Chapter Eleven: Hell

“Yes, they’ve used up the entire energy potential of the sun,” Zanzekai snapped into his headset, “no, I can’t ‘just undo it’. They’ve destroyed the Sun. It isn’t like turning out a lightbulb. It isn’t like re-lighting a candle. The Sun is gone! He stamped his feet. “Oh, stop crying, it’s not the end of the universe. Mobilise the fleet and get as many people into orbit as you can - this chance won’t come again. Yes, Mister President, you’re absolutely right, this is just a joke, isn’t it hilarious? Turns out I’ve been hiding the damned Sun in my pocket the whole time. Oh wait, that’s right, I don’t have any pockets, nor do I have a Sun because it doesn’t exist anymore! Now do as I say or die in darkness because I’m not calling you again!” He tore the headset off and furiously tossed it against the ground. “Man’s still thinking about the next election, I swear. I’ve never met an intelligent leader, not once in my life!”

Dagger let it slide, still watching the spinning torus outside. Most of the sphereships had been launched, arranged in defensive formation around the station, not yet aimed at anything. Bolts of lightning longer than the circumference of planets cackled between the frame, discharges of energy similar in scale to the output of a solar flare. The surface of dead Vlissik was barely illuminated by the energy around it, the spent corpse of a redundant world, shadowed by the demon I’d built.

“How long until the fleet arrives,” she asked.

“Too long,” Zanzekai tapped the screen impatiently, “too long.”

“Can we do this without them?”

“Maybe. Not sure. Maybe.”

“What would we need to do?”

“Oh, you won’t like this. First, we dock with the Arkolt ring.”

“That one?” Dagger pointed towards the storm.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Brilliant. Which part?”

“I built this failsafe into the portal’s design, so I can bring us in relative to the beam-emitters we saw earlier.”

“Okay. What next?”

“Well, it should be close enough to the hull, so we won’t need to go far. Essentially, I’ll be hooking myself into the Arkolt. Taking control of the ring for myself,” he clicked his mandibles excitedly, “the Zanzekai Three.”

“The entire Arkolt?” I said, in an embarrassingly high pitch. Zanzekai glared.

“Of course.”

“You don’t understand how powerful-”

“I understand plenty, little abomination of the gods. I’ve been hooked up to them for seven years, need I say?”

“To one of their outposts, not the entire Arkolt mind.”

“It’ll be harder, but I know I can do it. It has to be me, because no one else could possibly get this right. No one has a mind like mine.”

“I think I agree,” Konzor said.

“What about an escape plan?” Dagger folded her arms. Zanzekai laughed.

“Escape? You jest. For most of us, probably all of us, this is a one-way trip. If we win, escape will be easy. If we lose, it won’t matter.”

“Still,” she pondered, “we could bring the Ultimatum of Infinity inside the,” she sighed, “Zanzekai Two, then we could protect it more easily, and use it as an escape craft if we need to.”

“That old thing is like a twig to these machines. Like a leaf. Might as well jump into space with a pocketful of air and a blanket for the cold.”

“Better than letting the people inside just die when the shoe drops.”

“Well… Yes, I suppose it is.” He begrudgingly picked up the helmet, “I’ll open the primary cargo bay doors for the ship to enter.”

“Guys,” Konzor said, his limited attention span whipped away by something outside, “I think it’s opening.”

“Ah,” Zanzekai said with mixed intrigue and terror, “looks like my handiwork at play.”

The space within the Arkolt ring started to shimmer like metallic foil in moonlight, like a living geode with a billion shining faces. Not quite a tear, not quite a rip, but the merging of two distant points in two different spaces. We could only watch as the fabric of the universe boiled and bubbled, a beautiful cyst in reality.

“a fingernail the size of a planet,” whispered Zanzekai, voice like claws against slate, “touching the skin of the universe, stabbing too hard, a little at first, and then more. Peeling the epidermal layer, ignoring the screams. Peeling the skin and sticking a straw through the open wound.”

“Stop it,” Dagger scowled, “I’m freaked enough, thank you.”

Without slowing, the ring fell still, and the shimmering fabric of the universe pulled into a single perfect sheet, the exact shape of the hole that contained it. For a moment, the structure fell dim, but then…

In many cultures, I had encountered portrayals of a realm of pure chaos. From myth and from legend, from folklore and fiction. A world where the universal laws were so foreign from us that a simple glance would drive even the strongest minds insane.

This was…

Well…

The only way I can describe it, is the absolute opposite of that.

Somehow through the walls of the ship, through the brief window into another universe, I could see the nature of the realm we’d been joined with. Planet and moons utterly broken and reformed, torn to their very subatomic particles and reshaped at a whim like clay. Gears made of stars, the very constellations in the sky moving the same rhythm across space, each solar flare timed and controlled like the hands on a clock. Neurones made of galaxies, communicating in starlight, twinkling in time, simple parts of a single mind.

This was a realm of pure order, a place where the shaking of every quark was scheduled to the end of time.

Everything had been predicted, every photon kept in place.

Until now.

I could feel it, somehow feel it, the attention of this infinity brain looking towards us, the first unexpected event in perhaps billions of years.

I could feel it look towards us.

I could feel it coming.

“We’re too late,” Konzor rested his hand against the glass. In spite of it all, I could see wonder in his eyes. Galaxies, real galaxies, just staring at us through that portal.

“Damn hell it isn’t,” Zanzekai spat, “the Arkolt can’t relay the blueprints without me, the ones I provided were erroneous. They’ll need to study it before they can reproduce it.”

