THEN: July 12th, 2016, CNN BROADCAST, BAY OF ESSAOUIRA, MOROCCO, SARA MURRAY and DYLAN BEYERS

Dylan: “Approximately one week ago, President Ashe flew from the Capitol in Washington D.C.to the port town of Essaouria in Morocco. The State department contacted the Prime Minister and King of Morocco to inform them of the visit, although no specifics were given other than that President Ashe was doing research into the impact winter and was searching for an archeological site using her… uh, magic.

“Once The President arrived, she made arrangements with the local Kingdom to have some sort of pavilion built. Over the next five days an influx of workers, caterers and entertainers appeared, and erected this tented district in the beach near the port. Reporting now from Morocco is Sara Murphy. Sara, what’s the pavilion like?”

Sara: “Very opulent, as fits our President. After a day of being built, the U.S. Navy appeared, providing security and sea cover. Meanwhile, we have this footage of the President flying out over the ocean, you can see her basically looking down and casting spells, I guess. She would periodically look at this sneaker she had with her.”

Shot of President Ashe holding a sneaker by a shoelace, watching it bend and twist, using it like a divining stone.

Sara: “After three days of this, she seemed to find a spot she was hovering over. Then she cast some kind of spell that caused lighting to strike the spot. After casting, she immediately returned to the pavilion and hasn’t been seen since.”

Dylan: “The spot the lightning struck has been steaming and bubbling for a few days now. Our new magical experts have tentatively identified the spells she was using as some kind of summoning matrix but the names being summoned was un-”

Sara: “Just a second Dylan, there’s some activity. Yes, something is coming out of the water. It looks like a tiger! No wait, it’s some sort of humanoid-tiger creature. Blue colored. Wearing a fez. And uh… male. Very male. Very handsome.”

Dylan: ”Sara, but-”

Sara: “Several local women dressed in traditional Moroccan costumes have brought robes and slippers to this Tiger-man. One of them has a jug. He seems to be amused by all this. He’s bowing. He’s drinking. Now he’s getting dressed. He’s uhh he’s sort of touching the women. Pawing? He’s getting pretty frisky.”

Dylan: “We have a parental warning in place, as always, whenever we cover the President.”

Sara: “There’s movement at the pavilion. There’s clouds of smoke coming out that smells pretty uhhh pungent. Sparkles, there, in the clouds. Oh wait - there’s the President. She’s being carried by four local men on a litter of some kind. There’s a few other musicians following. Throwing rose petals. Oh, no, the rose petals are coming from The President. They are glinting - they are dewy. Dewy rose pedals. Whew. She’s on a palanquin?”

Dylan: “Our people say that a palanquin needs a roof, Sara.”

Sara: “She’s reclining on pillows. She’s, uh, topless. Oiled. And wearing some kind of jewels and diaphanous pants. She appears to be smoking a Hookah. She's blowing smoke rings…hearts. She’s got rings of smoke hearts floating around her now. She, uh, she looks good. Wow. Really good. Whoo.”

Shot of Sara stroking her own chest, panting and unbuttoning the top button of her jacket.

Dylan: “Sara? SARA. What’s this tiger-man doing?”

Sara: “...wha? Oh right. He sees The President. He’s laughing and roaring - now he’s walking up. She’s dismounting from the litter. Wow. For a woman her age, there’s not even any sag to her-”

Dylan: “Sara, is the President in any danger?”

Sara: “I don’t think so. The Tiger-man has approached her and is bowing, now he’s licking her hand she’s offered. Wait, she’s grabbed the belt on the pants he’s wearing and is pulling him back to the pavilion. They’ve gone inside. Uh, I’m going to try and see if they are having a press conference of some type. There aren’t any cameras allowed inside.”

Dylan: “You’ve seen inside the pavilion earlier, isn’t that right?”

Sara: “Dylan, yes. It’s mostly silks and pillows and food and a few women undressed.. Uh, dressed in historical costumes. Some uh… hookahs. I think there was a big hot tub.”

Shot of Sara approaching the tent, then talking to a woman at the tent opening. Sara peeks inside the flap.

Sara: “It looks like the… formal… entertainments have started. There’s already perhaps three or four men and women in there helping the President and the Tiger-man with the uhhh… initial introductions. I’m being told a limited number of people may observe, but we have to undress before entering, as it’s custom at an orrrrr- a historical gathering. Of, Of this type.”

Shot of Sara unfastening her pants, kicking off shoes and gesturing at the cameraman, then fighting to pull her pants down around the wires of the remote microphone.

