Not far below Rapa Nui lay a hot, slender needle — an ancient, narrow plume of magma — part of the mantle’s grand recirculation system. This very needle had made the island many millennia ago, piercing through a scrap of crustal plate to erect this lonely outpost in the sea. For quite some time since then, however, it had lain quiescent.
Now the boil is squeezed by sudden, transient, titanic forces, pinching molten rock up the confined funnel at awesome pressures, driving it toward those old calderas.
And yet, even at the same moment, something else flies through the same space, traveling just ahead of that explosive constriction… something less coercive, subtler, whose fingers of laced gravity unfold like an opening hand.
•
Instinct took over amid the dazzle and roaring noise. Somehow she made it up the quivering ladder to the command deck, where she launched herself into the pilot’s seat and began flicking switches by pure rote. “Oh shit!” she cried, hearing the fateful prang of metal bolts popping free under strain. The ancient shuttle’s fractured spine complained with a horrible shriek as Teresa felt a sudden surge of acceleration — the seat-of-the-pants sensation of being airborne.
It can’t be! This ship can’t fly this ship can’t fly this ship can’t fly
The wings couldn’t bear launch loads. She’d seen X rays of the shuttle’s broken back — the reason Atlantis had been abandoned on a forlorn island in the first place.
An island that no longer existed, from what little she could see as she strained to turn her head. Atlantis rose atop a pillar of flame, but there was no rocket. Instead she hurtled just ahead of a towering volcanic plume, reawakened and roaring where only moments ago a tiny Polynesian islet had quietly defied the waves.
Grimacing from g-forces, Teresa nevertheless gripped the cockpit control sticks and felt a strange joy. Perhaps, in some corner of her mind, she had suspected all along it would come to this. Suddenly she feared nothing. After all, wasn’t this the best of all possible ways to go? Flying? In command of a sweet old bird that should never have been left corroding on a pedestal, but should only die in space?
Even the visceral sensations were grand. She felt as she had as a little girl, when her father used to throw her into the air, and she had known, with utter certainty, he would be there to catch her. Always there to sweep her out of harm’s way.
Out of harm’s way—
The words seemed to resonate inside her. And as she blinked, tears of happiness washed away those splashy colors, which thinned and merged and finally spread aside to resolve a black cosmos, overlain by a soft blanket of unwinking stars.
Teresa sobbed in sudden realization. It felt exactly as if gentle arms were carrying Atlantis home again. The instruments she had carefully restored now chuckled and hummed around her, glowing green and amber. She looked out through a windshield that had been cleansed by fire and saw the moon rise over Earth’s soft, curving limb.
In order to get rid of her foe’s chief pivot, Daisy has temporarily forsaken her selective, “antibody” approach, using cruder, more decisive force. In seconds, the island is no more.
Ah, well. There hadn’t been much of a natural ecosystem left there anyway. Small sacrifice.
More important though, now the Wolling witch has no anchor! Her surprisingly powerful programs — so formidably represented by the tiger icon — might be a match for Daisy’s down below. But they can’t accomplish much without a link to the surface world, to the net. And now that has been cut!
“Very impressive, Wolling,” Daisy murmurs in satisfaction. “You surprised me. But now it’s good-bye.”
Sure enough, the holo shows her dragon in advance now, forcing backward a strained, disheveled cat, which yowls defiance.
•
At the bottom of the old Kuwenezi gold mine, Jimmy Suarez knew he was a privileged observer. Not only could he watch the battle of two metaphors, which dominated every major holo channel, but he could also use the instruments of this abandoned facility to follow something of the real struggle, down below.
For instance, he saw the exact moment when four resonators fired all at once to blow Rapa Nui completely out of the South Pacific. Another force seemed to precede that driving gazer beam by mere moments, but it might have been just a shadow, cast ahead of the decisive bolt.
From that instant, in fact, the tide began to turn. More and more filaments and finely meshed channels seemed to come under control of the force he now recognized as the enemy. The turn of events was horrifying to watch.
It would probably be wiser not to. Just sitting here was risky. Although Kenda’s thumper lay inactive now, only a few meters away, even using it on passive detector mode was taking an awful chance. What if the horror — whoever it was — picked up the machine’s faint echo? The fate of Easter Island could be his, any time.
Was it curiosity, then, that kept him here instead of smashing the cylinder and fleeing? Or had it been the old lady’s last request… to leave it turned on till she died? Well, she’s been dead some time, he thought. The body lay under a tarp behind him as he’d found it, twisted and disfigured, still connected to her console. I don’t owe her anything now. I should take a hammer to the thumper and…
And what? The surface world was certainly no safe place. Kenda and the others might be dead even now, if this part of Southern Africa had already been targeted for culling. Unlikely, since teeming cities and military bases seemed to be the principal victims so far. Still, it was only a matter of time.
Stay down here, then? If I wreck the machines, the death angels might miss me altogether. It was a depressing thought, though. Oh, there was food enough for months. Other isolated snippets of humanity might be as “lucky,” holding out in nooks and crannies for some time after the dragon won. But at this point, Jimmy wondered if he should have taken his chances with Kenda and the others after all.
So mired was he in self-pity, it took some moments to harken to a new sound, a gentle humming that added layers as machines throughout the abandoned hall began coming to life. He looked up, staring blankly as the towering crystal resonator swiveled in its bearings, giving off a rising tone. “What the hell?” he asked, standing up. Then, in full, terrified realization, “No!”
He ran to the master control station where the main cutoff switch lay. But as he reached for it, a voice quietly said to him,
What really made him halt, however, was the brief, almost tachistoscopic image of a face that flashed before him and then was gone again.
“But I thought you were dead!” he whispered hoarsely. Then, when there was no answer to that, he blurted, “Let me help, at least!”
As the dormant machines warmed up around him, that momentary visage returned, and he knew this both was and was not the woman whose former body lay covered just a few meters away.
In real life they had exchanged maybe a hundred words, total. And yet, right then Jimmy didn’t even wonder why her approval filled him so with joy. All he did was leap to his old work station. Rushing through all the diagnostic checks, he fine-tuned the tool she needed — her link between the worlds above and below.