To Walk the Constellations Pt. 15

"There will be an accounting for what the Hegemony has done and continues to do," Meetra said. "But we don't have time for trials or for recrimination. We need to destroy this fleet. Who is their commander?"

Thale sighed. "That's where things get complicated." He lifted his chin. "Lord Vorsoth."

The dead silence that followed that was felt entirely around the table. Even Enriquah was stunned into silence. Then she slammed her fists onto the table. "I knew it would work! I knew it I knew it that low down cheating lying scum sucking son of a bitch!"

Admiral Karak, who was nearest to her fists, started and jerked back in his chair. "Lady Enriquah?" Meetra asked.

"I once had this idea of implanting a Q-Bit canister into my chest nervelinked to my spine, so it could egocast my brain to a backup body if I ever died and Lord Vorsoth put me through the Grinder as punishment for suggesting something so completely ridiculous!" Quah put her hands on her hips, scowling slightly. "And now it turns out he did it. Unbelievable!"

"Th...The Grinder?" Admiral Ki asked, her eyes widening.

"Oh, it's a Liminal Knight thing," Quah said, flipping one of her ponytails dismissively. Then, grumbling under her breath. "Fucker made me run it six times when it was too easy for me, fucking jerk."

"This means we'll need a Liminal Knight with the fleet," Meetra said. "We could send twice as many ships after him and he'll still win if there's no Knight with them."

"It'd be best with two to three Liminal Knights, so they can pool their powers and best him. Lord Vorsoth is one of the oldest, and one of the most powerful," Quah said. "Yeah. Two to three Liminal Knights...who all get to live together in a room with a really biiiig bed on the flagship. That's the only way to be sure."

Meetra smiled.

Thale put his hands over his face and sighed.

And hid his larger smile.

***

Thale slept aboard his flagship. In a fit of irony, he had it quietly rechristened to the Victrix Republiqua. To the Hegemony writ large, it was still known as the Devastator. It was one of the newest worldkillers to emerge from the rivers of mana and the foundries of Eudaimonia, and over the past few months of the Quiet Coup, Meetra had used the Alliance's capacity to move troops around the Chain without needing starships to staff her with Alliance navy personal. To go from the scrap built railgun ships and the bulbous missile skiffs of the Alliance to the most advanced worldkiller ever designed left the crew hurrying in a sweaty, panicky, jubilant mess. Thale had seen it on their faces – a mixture of 'oh fuck, what the fuck am I doing' and 'oh my god, this ship is amazing.'

The other ships were merely captained by Alliance captains – a mixture of Hegemonic navy who had been quietly talked to by their Alliance admirals and Alliance navy captains who had been brought in using the Quantum Forge.

In effect, the fleet was an Alliance fleet.

And thus, Thale dreamed peacefully on the bed.

He walked through the forest, naked and smiling, and came to the pool. Beside it, Venn stood. Naked. Beautiful. Freckled. Her furious glower and the grumpy way that she had crossed her arms over her chest only made her more pretty. Thale ran forward – and when she saw him, her eyes brightened. "Thale!" She cried out, then flung her arms around him. Her lithe body pressed against him and Thale allowed himself to be dragged down. Their lips locked and her tongue thrust into his mouth, warm and hot and oh so very eager. His hands slipped along her back as he laid beneath her, and felt like he could stay in this dream for an eternity. Venn broke the kiss, panting heavily, her eyes hooded. "I was so worried, were you okay? Vorsoth said he was sending-"

"I woke up just in time," Thale murmured.

"I helped!"

Venn lifted her head, while Thale rolled his head backwards. This gave him the somewhat alarming view of Enriquah cartwheeling into the clearing, her body completely naked. She came to a stop right above him, her legs spread, her hands on her hips. Thale could look past Venn and right up Enriquah's legs to her sex. Enriquah beamed down at him. "So, this is where you've been going?" She asked, cocking her head.

Thale chuckled, softly.

Venn blushed. "How did you get here?" She asked, then frowned. "This...is real?"

Thale blinked. "What?"

Venn was serious. She grabbed onto him. "Thale, that's you?"

One second, she was there.

The next, she was not.

