The Moon

Lunar Base Prime, inner perimeter defenses

T-Minus 2 days to Willis’s Impact

Amahle hummed with yellow ki energy that crackled and hummed around her. Phantom armor and gauntlets had formed around her body and fists, and added another two feet of height to her already impressive frame. The life energy was a combination of her own and whatever she could draw from the sun and the Earth. Her focus and ability to concentrate was being pushed to the limit as she waded into the fray and began pummeling and kicking aliens one after the other, punctuated by the occasional powerful ki blast that mowed a row of them down in a flash of sunshine light.

Normally this wouldn’t even be anything but a warm-up, even with the strength of the aliens.

But she had to split her focus on fighting and keeping herself alive in the vacuum by treating her ki armor as a type of makeshift EVA suit as well. Her strikes were powerful: pulping alien flesh and shattering bone or shell or carapace with ease. Her armor was strong too: it deflected sprays of acid, dark blasts of shadowy energy, fangs and claws and worse.

But it was a balance. The ki she used to keep herself alive was fragile. If too much force was exerted, or exerted in the wrong way, her containment would waver and that would be it. She wouldn’t die, not right away, but she would be forced to retreat, and that was almost as bad. It was like holding a tiny bird inside her fist and having to knock somebody out while not crushing the bird.

And for now, she was doing fine. She was a living nexus of energy, connecting the ley lines of the Earth and the Moon and the Sun. While the latter two didn’t emit life energy directly, they were both responsible for fostering it. The heat of the sun allowed life to grow, while the moon’s balance affected the tides, the flow of water, and the creatures within it. At her early levels of skill, she’d only been able to access her own life energy. Then it was other living animals and people, then plant life, then the charged, life-giving energy of the atmosphere, and now cosmic energy itself.

She suspected there was some overlap with what that Indian woman used: the Aether. Almost as if she had been summoned by the thought, Samaira soared past on her gigantic white tiger clad in gleaming silvery armor. She rode hands free, gripping the saddle with her legs while she handled a huge bow of platinum and sapphires. The drawstring of the bow was a line of cerulean energy, and a magical arrow the size of a javelin was nocked in the bow. When she fired it into a crowd of at least fifteen alien, it burst into deadly whorls of aetheric strands that sliced through inhuman anatomy like razor wire through cream.

“Keep them away from Dome 1!” Samaira shouted. She was glowing with silvery blue light that probably provided her protection from the vacuum. She spoke over the menu comms window, and while Amahle could hear her, she had to wonder how far her signal carried. The gray surface of the moon had been stained a bloody pink in the red light of Willis, and Amahle had learned that it blocked communications between menu users somehow. She hadn’t been able to contact Bernard to tell him she was okay, to ask how he was doing or——

Her phantasmal sunshine ki armor flickered and Amahle’s breath caught in her lungs for a horrible second before she refocused. Thinking about her fiance right now was a sure way to distract herself. He had that affect on her. Amahle regained her focus and redoubled her power and slammed her fist forward with such force that she punched through the nearest two aliens and the power of her punch continued outward to wound another three before she finished them off with a few small ki blasts.

A battalion of the Chinese battle droids charged forward or soared overhead, firing volleys of lasers and plasma and armor-penetrating missiles. The volume of firepower was such that Amahle actually had to back away form the front line. Samaira created a spherical shield of translucent blue aether around herself and Chandrali to avoid some of the splash damage of the droid’s volleys.

There were a ton of the mechanical Chinese soldiers, but they didn’t seem overly concerned with the safety of their flesh-and-blood allies.

By contrast, the small number of Exterminators from the American inventor Gary were far more precise, often targeting stronger groups of aliens that surged towards Dome 1 or weak points in their defense. They were still far from perfect though. The aliens swatted all the mechanical fighters, even the Exterminators, into scrap with relative ease. The droids hit hard, but they were glass cannons: good for an opening salvo or two before the horde descended on them and turned them to so much trash.

