Chapter 308

The landscape below was destroyed. Parks riven and cold, destroyed buildings covered with a rime of frost from where the atmosphere had frozen to the surfaces when the dome had been breached, vehicles strewn around. There was still the flicker of neon and holograms.

And the white flicker of shades.

"Where are we?" Herod asked as the domed city slowly passed beneath him, as if he wasn't moving at nearly two thousand miles an hour.

"Over the Layer Sigma Worker Housing Area Niner Epsilon Three Area," Sam-UL answered.

"How many people worked in here when it was active?" Herod asked, watching at the shattered edge of the dome slid by.

"Two hundred fifty three thousand four hundred nineteen 'Pure Strain Humans', eighty-three Digital Sentiences, eighty three thousand two hundred nineteen 'gene-jacks', one-hundred sixteen thousand two hundred forty two Cybernetic Collective Citizens, fifteen thousand Treana'ad exactly, nineteen million eight hundred fifteen thousand six hundred seventy six Born Whole maintenance clones," Sam answered.

Herod closed his eyes, no longer the robotic looking eyes his physical interaction frame had started with, and pushed his palms against the eye sockets.

"They all killed each other," Sam choked.

"Steady, Sam," Herod said. The other DS had been alternating between raving and weeping for a few hours prior.

"There's just so many of them. So many of them," Sam's voice trailed off into a whisper.

"Steady, Sam," Herod said. He looked down at Wally, the little robot that had been accompanying him.

Wally could get to the mass storage areas much faster and easier than Herod could.

And unlike Sam and Herod, Wally didn't see the Shades.

Another destroyed dome went by, frozen trees and fields of gain in the darkness. The only light was the pale white flicker of shades moving about, the psychic residue of the last moments of beings driven insane.

"How much further," Herod asked.

"Half an hour," Sam-UL said.

"What do I need to repair?" Herod asked.

Below a complex railyard passed, with the rails moving up into the air.

Behold mine works I doth craft in mine madness and despair, ye who art still burdened with thy sanity, Herod quoted to himself as the mag-lev passenger car passed a train frozen still on the tracks and covered in a layer of frost.

"Main power switching system. Not the computers, but the physical links," Sam said. He coughed, the wet bubbling cough of a man with a punctured lung. "It used old Stappenbury Superconductors."

Herod nodded. That type was room temperature and above but quickly increased impedance the colder it got, a direct reversal of most conductors.

It also excreted flourine gas as it got colder and hydrogen gas as it got hotter.

One of the earliest strange matter applications.

"I'll manufacture the Stappenbury when I see what I have to replace. Do you have a visual on it?" Herod asked, opening up his virtual keyboard and setting to work.

"No. I've got the blueprint, but like we saw in the matter shipment switchback what is on the blueprint and what is reality are two different things," Sam said. He paused for a moment. "It's OK. Don't cry. Let's go find your mommy."

Herod tried to block out the last part.

So, so many children, went through his mind before he could push the thought away.

The power switching section supplied power to the habitats and at first Herod couldn't see why Sam wanted it fixed.

It was the tertiary backup power system for the Born Whole hash system. The bare necessary power for the cold storage to be accessed, much less move base hashes to the 'griddle' to be warmed up and 'grown' so that the 'buds' could be harvested and made into full hashes.

Herod thought for second. There was a reason that any hashes that had been cooked up when the Glassing happened couldn't be used.

They would all be mad.

And Herod had found himself becoming more and more educated on the different flavors of being mad.

The mental image of himself in an ice cream shop, between Treana'ad matrons, picking out a cone of madness to taste made him start giggling.

The giggles turned to sobbing laughter.

The sobbing laughter began to mix with laughing sobs.

The laughing sobs and sobbing laughs turned to screams.

Wally snapped him out of it, patting his back and making soothing musical chirps.

Herod hugged the robot close, weeping, for a long moment.

Finally he straightened up, wiping the moisture from his face, and looked outside the tram.

There was one of the fusion generators masquerading as a sun moving by underneath him, the polarized section facing Herod, so that it was shining light down on the section of the inside of the sphere below him.

Huge tanks, the size of massive cargo ships, slowly moved by beneath him. There were red emergency lights on, bathing the whole place a surreal reddish color.

He could see the flickering pale white of the Shades among the tanks, gathering in number, until he passed over a destroyed area where the Shades were thick.

"Volatile Noble Gas Storage," Sam said suddenly in Herod's ear. His voice was calmer.

Herod managed to keep from screaming.

"Born Whole short life clones, driven mad by the attack, swarmed the workers, killed them, and ate them. The attack damaged the kill-switches in them so the Pubvians working in that section were outnumbered a thousand to one," Herod said. "They held out here, hoping to keep the clones from overrunning their housing."