Dylan: “You’ve not been given clearance to go inside-”

Sara: “I can’t bring cameras in but I’ll get inside and report back to CNN. C’mon, you fucking…c’mon, c’mon, c’mon…”

Shot of Sara kicking off pants and shucking her jacket, leaving just underwear, then quickly entering the tent. The CNN camera hits the ground, showing the tent front, and then the Cameraman follows, wearing just jeans.

Dylan: “Sara Murray has entered the tent with the Tiger-man and The President. We’ll report back if anything changes.”

-

A week later, Xeniya was in the Theta Labs building, sitting beside a reclining Tamra, who was eyes closed and in a trance. Wendy was watching from a webcam call, still in Morocco, wearing hotel robes, drinking coffee.

After a day, Wendy had exited the pavilion, and when the crews went in, other than a few fucked-out people inside, there was no sign of the tiger-man. Even Wendy looked a little bedraggled coming out, half staggering, but with a big stupid grin and a cheery wave. Now she was watching the proceedings. She had emailed a drawing of some runes, plus some GPS coordinates.

While they waited, she chatted with Xeniya. “I made a deal with the Kingdom of Morocco,“ Wendy said, yawning, “to stay a few weeks and pump up the plant growth and drive off some soot in the air. Price I had to pay for risking the country and using the port. It’ll be worth it, though.”

Xeniya nodded. She wasn’t sure sometimes about the lack of formality Wendy demanded with a few of the folks who worked under her. The first couple of times she had called her “Madam President” Wendy had gotten angry and said stuff about how in private they were all equals and part of the same coven. Xeniya had a suspicion it was more a cake-and-eat-it thing, and one of these days she was going to defy her on something, and then it would probably be Madam President after that. Best to enjoy it while it lasted.

“How much info did you get out of Mûzna? Was this it?” she asked.

“I got a few other bits and pieces,” Wendy said. “A few runes I’ll show you when I get back that are interesting. But he basically explained as best he could as to where he remembered AAtlantia being, and a big structure with an Aatlan rune system on it. Hopefully Tamra can get close with the coordinates and then can sense the system.”

“How are you holding up?” Xeniya asked.

“Me? I’m fine. Woof. Look,” she said, turning around, dropping her robe, back naked to the screen. There were several long scratches down her back. “I can’t even heal them magically. He was like, “scratches from Mûzna can’t just be turned into flowers, ha ha ha!” I don’t mind, I think they’re kind of sexy.”

“OK, that’s fine.”

“Just in case you wanted to know,” (“I don’t,” Xen said.) “Scientific curiosity and all, his junk wasn’t barbed, either. You know.”

“...No.”

“Like a tiger.”

“TMI.”

“I’ve got something,” murmured Tamra quietly. “It’s a couple of meters long and made out of rock - no, that’s the sea. Metal. Four-pointed. Top of something. Goes down into the sea floor. Full of Kha.”

Everybody quieted down in the lab, even Wendy, who sat back to watch. “Can you follow it down?” Xeniya said.

“If it goes underground I won’t be able to see much. Let me see if I can get inside,” Tamra said.

Under fathoms of water, murk, and then seafloor plumes, a faint, ghostly Tamra floated. Astrally projecting (or remote-viewing or spirit walking), her soul/Ātman/KhaĀt reached out to touch the structure. She felt a faint electric buzz that knocked her spirit hand back.

“Ouch,” she said. “It still has defenses on it. Or something in the construction. I can’t get inside. Hmm.” She floated forward until she was a few centimeters away. “I can see it if I’m up close, it’s radiating so much Kha. I’m gonna follow it down.”

She drifted down, her Ātman following the structure. A meter down and she was below the floor line, peering through gray silt, but keeping close to the structure, a few centimeters away so she could still sense it. It went down and down, ten, fifteen meters, Tamra carefully following. A few times she bumped into it and got a jolt and yipped.

“I’m at the base, I think,” Tamra said. “Good!” Wendy exclaimed, sitting up. “Follow it around until there’s a wedge-outcropping of the side. If you follow the point of the wedge, Mûzna said you’d hit an altar. He said he thought the spell was mechanically controlled from there.”

“Found it,” Tamra said a minute later. “Get me something to write on.” Xen handed her a pad and a pencil. She sketched as best as she could see. It looked like Aatlan Xeniya recognized, Enochian, some sort of proto-Futhark.

“That doesn’t look like it. Can you go back to the wedge and follow it up a little?” Xen asked.

Tamra floated her Ātman back to the structure, following up the edge. “There’s… I think it’s a covered line of silver. Conductive. There are runes every meter, repeating. I don’t recognize them.” She went back to sketching. Aatlan again, but this time something Xeniya had never seen.

