Taking the ship was the easy part. The hard part was keeping General Panic from realizing what we had done until it was too late. The K’ntasari kids weren’t too happy to give up Ari, but Mickey was right. Ari’s not the best at subterfuge. Besides, it was my revenge.
We weren’t that far from Dolparessa. I sent out a message on a secure frequency. In a moment, I had contact.
“Send me the transmission records,” said Rivers.
It didn’t take long before he was back in touch. “I’ve had the AI analyze the communications logs and put together a little mixtape. Whenever the ship is supposed to check in with the armada, it will now send out a message I’ve cobbled together from prior messages. I was careful not to make it too obvious. It wasn’t easy, as each message had its own embedded identification tone. I had to strip the tone and replace it with a new one on my spliced messages.”
“So Panic shouldn’t realize anything is wrong for a few more days, until the tear between Dolparessa and Volparnu fails to materialize.”
“By travelling through the power grid, you should be able to make it well before then.”
I nodded, but the thought still made me nervous. The mothman was an entity composed of pure nul-energy, and as such, could be transmitted using the crystals. Cillian thought it up, and Cillian was the one who first had the balls to try it. The Atlas emanations had used the trick many times before, so there was really nothing to be uneasy about. Still, the thought was dizzying.
“I’m off,” I told the K’ntasari. “A ship will come in a few days to meet up with you. You’ll hear from me before then. Just keep sending the messages at the intervals Rivers gave us.”
My next stop: ship five, the one closest to the armada. That ship would be in place to release its singularity in three days, providing the final blow which would rend the fragile fabric of spacetime in the Domha’vei system. At least it would have, if all the other singularities were in place. But the first one, closest to Dolparessa, was the most vital. As Cuinn had explained it, it was supposed to punch the hole; the others were to provide the pressure to pull the abscess into a tear.
This time, we needed to make a show of it. After riding the grid to the nearest hub, I and I manifested in all his glowing glory, blazing a trail straight for the ship’s visual sensors. They saw Him coming for thousands of kilometers.
Panic would have to know that if he reached that ship, her plan was over. She had to have a backup plan. And we had a pretty good idea of what that plan would be.
Several dozen ships broke off from the armada and started on a trajectory to Dumati. There weren’t that many people living there – a hundred-thousand, tops. It was a frozen desert, with nothing but cercrotium mines. But General Panic was gambling that I and I wouldn’t allow her to kill those people. He would need to retrace his route back to the hub crystal, which would buy her half-a-day. Then He could be at Dumati in under a minute, using the hub. We’d beat her there. If we flew out to meet her ships, it would be another day, and then another day back, and then another half to get to the new position of the fifth ship – too late to stop the release of the singularity.
But there was absolutely no advantage in going out to meet her. We were gambling that we could trick her into engaging us on Dumati. Proximity to Goliath made it much easier for the Archon to draw power than when Ross was captured here. But that time, Ailann couldn’t help anyway since Ross was taken by surprise. They hit him with a fast-acting nerve gas which debilitated him too quickly to use his limited alchemy. Then they got him out of range of the planet’s measly few crystals before he could recover. The honest truth was that it would never have happened to Mickey, or even Patrick. Experience is everything in a bad situation, and Ross was a green branch at the time.
And here I was, with absolutely no combat experience. Ailann couldn’t help this time either. It had to be me. It was risky. Ailann or Aran could draw enormous amounts of power directly from the entire grid, but Panic knew what they could do. We needed her to be overconfident, but we also needed someone whose presence seemed plausible. If everything worked as planned, we wouldn’t need raw strength to beat her. We had better not. There were so few crystals here that if I needed, I’d have enough strength to get out, but not that much more. We’d carefully calculated just how much alchemy I’d be able to do by using them.
Using nearby crystals as a power source is a trick we owe to Owen, by the way, when he realized that he could control them in the Skarsium mine. Cillian refined the technique. Before then, we had to rely on what we could draw from our tree. Patrick could barely go for a walk on Eirelantra without getting exhausted.
I had a day to prepare. Clive had told me what to do. I went around Dumati Station, installing little steel ball-bearings in precise locations. Then I waited for General Panic in the restaurant, the one where she had first recognized Ross as an emanation.
As I expected, she signaled me. “Constantine – you were serious,” she said. At this point, CHMR had done such a good job of publicizing my vendetta that the Bounders of Pegasus IX had probably heard about it. “I expected Ailann, at least. This will be too easy”
“Don’t bet on it. This is a grudge match.”