"Did it work?" Herod asked.

"It didn't matter. Their wives and children had been driven mad," Sam-UL said softly. He hitched a sob. "So many of them need comfort, need the trauma of their last insane moments eased," he said. "I can't do this, Herod. I can't bear it."

"We will do as we must," Herod said, doing his best to keep his voice firm. "There is no-one but us who can do this."

Sam-UL gave another choking sob. "Why, Herod? Why would they bring their children to this place?"

"It wouldn't have mattered," Herod said, watching the dome that was obviously the Pubvians habitat slowly move by underneath him. "Here, Terra, Pubvia, Rigel, it wouldn't have mattered. The Mantid killed over seventy-percent of the Republic's citizens."

"And only managed to kill less than ten percent of its military," Sam-UL laughed. The laughter suddenly cut off and Sam was silent for a long moment. "How, Herod? How did they do it?"

"The Mantid?" Herod asked. He was staring down at long highways, railways, mag-lev tubes below him.

"No. Our parents," Sam-UL said. "How did they forgive the Mantid with the fires of the Glassing still burning on Terra and on Pubvia?"

"Because they did," Herod said. "I don't know. Just being this close to it all, I can feel the hatred beating at me like heat from standing too close to a fusion furnace."

"The sheer pleasure the Speakers and Warriors felt, pushing the deaths of every kill back into SolNet and the SoulNet, it's obscene," Sam-UL said.

"They are extinct now, Sam-UL. Killed by the Immortals and the endless might of the Imperium of Light," Herod reminded the other DS. "No Queens, No Masters."

Sam giggled.

"It was thousands of years ago, Sam-UL," Herod said quietly, hugging Wally. "It's ancient history now."

"Dust in the wind," Sam-UL sang softly. "Just dust in the wind."

Below him there was a huge portal to the next layer, a permeable force field that flickered and wavered in the visual spectrum. Herod knew it was an older model, one of the first generations of such a thing.

"The screen generators are damaged," Herod said, leaning down and squinting to activate his telescopic vision. He could see three damaged points in the ring. "Looks like explosive."

"Power switching station first," Sam-UL said.

"I know," Herod sighed. "I wish I knew what kind of subsystems depend on the flourine or the hydrogen secondary product. It would be safer to use Duvalier Systems Superconductor in that kind of mechanism," Herod said. He sighed again. "I kind of wish Flowerpatch was here."

"She would have never made it," Sam-UL said. "The Mat-Trans would have torn her apart."

"Still," Herod sighed.

"Me too," Sam-UL admitted. "There's just not enough of me, not enough of you. I can touch the face of eternity, feel her tears, and hear the cries of the dead calling out for succor."

"Steady, Sam," Herod said, looking down through the huge circular gate. He estimated it was three or four hundred miles wide.

He could see lights in the darkness beyond.

The portal slid by.

"Herod, can I have your access codes?" Sam-UL suddenly asked.

"Sure, why not," Herod said.

He felt what seemed like a warm finger touch inside his brain and gasped.

"Thank you," Sam-UL said. "You're almost there."

Herod felt the mag-lev car slow down, starting the braking system working. The mag-lev car shuddered and vibrated, tiny flakes of neo-aluminum floating down from the ceiling.

"I'll have Wally warm up the nano-forge," Herod said. He closed his eyes for a long moment. "I can do this because I must."

---------------------

"Where do you think they are?" Torturer asked, staring at the security camera feed. The combined team had only just managed to get the cameras turned back on and the security system to access the feed. There were patches and lockouts all through the system.

"Not sure," Vanishing Point said. He leaned forward. "Look at the stuff scattered around. What were they doing?"

The gathered Digital Sentiences all turned and looked at the small slight woman with short black hair, sunglasses, and a pistol in the armpit of her black suit.

"I will not confirm or deny any theories as to what they were doing," she said, her voice soft but somehow menacing.

The Digital Sentiences all turned their attention back to the camera feed.

"Looks like they were coating something in something," Torturer mumbled. He waited a second. "Flowerpatch?"

They turned and looked at the only DS physically present, who was using a nanite cloud as a distributed network to host her intellect.

She leaned forward, smiling. "Looks like they used strange matter to coat, hmm, judging from the marks left of the floor, it looks like extreme environment hazard suits."

"Why would they need hazard suits?" Nexus asked.

"Unknown," Sigma said, cocking his head. "Herod withdrew equipment before he vanished."

"What equipment?" Flowerpatch asked.

"He ran off a template for a replica of a Third Republic 12mm force pistol," Sigma said. "He then created two hazardous environmental suits, then withdrew three mass tanks, a strange-matter Class XIV nano-forge using historical archive Third Republic designs, three Class XII graviton power generators that were actually pre-Diasporia designs, and two Class XI zero-point difference reactors that were Second Republic design," Sigma pointed at the laboratory. "There are no reactors or power generators."