Wendy pointed at the webcam. “I think that’s it. They pushed a charge of rarified, tuned Kha into the obelisk and it activated those. And those bult a stable field the altar cast the water-to-air on. Fuck. And I’m here, and I have to grow lentils and I can’t be there to play with the new runes!”

Xeniya took all the drawings to the scanner. “OK, Tamra, you can come back.”

“Do you mind if I just look around?” Tamra said quietly. “It’s really amazing.” Xeniya came back and sat down again to look at an excited Wendy.

“Knock yourself out,” Wendy said, standing. “I’m probably gonna raise the whole sunken city once the food crisis is past anyway.” She let her robe slide off and gave Xeniya a smoldering look. Wendy had a few other scratches she grazed her fingers along, commenting, “I might leave the scars. Maybe get some tattoos on them. I like how they look. What do you think?” she said, cocking her head.

Xeniya gulped. She hadn’t put on the charm she used to tamp down her sex drive and she could feel it like an angry wave inside her, crashing around without an outlet in the presence of her goddes- her… her ex-lover, she tried to remind herself. Friend. Employer. Madam President Not Appropriate.

“They look nice,” Xeniya said weakly, feeling her body getting hot. Gods, she thought. I’ve had training and I’ve known her, and I can barely resist her. How can any normal person?

Wendy smirked slightly and said “... ‘Nice.’ Hmm,” as she walked off screen to get dressed. From off screen, Wendy lazily called back, “Xeniya dear, I’m making it a Presidential Order you get laid sometime soon. If not me, then somebody. Anybody. Tamra, maybe. Seriously, girlfriend. It’s affecting your focus!”

Xeniya looked at Tamra, who smiled slightly and stayed in her trance.

Wendy's hand appeared back on screen briefly, pointing. “And by the way, if you are going to keep using that little Futhark gewgaw you think I don’t know about to keep your hormones out of your brain you might want to start wearing a bra, dear,” Wendy said, chuckling, then cut the connection.

Xeniya looked down at her chest and angrily pulled the sweater she had over her obvious arousal. OK, fine, she thought, she’s aroused. But the casual cruelty isn’t something that she ever directed at me that much before.

Now I’m horny and worried, she thought.

-

NOW: FLEET NIGHTBEAK’S RESPONSE, 6 MONTHS 2 WEEKS AFTER THE ATTACK ON THE FESTIVE NIGHTBEAK

The tug fleet had set up shop two weeks ago and was firmly connected to a swarm of Asteroids. Sixty-four small ones, each one currently connected to a tug drone, were slowly being accelerated in front of the brilliant flare of fusion drives. You can’t tunnel something this big and prone to crumble; slow acceleration is usually the way. These were ones to mop up after the big ones hit.

Seven other ships plus their own drones were pushing seven other bigger rocks, several kilometers each. Each of these plus the small ones were going to be under acceleration most of the trip, so as to make it nigh-impossible for the Thirders to launch their own asteroid-redirectors, if they had any, which seemed doubtful.

The wartug Myriopus’ Hammer was connected to its own asteroid - a monster at eight klicks wide. The Hammer was the only one that had a stability generator big enough to keep the big Asteroid from falling apart under heavy-g. Hammer itself was a klick long and mostly engines.

The tugs had encountered some light resistance. One of the Thirder ships had appeared, looking like a scout, opening one of their unusual Tunnels and pinging all the ships with scans. They probably expected to get some readings and jump back. They weren’t expecting the Tunnel to collapse behind them due to the massive quantum radiation distortion fields several repurposed-tugs started generating. It wasn’t a tactic the GCD used against any other species, since most transit Tunnels opened for a millisecond and then closed - but the Thirder stable Tunnels seemed to be more vulnerable to kind of onslaught.

With no way back, the ship tried to get closer to the Hammer, was pumped with urane from the railguns of the gunboats nearby, lost the small engines they had and instead chose to ram one of the smaller tugs and disgorge a team of the hammer-wielding warriors. It was impressive, brutal, and short. The tug was destroyed when the drive was holed, along with the Thirders. In the end, though, it didn’t make much difference as the asteroid was still on its way and other drones could make course corrections.

Estimates showed the main eight-klick rock under a constant burn just over a g arriving in about two weeks. At the speed it would be going a smaller asteroid would probably have done the job, but the GCD liked the overkill, especially when presenting the footage to other rebellious systems.

THEN: DEC 12th, 2016, SIGMA LABS

“This is pretty amazing, Doctor Pendit,” Tamra said. “But.. The Disco Inferno?”