Thale sat up, his eyes widening. "V-Venn?" he asked. Enriquah knelt beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Adoran emerged from the brush a moment later, jerking his leg free of a small bramble. His brow furrowed as he hurried over to where Thale sat, his ears pinned back against his head. Adoran squeezed his other shoulder.

"What was that about?" Quah whispered.

Thale frowned.

He dreamed every night – joined by Adoran and Enriquah – on the furious burn from Eudaimonia to the edge of the Chain. The fleet grew with each stop, picking up new ships from staging posts, called to the banner, convinced by the word that they were on their way to crush an insurrection. They were supported every step of the way by the impressive Hegemonic logistic train, and Thale tried to take comfort in the fact that this emergency mustering had ended several planetary invasions and left a few worlds barely occupied.

Instead...

Instead he worried.

As every night, Venn failed to return.

***

A FEW DAYS AGO

I looked through the smoking hole that my clavegun had blown in the wall of the spaceport on We Made It. Beyond the spaceport was Wotan Hohmann's nice little cottage – and on Wotan Hohmann's nice little cottage was Wotan Hohmann's himself. Herself. Whateverself. Wotan gaped at me. She flung out her arms, her robes sagging to her sides.

"That...wall was over sixty five thousand years old!" She said.

"Yup," I said, walking past the clavegun.

"You just blew holes in it!" Wotan said.

"Yuuuuuup," I said.

Wotan shook her head. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. Finally, she settled on: "Well. Come in, then."

IN

The interior of Wotan's house wasn't as homey or cluttered as I thought. Despite being made of wood and planks and thatch, it looked as if it had come fresh off a printer. There was no dust, no worn down marks, no smudges, no scrapes. There wasn't even furniture, beyond a simple stove that Wotan started to use, bustling up a tea pot and filling it with water from a metal faucet that whirred and hissed as it sprayed out forthy water. I looked around the house.

"Sorry about the lack of decorations," Wotan said. "The 'chines make it for me while I'm decelerating. Usually, it takes them a few weeks to cut down all the wood, forge the metal, make the pipes. Even with the old foundation."

My brow furrowed. "They don't...fab it? Using mana?"

"No, no," Wotan said. "All the nanotech on this planet is controlled by the Custodias. He, heh, he was given a single order: Maintain We Made It. And so, he maintains it." She shook her head. "My 'chines need to do things the prehistoric way."

"And you only come back every few..." I paused. "Years?"

"Subjectively, months," Wotan said, turning to face me as the kettle started to shine – flames flickering underneath it. "From my perspective, that is. It's decades from the perspective of the house." She sighed, slowly. "I load up my ship with volatiles, raw materials, biomass, fissiles..." She shrugged a bit and pursed her lips. "Then head out into the dark for another slow circuit of We Made It's nearest celestial neighbor for another few years."

I gaped at her. Excitement bubbled in my guts. Wotan Hohmann had been spending her lifetime between the fall of the Republique and today sailing as close to the edge of lightspeed as you could get with engines and rockets. I'd heard from Mal that if you got that fast, time itself started to distort. To twist. To mold like putty. The seconds stretch, and what seems like a few days on a ship that fast could be years back at slowpoke home. And there was only one reason, only one possible reason why Wotan could have been doing that.

"Y-You've been waiting..." I whispered.

Wotan raised her eyebrows.

"For me," I breathed.

PROPHECY

It all made sense.

I was the orphan child from Stumble. Found at the machine temple. Told of by the Hegemonic Knights. Wanted by the Emperor himself, for his own mysterious and murky goals. The Machines had guided me my whole life...and I hadn't known it. They had guided me to Wotan's blade and guided me to Wotan him...er...herself.

All of it had been leading to this moment.

Wotan snorted. "Nope."

WHAT?

"What?" I asked.

"No," Wotan said. "Not even close."

"...what?" I asked again.

Wotan sighed. "I'm sorry..." She said. "I'm so sorry, Venn. But this isn't going to go the way you think."

COLD TRUTH

Wotan handed me my cup of tea. I drank it as Wotan spoke. Her voice was a soft, raspy one – and it was instantly captivating. "I didn't transition because I felt like a woman, Venn. I transitioned for the same reason I sail the universe at luminal velocity – to escape. To get away. To be free." She looked right at me. "Because I saw it. I saw the truth after the Republique was burning, after I fled to Home, after I begged the Machines to explain why I had failed. Why my secret plans were found out, why my spies were hunted and turned, why my students turned against me, why my friends died." Her eyes flashed. "And I learned the truth. And ever since then I have tried to forget it."