Flowerpatch had tossed up the specs for the equipment and rocked back suddenly. "All of this came from the historical archives. It's all Pre-Glassing technology."

"Surely you are mistaken," Nexus said.

"No. Look at the dates of the templates he used. All of them are pre-Glassing using only pre-Glassing methods and materials. They chose for inefficency rather than higher efficency and energy to matter conversion rates," Flowerpatch said.

"Why would they do that?" Torturer asked. He turned to the slight woman. "Do you know?"

Flowerpatch was looking right at her when she shook her head and saw, again, something that apparently only she could see.

The bio Terran had a digital presence. It was slightly off, maybe a nanosecond, but she still saw the oddly colored and oddly shaped digital presence of the small woman. It was all gray, silvery, and moved more like water or a thick gas than a pure digital representation.

Flowerpatch filed it away as just another curiosity.

"What could they have wanted that equipment for?" Nexus asked. He pointed at where some kind of hexagonal chamber had been built in the corner of the room. "And what is this? He used one of the larger creation engines to build it, but the template for that is nowhere to be found."

"The creation engine in his lab is under some kind of lockout," Delta said. He turned to the bioform. "Can you unlock it so we can see what he built?"

Again she shook her head. "No. The interlocks are older code, core code. Any attempt to even move the creation engine will cause it to fuse out."

Flowerpatch looked close at the lab. "Is the creation engine why none of us can enter?"

She nodded slowly. "Yes."

"How old was the template he used to create that object?" Flowerpatch asked.

The small female Terran held still for a long moment. "Before your people were born. Sam-UL managed to hack out the schematics and created a template from the schematics using Legion's access codes."

Everyone went still.

"It predated creation engines?" Delta choked out.

"Yes," the woman said.

"And Sam-UL has Legion's access codes?" Torturer said. She nodded. "Why didn't you do anything?"

"Legion gave instructions that we are to ignore all hacking and data theft by Sam-UL with highest priority," she said. She shrugged. "He found something, something nobody else did. Legion's codes were hacked after the Case Omaha went out."

Another of the petite women came in and looked at Flowerpatch. "You are required," she said. Her voice brooked no argument and Flowerpatch could hear the order repeated in digital space.

Flowerpatch stood up, dusting off her hands. "Complying."

She followed the petite woman out even as Torturer argued that Sam-UL had somehow escaped the Black Box with Herod and left everyone else to rot. They wound through the hallways until they stopped at a heavy door.

The slight woman put her hand next to the door and her palm was scanned and her digital identification was read. The slate pinged and went dark as the door unlocked.

"You are the only one with physical form. We lack the empathy to carry out what must be attended to," the woman said.

"You're part of an Immortal, aren't you?" Flowerpatch asked.

She nodded. "Yes."

"The Case Omaha took part of your mind with it, didn't it?" Flowerpatch asked.

She shook her head. "No. My sister's and I's souls. Our Father fights to preserve Holy TerraSol. We carry out his will in the universe beyond so that the enemies of mankind will not triumph."

The door finally finished unlocking and slowly opened. Flowerpatch noted it was two meters thick warsteel and opened into a hallway.

"Are you all the same?" Flowerpatch asked as she followed the small woman, who most people thought of as a "Confederate Intelligence Agent', down the hallways.

"We are all complete," the woman said. "We live, we die, we live again. We do not forget yesterday but we stand today looking toward tomorrow."

Flowerpatch managed not to shiver as the petite woman opened another door. It took long moments before the door raised.

"Do you know where Herod and Sam-UL went?" Flowerpatch asked.

"I cannot confirm or deny any knowledge regarding any such potential individuals nor their possible activity," the woman said. She made a gesture. "After you."

Flowerpatch walked in and stopped. There were cryo-tubes in the room. Surgical ones, where nanites and robotic surgeons could work on someone in cold storage. The room was warm, the cryo-tubes covered with moisture.

The petite woman walked up to one that was dry, putting her hand on the top.

Flowerpatch walked up next to her, watching it confirm the woman's identity. For the first time, concentrating, she saw it as it flowed by.

SANDRA-BLAKE-33928A43

"He will need you," the woman said. "He has recovered from his illness. Legion, my Father's brother, has delivered him from the grasp of Hades."

The tube cracked open and Flowerpatch stared in shock at the body inside.

It shuddered and opened its eyes, staring at Flowerpatch.

"Mommy, I had a dream I had been sick," the young Dogboy said, reaching for her.

Flowerpatch took his hand. "It's OK now, sweetie, momma's here."