Nap grinned, looking back at the (sometimes) Secretary of Education. They were both on board the ship he’d constructed in his dreams, currently floating over the water by a few meters. The Cavorite in the engine room had a system of control lines up to the bridge and he’d demonstrated the lift. Tamra’s ghostly form drifted about the bridge, looking at various objects and details.

“I like disco,” he said, shrugging. “It’s not like it’s real or anything. It’s just… the logic of this world means I can’t have a ship without christening it, I needed a name, so...”

Tamra laughed, touching the name plate in the wall. “It’s really interesting work, Richard.”

“Nap is fine. You get what I did?” Nap asked, and Tamra nodded, still peering at some glyphs on the steering assembly. “I think so,” she said. “You built a memory palace in your dreams, but instead of a palace you built a boat. And then…anchored it using the runes so it would persist in the dreamtime. It’s such an unorthodox use of this kind of astral engineering. You should be working in the Theta labs.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He walked about and sat at a map table (no maps yet.) “Anyway you said you wanted to talk about something private, I figured this was the best I could arrange without… her listening in. You think it’s safe?”

“I dunno, Nap. Is your end safe?”

He grinned, looking around, pointing to some old-time cathode display boxes wired into the wood of the ship. “I’ve got alarms if she tries to read my mind. You only got in because I gave you my Futhark private key. What about you?”

“My astral cord is encrypted at both ends,” she said. “Theta lab upgrades. She couldn’t analyze the traffic going back and forth without breaking the 256 bit private key at both ends. I mean, I'm sure she could, but it would take a lot of time, and she’s busy enough right now.”

Nap whistled, thinking yeah, she is. The impact cold (or the Fumblewinter as some wonks were calling it) caused by the probe ejecta was almost a year along, and not getting better. A few meager crops had been grown and harvested, thanks to the President opening holes in the sky and force-growing plants, but the soot in the air and the never-ending cold remained. First-world countries were still hanging on using stores of canned goods and stockpiles, but other poorer countries were in full-on freefall. Famine and starvation was rampant. Deaths were already in the tens of thousands. The world economy was in shambles.

Add to that the chaos of Wendy, the First Witch herself. The desperation of the rest of the world was appalling and while she was saving people, her own power was growing, and she knew it. Already some smaller countries were asking to simply become part of the United States if they could get more of her help. She hadn’t said yes to it, or asked Congress to look into it, even though they were so poisoned with her Authority they would probably have rubber-stamped it.

But she hadn’t said no, either.

Meanwhile President Ashe was pouring research and engineering into building this thing that she said was going to help clear the skies. Five months of all the secret labs, all the contracted minor wizards and spell-engineers and cloud-sourced spell groups online working like mad before the ecological damage was permanent. Money and time that could maybe be spent better trying to find some food, or grow it.

They had clues from the Aatlantian device now, and were trying to reverse engineer this machine capable of powering and stabilizing the spell she wanted, but it wasn’t quite there. The spell wasn’t working the way they needed, according to the chatter from the Delta labs chat servers. The materials they needed - some kind of mystically created Osmium - wasn’t coming together in the Sigma labs, where he worked.

“You know she’s talking about raising Aatlantia to get the Osmium we need, or just whole-sale using the device they had?” Nap asked. Tamra stopped her investigation to look back at him, then floated over, the flowing silver gown wafting in the astral æther. An odd choice, he thought, considering her usual jeans or Primus t’s.

She was a small woman, and in her astral form, her KhaĀt, she looked subtly different, he noticed. Attractive, sure. Being a magician of any caliber meant a constant uptick in sex drive anyway due to the QEMPS, and you learned to live with it (or you occasionally slutted around, whatever worked), so it could be just that. He tried not to read into it. It’s just that back in the physical world, she looked a bit more androgynous, where here she was slightly more feminine.

“That’s why I’m here,” Tamra said. “I want to show you something. Do you know how to project?”

Nap sighed. “I’m crap at it. I know all senior warlocks on the track are supposed to get the AS-101’s and 104’s. I failed the exam the first couple of times. I’m too busy to really study it.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “You're here spiritually now so the transition’s already done. I can guide you. Give me your hand.” She held out her own glimmering hand, and he took it as if it was real, which made it real. When he touched her, he felt a surge of blood and warmth. He gave her an embarrassed look. She grinned slightly.

“Sorry,” he murmured. “That’s just the QEMPS talking.”

“I know,” she said. “But you’re a roguish sea-captain now. Sky-captain. So I’m just going to choose to be flattered anyway.”

She drew sigils in the space in front of them, forming a spirit-Tunnel, and pulled them through.

-

Nap was scared at first but his KhaĀt eyes adjusted to the gloom, under the silt, and he looked around. Tamra obliged by casting a witchlight which reflected off surfaces to show the ruins of Aatlantia around them.