There were other hosts, thankfully. Amahle fought alongside a Cuban host in powered armor so thick and heavy that the surface of the moon cracked beneath its weight. The rifle in his hands was roughly the size of a motorcycle and anything its powerful glowing rounds hit was turned into a fine mist. Another host from Spain (Barcelona, maybe? She thought she recognized him from the first host meeting with Renn outside Beijing) wielded a delicate saber and moved almost faster than she could follow. He wore a flexible EVA suit that kept him alive, and dodged any incoming attacks with comical ease.

The non-mobile, automated defenses of Lunar Prime held the back ranks. They fired smaller Mori cannons and similar artillery from well defended positions either inside outer domes of Lunar Prime itself, or makeshift, temporary pillboxes that had been erected in minutes by the droids.

Amahle saw a light flash near Dome 1 and ducked reflexively as the Deluxe Mori Cannon fired for a second time. It’s beam of anti-matter soared into space, toward the wavering red light of Willis. Amahle saw the asteroid begin to move, and the Mori Cannon’s beam missed the center mass again, by miles. This time the beam struck the asteroid’s right side, obliterating millions of tons of rock and thousands upon thousands of aliens, but leaving the larger mass intact.

“It’s too far out!” Amahle shouted into her menu comms at Li Qiu. “It’s got almost a full minute until impact to move out of the way. You’ve got to wait until it gets closer and it’ll have less time to dodge!”

“Negative. I have my orders. Maximum number of shots will be fired,” Li Qiu replied. “We have the energy. Even if a shot doesn’t hit center mass, it still reduces the asteroid’s size.”

“We don’t have the energy!” Amahle shouted. “The outer domes lose power whenever you fire and it’s taking them longer to come back online. The southern defenses are getting hammered! And the aliens are only getting denser!”

Even as Amahle said it, a horrendous serpentine scorpion creature over fifty yards long and bigger around than a truck slithered toward Amahle, its huge pincers snapping. She slammed her ki-armored gauntlet into its face and was pleased to see it crack, but then gasped as it continued to attack. It was the first alien she hadn’t been able to one-shot since Alpha.

The alien opened its ravenous maw to reveal row upon circular row of whirring obsidian teeth. It chomped onto Amahle’s gauntlet and she swore. She detached the glowing ki construct from the rest of her armor, kicked the alien as hard as she could, and then with an effort of focus and a burst of energy, caused the mystical glowing gauntlet to detonate like a grenade in the alien’s mouth. It’s head and the front fourth of its body burst into slimy pale chunks and green slop that floated gently to the lunar surface like gory autumnal leaves.

“Bastards are getting tougher!” Amahle said into the local communication line.

“And there’s more of them by the second!” Samaira said. “We’re losing ground. At this rate we won’t have time for the DMC to fire all of its shots!”

“You hear that Li Qiu? You gotta make this next shot count!” Amahle shouted.

“Rushing will do nothing,” Li Qiu replied, but there was a quaver in her voice.

“It might save the damn planet, actually!” Amahle said.

Silence from Li Qiu for several moments, and then, “I’m setting the DMC to auto-targeting. It’ll be able to hit Willis. I’m sure of it.”

“You’re what?” Amahle demanded.

“Just keep those things off Dome 1 for another fifteen minutes,” Li Qiu said, and then cut her line. Amahle turned to Samaira, and the two women exchanged confused looks.

“What the hell is she doing?” Amahle demanded.

The Moon

Lunar Base Prime, Dome 1, DMC Firing Chamber

The DMC had missed twice, only scoring partial hits, and it looked like the third shot would be its last. Red alerts flashed on every screen nearby and showed aliens flooding in past the outer perimeter and overwhelming or destroying the defensive satellites. They were already down to 75% of their robotic forces, and the rate they were dropping got fast with every minute as more aliens arrived.