“I admit there is resemblance to Ross, but I must say the idea of a branch with a brother confounds me. Furthermore, the very concept of siblings seems uselessly sentimental. It encourages the prioritization of genetic relationships over the welfare of the state. If your relatives are useless pieces of trash, why protect them, let alone avenge them? All that trouble for the honor of a handsome lawyer, Ashtara. I could buy a dozen of those.”
“Lady, you’re a real piece of work. Of course, lady is probably not the right term. You look like a science project slapped together after a sleepover in a scrapyard.”
Insults did not seem to disturb her metallic coolness. “Are you going to do the tediously predictable thing and render my fleet useless?” she asked. “Or are you man enough – tree enough – to face me?”
“Bring it,” I said.
“All the better. I’m coming in a shuttle.”
The first body she used would be a throwaway. She’d expect me to stop it. There would have to be a second, more formidable one: after the last battle, that was to be expected. Cillian had predicted a third, held in reserve for the moment when we thought we’d won. She could only win by trickery, that and a guess as to how much power we could summon at that distance. Clive and Owen had run dozens of simulations predicting how powerful the droids might be and how quickly she could swap from one to another. They had determined it could be near instantaneous if she were only doing incremental updates from her last recorded memory state.
At first, things went as anticipated. The android that showed up at the restaurant looked impressive, but I could see it was barely armed. And I could smell the lasers in the one coming up behind me. It was almost too easy. I spun, turning coolant fluid into simple starch as I faced my adversary. But in an instant, her consciousness was back in the first, and the first had a hidden gimmick: the joints were lubricated with a micro-fine friction reducing dust, and she flipped open the pressurized reservoir, spraying my eyes with particles. Unpleasant indeed, but it’s a foolish move to blind an opponent who doesn’t need eyes to see. I knew that Cillian had been right; I could hear and smell the third, most powerful android. I could feel the current flowing through its massive metallic limbs.
She’d be counting on beating me with surprise, the way she had crippled Ailann, but also, she wasn’t stupid and would have an escape plan. I could already see the first android, moving on autopilot back towards the shuttle. We’d anticipated this. Now I needed to do something showy, something that would distract her from realizing that I was also mucking with her ship’s engines. Unfortunately, showy meant a big energy cost.
The android’s shell was made mostly of an alloy of Thrice Heavy Steel and impenetratium. I rearranged it into sponge-rubber. It was a humorous effect, the simulacra flopping to the ground, its limbs no longer able to sustain the combined weight of its CPU and power source.
I was exhausted. But the endgame was at hand. She was back in the first android, and halfway to the shuttle. Once she realized that she couldn’t get off the ground, she’d try her last maneuver.
Not quite her last, apparently. There was a flash of light and searing pain. A fourth android had jumped out into the corridor, lasers blazing, in an all-or-nothing attempt to burn me while I was distracted. There was no way I could’ve missed it leaving the shuttle. It had to have been hidden here, deactivated, from before I arrived. It wasn’t powerful – it didn’t need to be. One shot was enough. With a thought, I crippled it.
It was a mortal wound. I could’ve changed into the mothman then; unlike Ross, I had the power. If I died, it would happen automatically. But only Ailann and Aran could control the power grid. The control nodes – the trees, the Archons, were physical. Without the strength to emanate one of them, the Mover would not even have the small amount of power left that it would take to complete our plan. It would take all His strength to keep from an uncontrolled fall back to Eden, and such a fall, without riding the grid, would take weeks.
I waited, forcing myself to listen past my agony, until I could hear the engines fail to ignite. Then I changed all of those ball-bearings into tiny pellets of Skattershot, trade name for a military compound used for defensive shielding. It was now impossible to get a clean transmission through the carefully constructed array. Sure, you could manage a weak and static-laden radio message, but it wouldn’t exactly be a good idea to transmit the complex and fragile data of a consciousness. Important parts would be garbled or missing.
General Panic was trapped, stuck on Dumati in a useless body she couldn’t leave. Poetic justice. Mickey’s operatives could handle the rest.
But she was laughing. And then I saw it. I finally saw what she had really planned. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. It was too late. It would take the mothman six minutes and forty-nine seconds to get from Dumati to Dolparessa by riding the power grid. The assassination attempt would happen in three minutes and eight seconds.
And yet there was a moment of – hesitation? Resistance? – before the Mover ripped out of my mutilated body and hurled Himself into the grid.