“It looks like that entire universe is Arkolt, you don’t think they can scan it quickly?”

“They most likely have the technology, but something tells me they weren’t expecting us. They won’t jump into this. We have time.”

“Then take us in,” Dagger gritted, “we can’t let them win, not now!”

“The Ultimatum just berthed, so there’s little reason to wait.”

I couldn’t stop watching as we moved towards the ring, couldn’t stop watching the collision of worlds as it unfolded. Somewhere in the middle, forgotten by all parties, Vlissik had been sliced cleanly in half, the core leaking hot globules of lava through the portal as the crust crumpled under its own gravity, the remains of a civilisation destroyed with the destruction of a planet. The sphereships lingered almost tentatively by the portal’s rim, waiting for something to happen. I supposed I’d expected every Arkolt ship to make an instant dash for the ring, but they seemed more apprehensive. It made sense. This was new territory, even for them. I could imagine them beaming information through the wormhole first, a handshake to the god.

The sky behind the ring blackened once more, as something blocked out the stars. The sphereships shuddered, but didn’t proceed, nor did they retreat, not yet.

“What could scare something like the Arkolt?” Konzor muttered, eyes unconsciously drifting my way.

“Nothing,” I said, “they don’t have emotions.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means if they’re responding to danger, if they run, then they have a perfectly logical reason for doing so.”

“…Oh.”

The blackness of the gate seemed to bulge outwards for a moment, and kept on going until I realised it wasn’t the gate at all, but something coming through. The sphereships drifted back a little, swivelling to keep their distance, but I seriously doubted that would matter much.

It filled almost the entire space of the portal, less than a meter from any part of the ring’s inner face, bigger than planets by far. An enormous bullet-shaped spacecraft of pure grey material, utterly free of features on the surface. No windows, no doors, no guns, no engines. A blank obelisk, so smooth it seemed unreal.

“Can they see us?” Dagger said quietly, as we drew closer still to the hellgate. The obelisk kept poking through, seemingly without end.

“Probably,” said Zanzekai, “but I don’t think they care about us.”

“What are they doing?”

“Saying hello, I’d imagine.”

A pure yellow beam of energy blasted from an inconspicuous point on the obelisk’s surface. It only shone for a single second, and when it was gone, one of the twenty-two sphereship titans had been atomised, exactly as our own ships had been only hours earlier.

“They aren’t a part of the one,” I realised, “the universal-Arkolt doesn’t recognise them, just as they didn’t recognise my kind.”

The sphereships scattered then, each one blurring faster than light to escape the god they’d awakened. The obelisk simply fired the moment they re-entered existence, three separate beams striking true and ending another trio of sphereships.

“How could we possibly beat that?” Konzor watched the slaughter with extasy and terror stark on his face.

“We can’t,” responded Zanzekai.

“Coward!”

“We don’t need to beat them. We just need the portal.”

“He’s right,” Dagger nodded. She seemed completely healthy now, save for the scars, and was pacing around the ship, no-doubt taking stock of the ships outside. Each of the remaining Arkolt titans fired upon the interloper, which glowed with heat wherever they hit, but didn’t buckle or die. The ring itself was firing, but its own weapons seemed incapable of even eliciting a glow.

The obelisk fired again, and three more sphereships died.

Dagger snapped her fingers.

“It doesn’t want to hit the ring,” she said.

“Of course not,” Zanzekai smirked, “it wants to claim the portal technology for itself.”

“But it won’t fire through the ring either. It’s pretty much the entirety of its own universe, right? Each little bit in the right place? I’d guess that firing through the ring is painful. That’s why it’s only killing the Arkolt ships in front of the ring! It’s like a blindspot!”

Zanzekai squinted, and nodded.

“Makes sense. But I doubt we could even hope to- Ah, I see what you mean,” he snapped his mandibles, “I have a call to make.”

The Arkolt seemed to have drawn the same conclusion as Dagger, and quickly took cover behind the gigantic portal. The obelisk seemed happy enough with this development, taking the opportunity to shear any of the ring’s defences it could see. Lucky for us, since it meant fewer obstacles to dodge.

Unlucky for us, because, well…

We waited with bated breath as the Zanzekai Two crept closer to the ring, watching as the obelisk absorbed the full might of the Arkolt ring’s attack with barely a scratch, as dreadnought-sized cannons were blown from their mounts like pop-guns. The Zanzekai Two was an unarmed transport, but we didn’t know if the universal interloper could detect that. If it saw as a threat, we were dead, no question. There was little point waiting to see if we lived or died, because we wouldn’t know until we already had.

Finally, with a collective sigh of relief, our transport contacted the ring, a bright blue tractor-beam engulfing us as we were pulled inside. It was a horrible thing, being so damn relieved to be swallowed by an Arkolt superstructure, but that was really the point we’d reached. Outside, we watched the reflective white turn to unpainted grey as we were tugged down endless tunnels, moving kilometres-per-second, barely even penetrating the massive station’s crust.

“Like being eaten,” I said softly.

“You know what that’s like, Greenie?”

“I’ve had billions of bodies, and all of them died in one way or another.”

“That, little friend, is too much information.”

We came to a stop minutes later, suspended a hundred meters off the ground, in a cavernous space filled with dozens of identical ships. The walls were like intestines, covered in pipes and wires and blocks of computer power. Claws and other limbs hung in mid-air, unburdened by gravity, some as big as the ship itself. Smaller platforms approached the cargo-hold, still ready to unload our goods like clockwork despite the ongoing crisis.

Around us, the entire world shook as an unknown projectile hit the ring.

This was the Arkolt’s world.

This was the world.