Worse, according to Amahle, the aliens were getting tougher as well. There was a new alarm as a distant explosion boomed. Dome 4 had taken a particularly bad hit.

Li Qiu used her cognitive acceleration to run through several firing solutions at once. Base on the speed of the asteroid and the previous two moves it had made to dodge the DMC blast, all of the solutions resulted in her shot missing again. It wouldn’t be close enough to avoid dodging for another thirty or forty minutes, at least, and by then, Lunar Prime would be overrun.

Unless she could get the asteroid to stay still.

But there was nothing in the RAC store that she had seen that would do something like that on the scale required.

But…

There were the skills.

She rejected the treasonous thought almost at once, but it re-emerged. This was their last, best chance to obliterate Willis. If it made it past the moon, it would begin to wreck havoc with the oceans, with the orbit of the moon itself. The final defensive line could chip away at it, and Gary and Huang could fire all their missiles at it, but it might not be enough. The DMC could blast it apart, and Li Qiu knew it could because if it couldn’t, why would the aliens bother to dodge the hits?

For the first time since she had acquired the menu, Li Qiu summoned her AI. It was silvery-white, and had a head like a Chrysanthemum. It blinked at her, looked around, then blinked again as if surprised to find itself alone with her.

“No council meeting? I thought humans considered this illegal?” the AI asked.

“It…it doesn’t matter,” Li Qiu said. “I we don’t do something, laws won’t exist. China won’t exist. Nothing will.”

“I see,” the AI said. Unlike many of the other hosts, Li Qiu had never bothered to name it. She had always liked Chrysanthemums, though. “What may I assist you with?”

“I need a skill to hold that asteroid in place. Just for a minute or two at most.”

“That will take some effort. You’re currently at level 75, so we should be able to find something. I would recommend one of the dominions: Space, and the Eyes of the Horizon.”

“What will that allow me to do?”

“You will be able to spatially lock it in place, deny it movement forward or back, and essentially freeze everything on its surface. I only have access to the first ten levels of the skill, but if you spend all of your ‘Other’ skill points on this, you should be able to do it. You also have an unused class selection that you could use to boost it further.”

“If it’s Space Dominion, could I just push it back? Or maybe teleport it somewhere else?” Li Qiu asked.

“I don’t know. I do know that within the first ten levels teleporting yourself is possible, but will cause fatigue. I don’t know about something that size,” the AI said and glanced at the nearest screen showing Willis. “However spatial lock is available at level 1, and is a fairly simple maneuver. Given the growth patterns of your other skills, I predict you should be able to apply it to the asteroid.”

“That will do then,” Li Qiu said. She had been thinking of the best way to get up there: via ship or jetpack or something else, but teleporting would be perfect. Just herself would be enough. She could use one of the armored EVA suits to guard against the vacuum. She knew it wouldn’t last long against the aliens, but she didn’t need it to. Just long enough would do.

“Do it,” Li Qiu said. “And whatever class will boost Space Dominion the most.”

“Of course,” her AI replied. Li Qiu felt a sudden rush inside of her head as the collective impact of all those levels in a single skill hit her at once. It wasn’t as bad as doing a complete level up: her stats and her other skills were unchanged since she hadn’t gained anything new, just using what she had stockpiled.

It was still enough to knock her out of her chair and into a blind, agonizing pain for several long moments.

When Li Qiu came to again, she saw that barely a minute had passed, but she felt awful. She crawled over a few feet and vomited, then stood up and blinked.

Her eyes felt…strange. She could see everything very clearly now, and more, could see around things, out of line of sight. Then she realized she wasn’t really “seeing” them with her eyes so much as being instinctively aware of exactly what occupied every inch of space around her. If the movement of her caused a dust mote to twitch a hundred feet away, she knew it. She knew that some of the wires behind one of the battery cells were slightly twisted, and knew that that single kink had caused more twists and tangles further down the line, but if she just gave a gentle tug on that one wire, the rest would align perfectly.