“Jesus,” whispered Nap. You couldn’t see far, but it was amazing regardless. Spires and squat buildings, a channel in the subsurface that looked like an aqueduct, a hive of living spaces off to the side. And everywhere there were faint pings back of Kha-sensitive materials. It was stonepunk, Flintstone engineering combined with bleeding edge magic for its time.

She maneuvered them to a rotunda, through some columns, and then down a series of steps to a chamber with a flat block of Osmium, crawling with runes, and a small throne of the same material in the corner. She stepped into the chamber and touched the floor.

Suddenly the throne was occupied. Seated in it, impossibly normal despite being buried under time and a hundred meters of ocean floor, was a man, vaguely Arab looking, robed and slippered, all smiles. He called out a greeting that Nap couldn’t place.

“I don’t understand,” Nap said, looking at Tamra. “Is it Aatlan?”

The man bowed, then made a series of rapid spellcasting movements that rivaled any modern magician Nap knew. Tendrils of tiny letters poured out and grabbed ahold of his head, then slid through his eyes and ears into his cortex without a lot of preamble. Nap felt his various internal spells popping and moving aside. It was over quickly, if somewhat violently.

“There we go,” the man said. “Your defenses are atrocious, by the way. I sewed a patch onto your brain’s language center. We’re speaking conversational Aat, which my friend here - “ he gestured to Tamra - ”said is some kind of evolved Aatlan and proto-Arabic.”

“You just taught me a language?” Nap asked. “That’s…that would help so much in-”

“No,” the warlock said. “It’s just a patch, like a patch on a garment. It’ll hold for a while until the threads dissolve, then it’ll be gone. I can’t instantly add new structures to your brain without disrupting other ones. I thought you were a warlock? Sister,” he said, turning to Tamra, “what does this one do?”

“Math mostly, Ebd,” the astral KhaĀt Tamra said. “Mechanical Information processing math. Plus he built a functional persistent boat in the dreamlands.”

“Anybody can do math,” Ebd said, nodding. “But building anything in the dreamlands that stays between dreams is impressive, much less something that functions. What do you call it?”

Nap tried to speak but found his tongue jamming on errors coming from the language patch, so he tried to just speak the concept instead. “The Dancing Flame?”

Ebd smiled. “Worthy. Now, why do you disturb my slumber? Is it to talk again about this mad plan of your witch-queen?”

“Hang on a moment,” Nap said. “Who are you? Why are you down here? Are you… I mean, how can…?”

“I am Ebd El-Zoq, and I was chosen to remain when the city of Aatlantia flooded for the final time. Our spells could no longer keep the ocean out. They had a good run, though. Almost two generations! But, when the spells on the tower began to collapse, a seer saw a future where the Osmium foundations under the city would be ransacked, and it was decided to leave a warning and defense behind in that case.” He bowed again, and said, “I am the warning.”

Tamra nodded. “His KhaĀt was disconnected and severed, and the body end anchored here, where it could stay alive from a trickle of stored Kha.” She turned to Ebd and pointed at Nap. “Tell him the warning, please.”

“The warning is this: Do not pillage or disturb sunken Aatlantia. The foundations of the city were not just built as a place of rest for the buildings and wonders, but as a seal and vault for a terror from beyond, an eldritch evil that was worming its way into this world through a particular timing-gap in this universe’s instructions, found here, on the sea floor.”

Ebd gestured to the floor covered in runes. Nap watched as he illuminated various glyphs and showed him the wards embedded in the Osmium. He pointed at one, and Ebd smiled.

“Flesh, Ravener, Servant” Nap said, pointing at the Enochian characters. “Shga-tô-teth.”

Ebd crossed his arms and cocked his head, looking at Nap, seeing if he recognized. “A monstrous abomination from beyond,” he said, “a mass of flesh, with an animal mind, commanded by dark eldritch forces. Programmable flesh.”

“Listen,” Nap said, “I appreciate the warning, but President Ashe - that’s our, uh, witch-queen - she’s worked herself half-mad to make the machine work. If she decides to raise the city, I’m not sure what anyone can do to stop her.”

“No offense my dear,” Ebd said, smiling sardonically at Tamra, who rolled her eyes, “but she’s just a woman, and I’m a man, and an undead warlock who came from a master race of sorcerers. I think I’m the equal of your ‘President.’”

“And if you aren’t?” Nap asked.

“Then she’ll need to deal with the Shga-tô-teth., which is beyond us both,” Ebd said, looking at his nails nonchalantly. “In your mind I see that you’d call it a ‘Shoggoth.’ Someone doesn’t know how to properly pronounce Enochian.”