Soon the humming reached a steady pitch. Then, with a twang of tidal force, it fired.
In meeting houses and churches, in the meditation glades of the NorA ChuGas, under the sloping hand-carved roofs of the Society of Hine-marama, from cathedrals and countless homes, prayers peal forth.
“Help us, Mother.”
On the Net, there remain islands of cynicism. Sides are taken, even bets laid down. Dragon over tiger, odds of ten to one.
For the most part, however, humanity’s surviving masses just hold each other close, watching their holos fearfully as the now one-sided battle surges on. Meanwhile, they glance to the horizon, toward any strange glimmer or ripple in the air, anxiously awaiting the first agonized scream or any other announcement that death’s own reapers have arrived.
Another blow hammers North America.
How much more? People ask the skies. How much more can our poor world take?
•
“Daddy!” Claire cried as tremors shook the house. Her feet slipped out from under her and she slid along the roof tiles. Logan barely managed to hold on himself, by grabbing one of Daisy’s many antennas as the temblor made trees and canefields sway. Horrified, he saw his daughter slip toward the edge.
In a blur the boy, Tony, launched himself face-first, arms and legs splayed for friction. His slide halted short of the brink, just in time to seize Claire’s wrist and help her hold onto a groaning rain spout.
The quake continued for what seemed forever — the worst in Logan’s memory — until at last subsiding to the staccato rhythm of debris hitting the concrete walk below. Fortunately, those crunching sounds didn’t involve Claire. Somehow, she and Tony held on. “I’m coming!” Logan cried.
“You’re back?” Daisy clutches the arms of her chair as her citadel rocks from side to side.
Fortunately, this place was built well, and there’s a limit to what her enemy can accomplish with just one device, even operated by surprise.
She deciphers this desperate gambit, to strike at her here, in her very home. “Not bad, Wolling. I’m impressed. After you’re extinct, I’ll see to it the tribes sing about this battle round their camp fires. You and I will be their legends.
“Only I’ll still be around. The goddess that won.”
She prepares commands to transmit to her massed resonators. This will be the final act.
•
Logan had to find a way to help the kids. So on impulse, he grabbed one of the antenna cables, yanked it free of its staples, and used the loop to lower himself toward the straining teenagers. At last he could reach out and grab Tony’s ankle. “I’ve got you,” he grunted. “See if you can—”
He didn’t have to give detailed instructions. Anyway, Claire was a better mountaineer than he’d ever been. She swung one leg over the gutter and clambered up their makeshift human ladder, passing first over her boyfriend, then her father. From the peak she turned and grabbed Logan’s leg. Then it was Tony’s turn to writhe about and climb.
The last staple holding the cable popped just as the boy reached the flat part of the roof. Staring at the loose end, whipping in his hand like an electrified snake, Logan felt himself start to slide… and was stopped at the last second as the kids grabbed him. Soon they were all leaning on one of the dish antennas, panting.
“What the hell was that?” Tony asked. Clearly he meant the quake. But his use of the past tense was premature. Again, without warning, the shaking returned — with a shuddering, infrasonic intensity that made them cover their ears in pain. This time at least, they managed to stay on the pitching roof.
When it finally ended, Claire looked at her father, sharing his thought. This had been no ordinary temblor. “We’ve got to get to Mother, fast!”
They recklessly took the obstacle course of electronic gear and solar panels. At one point Logan glanced northward toward the line of backup levees which the Corps of Engineers had erected long ago, to reassure a trusting public that all eventualities were predictable and controllable, and would be forever, amen. In the distance, a new sound could be heard, not as deep or grating as the quakes, but just as frightening. It felt like vast herds of wild beasts on the rampage.
That was when Logan knew with utter certainty the corps had been wrong… that all things must come to an end. The concrete prison, forged by man to control a mighty river, had finally cracked. And a crack was all the prisoner needed.
The father of waters was free at last.
Long delayed, the Mississippi was coming to Atchafalaya.
At a critical instant, several of her channels go suddenly dead, spoiling her aim. Daisy curses as her overpowering counterattack misses Southern Africa, vaporizing instead a corner chunk of Madagascar.
This is taking too long, distracting her from the important work of culling and from consolidating her programs in the vast new network below. These inconveniences are irritating, but there are fallbacks, and she retains far greater powers than her foe. She prepares these even as the house rides out another swaying tremor.
•
Claire cursed, straining on the attic hatch. “I can’t budge it!” Tony and Logan helped, heaving with all their might. Daisy had used good contractors to build her citadel. Logan ought to know, having referred her to the best. If only he’d known…
They pounded on the latch. He yanked a heavy chunk of antenna from its mooring to use as a pry bar. Between heaves, blinking away sweat as his heart pounded from the effort, he glanced up to see suddenly that there was no more time left at all. A muddy brown wall hurtled across the cane fields with awesome, complacent power, tossing trees and buildings aside like kindling.
Logan grabbed the kids and threw them down. Wrapping loops of cabling around them, he cried, “Hold on for your lives!”
$
Telltale alarms blare of phone lines disrupted and microwave towers toppled — all the local infrastructure she depends on to control her far-flung resonators collapsing in a shambles. And as the data-links snuff out in succession, her dragon staggers like a beast suddenly hamstrung, bellowing in agony. Daisy stares as the other software metaphor — the tiger — leaps atop the crumpling fire lizard to deliver a decisive blow. The cat rears back in triumph as its opponent begins evaporating in smoke.
“You win, bitch,” Daisy mutters. “But you better take care of the place or I’ll come back from hell to haunt you.”
One wall caves inward as a liquid locomotive shatters every barrier to interruption. Water shorts out the expensive electronics in crackling explosions of sparks and spray. But in that final instant, what Daisy realizes with surprising calm is that, perhaps, she never really had been qualified for the job she’d sought.
I never really wanted to be a mothe—
•
Meanwhile, a quarter of the way around the Earth’s quivering arc, a small party of refugees finished crossing a final stretch of lichen-covered tundra to reach the sea’s edge. There they stopped, clutching each others’ hands in fear at what they saw.
In the distance, smoke rose from a burning town and horrible, twisted forms showed that this was one of the places they had heard about — where so-called death angels had emerged from the ground to wreak terrible judgment on humanity. So their exodus from volcanic disaster had only brought them to face something even worse.