And that was just within Dome 1. She could sense the movement and occupied and unoccupied space outside for miles and miles, across half the surface of the moon. She could sense Samaira positioning her arms to fire her bow, and even before she loosed the arrow, Li Qiu knew what path it would take and that it would be off-target by five centimeters.

She sensed Amahle punch a towering alien made of stone and bone, and predicted the arc of its fall. If Amahle had punched it three feet to the right, it would have collapsed more effectively onto a group of weaker aliens and likely crushed them all.

“Oh my,” Li Qiu said and then felt tears in her eyes. How many more people could she have saved if she’d had this in the beginning? Had she really lost her humanity now? Did either option matter if the asteroid made it through?

The last question was all she really cared about now. If Willis made it through nobody would be saved, and there would be no humanity left to debate what the term even meant.

Li Qiu stood, wobbled on her feet, almost vomited again, but steadied herself on her chair. She flopped into it and began to input the final checks and information for the DMC’s last blast. She made a few final adjustments based on the power she felt within her now: she shortened the range of the DMC but upped the power. It would essentially drain the base of everything but basic life support functions for the better part of a day, but that sort of thing wouldn’t matter one way or another. She had one shot, she had to make it count.

She set a timer on the DMC’s last shot, and set her watch to match it. All she needed now was an EVA suit. She stood to go to the nearest airlock where they would be kept, then realized that wasn’t necessary. She pictured Dome 1’s primary airlock and vanished and then reappeared next to it in a second. It was barely more effort than taking a single step. The power she felt not just within her, but around her, made her think this might work out after all. Space was no longer just the absence of matter, the empty void between objects, it was all that mattered. It was a weapon she wielded as much as her Mori Cannon.

She donned one of the many armored EVA suits, its special alloy exterior capable of withstanding a direct hit from a tank, and then vanished again. This time she appeared a few miles above the lunar surface. She still had a perfect sense of where exactly the DMC was, and the trajectory of its beam.

Something moved behind her, disrupting the empty void around it, and Li Qiu turned.

An alien that was a churning mass of hair and teeth, bigger than a house, rushed at her. Li Qiu raised her hand and the monstrous creature halted at once.

She could have left it there, stuck in place for years, decades maybe, but it would have cost her energy to hold it. She compressed the space around it, folding it inward again and again within milliseconds. The alien went from house-sized to pea-sized in a couple of heartbeats, crushed almost instantaneously. Her AI confirmed the kill, and Li Qiu sent its tiny, dead body hurtling toward Earth to burn up in the atmosphere.

She teleported again, farther, almost at Willis now. She could have blinked there at once but wasn’t sure how much energy that would drain, and she needed to wait for the Mori Cannon to finish charging. She sensed that holding Willis at her current level was possible, but not for long. Maybe a minute, give or take a few seconds, and it would exhaust her completely.

She floated in space and waited. Aliens flew towards her and she crushed them with ease. Several of the incoming aliens resisted her attacks, pushed back at the space closing around them. These Li Qiu merely wounded and then pushed them toward the moon and Lunar Prime’s automated defenses. She didn’t want to expend herself too much, but she didn’t want to just ignore the attackers either.

Her watch beeped and alerted her that she had seventy seconds until the DMC fired for what would be the last time. Li Qiu took a breath and vanished once more and appeared behind Willis, over a hundred miles away.

As soon as she appeared behind the giant asteroid she sensed something. The red light surrounded her, practically assaulted her, and she sensed its origin. On the asteroid’s surface a figure loomed, hulking and inhuman. It was a giant cobra with four humanoid arms. Two of the limbs grasped a sword a shield, with the other two together held a long gleaming black staff tipped with a red orb that glowed a furious crimson.

Almost as soon as she noticed the creature, it turned to face her. Its face was that of a human skull, but malformed and warped, with a serpent’s fangs and a crown that raised up and merged with the cobra’s hood. It started to move toward her and she locked it in place.

