The bridge was too dark, and Cal couldn't stop watching his screen.

The stupidly named plan “Punch the Cyclops Where it Hurts” was, in Cals opinion, madness. Due to the ridiculously overbuilt nature of the VI building, the mechanical engineers had concluded that, not only could the ship handle impacting the 150 mile per hour winds of the storm wall, they could handle double that.

So then someone had suggested that they could physically contact the eye-wall of the storm and use the ship as a rock against which the storm would break. Only that calculations had indicated that wouldn’t decrease the kinetic energy of the storm enough-- they would have to drive the ship against the rotation of the storm, over and over, slipping in and out maelstrom like an oar physically halting to rotation of the storm’s inner wall.

Cal and Questro had reunited enough to lead Grace Kelly through the calculations and she had confirmed that it was, by most definitions, safe. Cal still thought it was mad.

On one side of his screen an animated rocket was screaming towards the ship. One the other, the animated ship was pushing with two badly animated hands against the interior edge of the storm.

A swarm of smaller drones drones animated to roughly resemble ravens fluttered between the ship and incoming rockets.

The larger drones were still in the eye-wall of the storm, extracting every last kilowatt of power they could from the hurricane. Any benefit from the ship’s closer proximity was cancelled by an increase in difficulty connecting with the ship to shed the charge they had collected.

Several of the raven-drones seemed to divebomb the missile. It exploded while another missile showed up at the edge of the screen this one weaving across the display towards the ship.

It too was intercepted, although it took more of the drones with it and it got a little closer to the ship-animation.

Maybe it was close enough for the crew of the ship to feel it. If it was, Cal couldn’t differentiate it from the rest of the insane turbulence he was feeling.

He wasn’t hearing much, not because his hearing had cut out again, but because his mind was overwhelmed by the volume of the people on the bridge shouting to be heard over the unremitting cacophony of the storm and the ship itself.

He briefly looked towards the windows on the bridge. He couldn’t see anything through the violence of cloud and water impacting the windows.

The sight unnerved him, deeply.

He looked back at his screen.

The ravens intercepted a third missile, and he thought he felt this one detonate. A single hard push from his left and a gentle swing back in that direction. It could have been the coincidence of a particularly hard eddy in the storm. The display definitely showed it getting closer than the last.

It came more quickly than the last.

The next was caught by the layer of ravens farthest from the ship, and Cal exulted that he felt nothing more than the normal bone-shaking vibration of the hurricane.

Then there were no more missiles on the screen, and the view zoomed in to the ship. As it got closer, a shroud of stormy colors stream-lined most of the way around the nearly cylindrical ship.

A few giant drone-birds with their edges lined in white flapped downwind of the ship, trying to push the wind down and into the eye.

Still no more missiles.

The cylindrical ship gradually moved up the wall. The white-rimmed birds following and pushing. One of the birds blinked was absorbed into the storm. Then another.

The shaking lessened as the ship climbed up the wall.

An especially loud noise caught his attention coming from one of the stations on the bridge, and then he felt the ground pressing up at him, hard, for just a few seconds.

The bridge was suddenly light again. The ship was no longer shaking. Its frame was no longer shouting as it flexed and strained.

There were no more missiles.

There was no one shouting on the bridge.

Now it was no longer just Cal who couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. The little cartoon was zoomed in on the wall of the storm.

There was a crease in the wall of the storm, leaking its darkness and color from the dark torus into the calm center. The crease started about halfway up the inside edge of the storm and was getting wider at the top.

Then it was getting narrower. Then the base of the cut in the hurricane was rising. The storm was resealing the break that the body of their ship had cleaved.

No one spoke on the bridge. They had failed.

The view on the screen snapped back to live-action.

The spinning storm was shorter, duller on the side the Creator and its crew had battled, but it seemed to be mocking them, visibly returning to nearly its former height and vitriol. The crease that they had fought to cut in the storm was now less than a third of the height of the hurricane.