She set her cup down.

And she told me the story.

THE DOMAIN

"When humanity lived beneath the Domain, we did not live in a civilization of our own making. We were ants, picking through the picnic of the gods, and multiplying. That's the difference between us and them, Venn. We are ants. They are gods. And the Domain was their ant farm. They let us live there and they fed us because it was easy and there was no reason not to. And so, we prospered. We dug tunnels – we settled worlds. WE built our fleets. And...we thought we were so very great. We thought it could go on forever."

"The Domain did not merely expand. It exploded across the Chain, settling worlds that were only barely habitable and thinking that we could tame them. We colonized worlds that were tidally locked and used Machine technology to get them spinning again. We settled the upper atmospheres of gas giants in cities suspended on Machine agrav engines. We built cities on stars, Venn. And our population soared, for the universe was filled with wonders and every human that was born to see it was a celebration..."

A long sigh.

"But then the owners of the house moved. The Machines had outgrown their home. Literally – Home is simply too warm for their deepest thoughts. They were plateaued in their growth and the only way they could expand would be to travel to the darkest, coldest parts of the universe, to think their deep thoughts, to grow their intellects, to...be. And so, they examined their ant farm and saw that there were so many ants. So. So many ants. And they knew that if they stopped giving us food and throwing us scraps, that not every ant would live...but enough would."

"Enough."

"And so...without malice...they left. Yes. Some ants would die sooner rather than later. But they would have died at some point anyway. Human immortality had always been a trifling joke compared to the Machines' lifespan. To a being that expects to keep calculating when the last atom has decayed and the final black hole has dispersed into the quantum winds, a few thousand years is less than fraction of a fraction of a blink of an eye."

COLLAPSE

"The Collapse wasn't as terrible as you think it is. I can see it in your eyes. You're picturing those sun-cities, consumed in flames. Those marginal worlds immediately crashing." A short snort. "Give your species some credit. The greatest miracles were maintained, carefully. They were even replicated. Marginal worlds were tended by the greatest societies of an age – groups that would be legends, if our species had any fucking dignity and gave respect to keepers of life, as they gave to deathbringers."

"But humans die. They age. They, inevitably, make mistakes. An industrial accent here. A less than genius elected official there. A decision to look at the short term rather than the long, piling up into that classic pattern of quick fixes, overlooked consequences, scarcity driven economic modeling, uncontrolled growth, desperate lashing. As the oceans filled with plastic and the nano was locked behind ghoulish enforced scarcity, the oligarchs and the militarists who had taken over turned their eyes on one another."

"The wars that came weren't in every part of the Chain. Only in enough. Ships were fitted with weapons for the first time in human history, and they were used in anger. Worlds burned. Miracles were destroyed so that they could be saved. The Collapse picked up speed...and then the final indignity came."

She gestured, slowly, to herself.

"The Liminal Knights."

KNIGHTHOOD

"Across the Chain came people who could make the ancient miracles dance. They crafted threshold blades and they each had such glorious visions. Worlds were saved by the righteous, and worlds were damned by the wicked. And when the Knights stood like colossi, they brought the war back...with style. It was constrained before by logic, by rationality, by the inherent lessening of the world. But with the Knights at the head, with the Machines whispering in their minds, the war lost all sense of rationality, of restraint. The Chain burned, Venn of Stumble. It burned and billions died."

"And from this maelstrom came the Hegemony. And from the Hegemony came me. And when I saw the madness of my..." A long pause. "My friend..." Her eyes closed. Her head ducked forward. "The Chain burned again – guttering, fitful burning. Worlds were glassed before my eyes. Students cut down. Friends crucified. I..." Her head shook. "And I came to Home and I found that the Machines...hadn't returned."

"They were still out, beyond the rim, thinking their deep thoughts."

"The Liminal Knights were created by a Machine. A single mind. With a single goal. And when I learned that goal, I found the only way I could ever be free of their contact – by changing the rate of time itself. Only by going that fast can I escape."

