.
Cool air blew in from unseen vents to keep the intense heat of the machinery at bay. In the center of the room Tina saw a large table. Two figures sat waiting for them–a man and a woman. But her eyes were drawn to the one directly opposite of their approach.
The man looked aesthetically perfect, as if sculpted by committee. Dark hair had reddish hints; he had jade eyes a shade darker than Taylor's, and his complexion, too, was darker. His face was broad, and strong–his chin and jaw much more pronounced than most men she'd ever seen. Then again, so was Al-Khidr's.
He stood and smiled, and it felt as if the sun was shining on Tina alone. "Welcome, Pythia," he said. "And Taylor. It's been many years."
"What are you going by nowadays?"
"You can call me Neothe," the man said. "This is my dearest companion, Erda. And you have met my most loyal friend, Al-Khidr. Please, sit."
With a glance at Taylor, Pythia sat. Oddly, Taylor did not. Instead, she stood behind and to the right of Pythia. Nor did Neothe seem bothered by her standing.
"Thank you for coming," Noethe began. "I recognize it was more of an ordeal than it should have been. But we're facing a challenging time. Tell me, Pythia, have you ever heard of a land called Anatolia?"
"I haven't," Tina admitted.
"Few alive today have. I have memories of that time, when the first great empires fell, and civilization as we knew it collapsed, when the greatest achievements wrought by human hands were bronze and stone. A great darkness fell across humanity for many generations."
It was a stunning admission that this being was like Al-Khidr. His eyes felt like a powerful wind pushing her, as if he were somehow a force of nature itself. "Such a time is fast coming again, Pythia. The AI Virus is just the forewarning. Throughout federated human space, sapient machines have been corrupted and have turned on their masters. The Federation Council has been working hard to keep the truth from getting out, but billions of humans have died these past three years. Whole worlds have been consumed, and humans are fighting a war against our own machines that most here on Earth don't even know about."
It felt impossible, it felt…
The air above the table before her shimmer. It revealed a human world, advanced and heavily populated, with a functioning space elevator and anchor plate. The lifelike hologram zoomed it until it revealed a cloud approaching the world. The cloud encountered the anchor of the space elevator first, and as she watched, the entire structure began to shimmer and disappear, as if erased. More of the silvery cloud emerged from it.
"Federation Intelligence calls them omniphages," the woman, Erda, said. She was dark skinned and strikingly beautiful in a way that defied description, just as Noethe himself was. "Nano-technology that was originally designed for surgical procedures, corrupted into a world-destroying swarm. Like locusts from the ancient days."
Noethe watched with a slight frown, as if only mildly perturbed that billions were dying. "It will get worse," he finally said. "Warp travel is going to grind to a standstill very soon. The human hegemony will collapse. Perhaps not all at once, or perhaps it will happen tomorrow. But we are on the precipice of an age of darkness that will span many generations."
"Humanity cannot truly recover from such a darkness without the full power of hope," Erda said, in perfect time with Neothe.
"And you have a role to play in bringing hope back," Al-Khidr finished.
"I don't understand…"
"Telos did not die. She cannot, not while any human has hope in their heart," Neothe explained. "Instead, the Destroyer of All Things shattered her into shards. A portion of that shattered whole stands beside you. Both other shards exist, and will, we believe, return."
"You believe I'll have a role in this return?"
Erda leaned forward, her gaze as intense as Neothe's, if not quite as powerful. "You have a vital role, even if the fates have not allowed us to see the nature of it. What we know is that you will lead your flock from Earth into the stars. You have already done this, and you will do this. It is written in the stars."
"But how? All civilian ship construction has been federalized, and all existing ships are being seized. We've been trying for years, since I was first exalted as Pythia!"
The hologram shimmered, and for a moment Tina felt as if slapped. The image she was the ship from her vision–the vision she had the day she was exalted.
"When completed, this will be the most advanced ship ever designed," Neothe said. "I had a hand in its engineering. Its shielding is temporal, and should allow it to navigate the storms that are sweeping through the Warp."
"But it's military," Tina said. "Taylor confirmed it's not available to us."
"That is why we are going to help you steal it," Neothe said.