Then four unknown vessels slammed into the base of that crease, and, before their eyes and the eyes of the viewers of the Governance, the storm died.

****

Earlier

It is impossible to describe what it feels like to sink deep into a meditation to someone who has not done it. Jules had tried hundreds of times with various lovers, medical professionals, and journalists. The only people with whom he ever succeeded were those who were also practitioners.

During the three hours that he spent sitting on the cliffside, he was not attempting to explain what he was doing. He wasn’t thinking about what he would write in his memoirs about the experience. He wasn’t doing anything other than meditating.

Which is to say he was thinking and feeling and experiencing a density of living that was simply astonishing. An accomplished practice encapsulates everything that a personal can feel, think, or do. The good and the bad are simulated in the brain, so that when the practitioner experiences something, like say, teeming violent fury caused by some asshole hiring an actor to pretend to be his mom, in an unsimulated environment, they are not experiencing it for the first time. Their nervous system is treading on neural pathways that have been prepared and somewhat desensitized.

He wasn’t thinking about how difficult it was to sink away from his surface thought and be aware of what he was experiencing. He would later recall that achieving mindfulness that day was one of the easiest experiences of life. It did take him some time to align his body. He had never loved the sitting part of sitting, and for about the first 45 minutes of his sit, he would twitch as a muscle group in his back rearranged itself into a position more conducive to his intent.

After the first hour, a normal bystander would have seen nothing more than a no-longer-truly-young man sitting very still on some rocks with his eyes closed. A more talented observer might have noticed the occasional tension that gathered and released around his eyes. A truly conscientious observer would have seen that the tension cycle corresponded with a particular number of inhalations and exhalations.

An intelligent computer with access to all of the observational capacity that Castelain’s organization possessed could and did notice much more. They noticed microscopic motions (of which Julius was unlikely to be aware due to their scale) moving down his extremities in a pattern which correlated to papers published by several spinal researchers.)

No one in his organization concluded anything from that fact.

Then finally, after the three hours that Julius sat on the rocks, the AI observed a vessel moving at faster than the speed of sound land on the rocks. It observed that the vessel had not appeared on its sensing equipment and had not generated a sonic boom.

It observed the lack of connection made by its signal to the implants that it controlled within Julius’ body. It calculated the difference in distance between the first responders hidden in the tree cover behind him and Julius himself and that between Julius and the unidentified vessel.

It detected vibrations in the air that should have correlated with language, but had been garbled beyond its latent capacity to translate. Then when Julius approached the vessel, it observed an aperture open on the vessel into which Julius entered. The entire timeline from observation of the vessel to the sealing of Julius within it took less than 5 seconds.

Once his vessel was sealed and Julius was no longer within sight. The computer reverted to programming that did not center on observing Julius. It saw six tranquilizer shots fired by the first responders get intercepted and pulled into the vessel by an unknown mechanism. It noted the 8 reports that it had sent to stakeholders in the organization.

Finally, it sent another report noting that the vessel took off and left his observational capacity within another 10 seconds.

It sent another report with the highest urgency. It observed another twelve vessels of similar design and behavior entering the island’s airspace. It attempted to alert the island’s air defenses, however, the interface between the core processes of the AI that monitored Julius and the ones that controlled the air defenses was intentionally limited to human speed. So, by the time the message got through, the vessels had stabbed into the ocean with barely a reduction in speed.

The last message that it sent, also with the highest urgency, before its computational capacity was reduced by the transition to auxiliary power was that the seismic sensors on the island had all begun behaving anomalously.

****

Jules was in the process of sending the signal for the third time when the extraction craft found him. Because of the state he was in, he didn’t feel any alarm at its arrival, although he definitely didn’t recognize some of its features.

Stepping into the craft, he recognized the self-sealing harness and dove into it, spinning so his back was resting on the floor. The straps tightened across his chest and legs and the ship took off.

He blacked out from the acceleration almost immediately, a fact for which he was extremely grateful.