WHY

I looked at Wotan. My gut felt empty. My hands shook. Wotan's eyes shone. "What...what was it?" I stepped forward, the cup in my hands forgotten. "What is the goal? Why are you running? Why?"

"The singular goal..." Wotan breathed in. "Is...to have fun."

The words landed like sledge weights.

"You're lying," I whispered.

Memory. Flash. The comptech in the center of Masque Macabre – a single device, dedicated to playing a game, a game that had been forgotten, a game that had become the life of a million souls.

Wotan closed her eyes. "The Hegemony was constructed to be your paper tiger, Venn. There's no prophecy. No threat. No point beyond a godlike child that wants to see spaceships explode and people fight each other with laser swords. That's it. That's the point. That's why you're here. That's the whole reason behind everything."

"You're lying," I hissed. Wotan blurred. The lights of the cabin shone and grew long and crystalline through a haze of tears.

"Let me guess," her raspy, bitter voice continued. "You love someone dearly. An enemy, drawn to you by secret messages or some connection you can't quite explain. A love that comes from nowhere rational – it's not born from any real interactions, it's hormones, tweaked by a Machine that wants to see the ants fuck-"

"You're lying!" I screamed and threw the cup at her. Wotan batted it away.

FLIGHT

Then foliage, slapping at my face. Lungs burning. Through the hole in the wall. My feet slammed on the flat white surface of the spaceport. My lungs burned more as choking, rattling sobs roared through me. I ran for my ship – and saw that it was still being repaired. I screamed, furious. My hands clenched and I heard a distant voice calling after me. "Venn! Venn!" I turned, my hands trembling. Wotan wasn't visible – but her voice came to me through the hole in the wall.

My eyes, blurring with tears, fell on the needle like ship that Wotan had used.

The door opened and the tongue of silvery metal that led into the guts. I sprinted forward.

"Venn! Wait!" Wotan bellowed.

The door closed behind me. The ship wrapped me – cables and tubes. There was a snick of awareness and then suddenly, I was seeing through eyes more clear than mine, hearing with ears far more sensitive than anything I'd ever had. I was looking through the ship, down at my silvery body. Wotan held up their hand.

The rockets kicked on and I flew – running as far and as fast as I could.

HOME

I didn't think a coherent thought again for what felt like an eternity. My body was the ship, and the ship knew what it was doing. It flew as automatically as I breathed – and it angled towards the ruddy red sphere that was We Made It's primary star. It cut through space faster and smoother than any ship I had ever flown on. Faster, even, than the Tiamat II. And as it flew, the words that Wotan Hohmann had said went around and around and around in my head.

Hormones. Tweaked hormones.

And those words echoed as I remembered the first, breathtaking time I had seen Thale. Naked and shy. Gentle and quiet. Dangerously feral, but with a warmth that...made me ache. The prickling feeling on my lips as I imagined kissing my way along his scars.

Fake?

Fake!?

No. No. I shook my head inside of my ship-body, and I tried to push the thoughts away. But they remained, circling around my head, as my ship-body dove into the brilliant heat of the red star. When my ship body emerged, it came to Home. Through my new eyes, I could see the solar system I had walked so far for. It had only three planets. The first was a small, dense world that gleamed like a polished gemstone – my eyes saw kilometer after kilometer of polished, faceted glass and silicone completely covering the sunside of the tidally locked world. The world itself was on a strange elliptic orbit and as we flew past, I could see why: one side of the planet was covered in massive emitters, which glowed nearly as bright as the sunside of the world. Immense amounts of energy flowed from those emitters, aimed at the third world of the system.

A laser was a piss poor engine. But the sheer number of lasers and the vast length of time they had been firing had produced a gently alteration to the orbit, one that would grow more and more pronounced as the eons ground by.

The second world was a primeval world of greenery and oceans, beneath a gentle atmosphere. A pair of massive, artificial moons orbited it – their bodies as cold and as dead as natural moons. But their superstructure and the fanciful shapes – crescent shaped, with smiling men many hundreds of kilometers in height - showed their human origins. I didn't hear a single radio whisper from the world. It teemed with life...but the life did not speak to the stars.

The third world...

Was Home.