The cobra-alien regarded her in silence, oddly calm as it stood alone at the rear of the asteroid. Its millions of siblings must be near the front, and Li Qiu figured it had stayed behind to shield itself from attacks while providing the weird red light.

Li Qiu flinched as she felt the cobra-alien not only resist her spatial lock, but begin to crack it. It moved, but slowly, and Li Qiu had to focus more intently on keeping the thing still. But the more power she used, the more it resisted, the more it began to approach normal speed. It was aiming its staff at her, or trying to. She tried to crush it, at least its arms, but it resisted that as well.

She had thirty seconds until the DMC fired, and then perhaps another thirty seconds or less until the blast impacted. She couldn’t use up her energy on this one target. She unslung her own rifle, the prototype of the DMC, and fired it at the cobra-alien below. The original Mori cannon had been enough to obliterate high-level aliens. It unleashed a single shell of destructive force that expanded in a white dome around the cobra alien. It had been enough to kill Alien Alpha, likely even without Zoya’s Czar Bomba or Gary’s Anti-Matter bomb.

When the blast faded, the cobra-alien remained, unharmed. There was a tilt to its head that looked almost…amused. It raised its staff, and that was when the DMC fired, and Li Qiu used everything she had to hold Willis——and every freakish creature on its surface——in place.

The effect on her was immediate. She felt like something was sucking the life right out of her, as if she were crumbling into the void around her. But she ignored it, ignored every instinct that said this was killing her, and held on. Willis remained immobile, and to her satisfaction, the cobra-alien managed to look annoyed as it was utterly frozen in place.

That was when something else began to push back at her. It wasn’t just the cobra-alien or its weird red light. She felt something upon her, a pressure like being deep under the ocean. It squeezed her from every direction, and she watched in horror as the craggy surface of the asteroid began to open and reveal the dark interior, and the void within.

She’d heard Galtero talk of some alien color, something that had erased Cooper’s ability to pilot his suit. But it had been at the front of the asteroid, which is why she had teleported to the back. But now, despite her efforts to halt all movement of Willis itself and the alien, the rock of the asteroid was opening like a great eye. It revealed a deep well of alien color.

Galtero had described it as a void, an emptiness deeper than space. He had only seen it from a distance, however, while Li Qiu was directly over it.

It wasn’t emptiness.

It was the opposite.

She was looking at something. A fraction’s fraction of something so huge and dense that normal space could not accommodate it. Her Space Dominion told her that there was a tear in the fabric of reality, that it had been violated, ripped asunder. Whatever was in that ragged hole in reality, it was not something that was able to exist within normal three-dimensional space as Li Qiu understood it. Its alien and unknowable color, like a living bruise or an infected wound but worse, was just the tip. Even as she stared at the swirling dark color she felt her mind begin to slip, felt a pull on not only her knowledge and abilities, but on her very self. Everything that was Li Qiu was being sucked toward that horrible infinite mass of impossible realities.

But Li Qiu held on. She redoubled her efforts, fought to keep the rocky iris of the asteroid from opening further and letting that horrible thing out.

Her watch beeped, and Li Qiu grinned.

The blast from the DMC struck Willis in the center, and she saw the cobra-alien’s red eyes widen in surprise. Cracks appeared along the back of Willis just as Li Qiu’s ability to hold it ran out. She saw aliens, hundreds of thousands of them, scattering and flying away from the asteroid, including the cobra as her spatial lock was undone.

The presence within the asteroid faded. The tear in reality closed, leaving Willis not as some housing for a gate to Elsewhere, but just a lifeless chunk of space rock. The blast of the DMC drilled into and through Willis, and white rays of light shone through the cracks.

Li Qiu had spent everything she’d had to hold it still, to guarantee a hit. Her smile settled on her face as she died. Seconds later, the DMC’s blast fully burst through Willis, consumed Li Qiu on the other side, and sent the dead fragments of rocks spinning away, into the silent void and away from Earth.