Angular extensions of darkness were expanding to follow but that was all right because they had hoped for something like this.
—Having fun, brother?
—Wonderful, sis.
Freya’s death squadrons came hurtling in from Roger’s left, screaming out of spacetime distortions like sapphire starbursts, and they tore through the darkness-extrusions, breaking them apart. Complex angular structures of non-matter tumbled off, twisted and bent, apparently inert.
Suddenly they returned to life, those fragments; but Freya had foreseen the possibility and a hundred more squadrons followed, taking the smaller structures apart, wielding zero-point energy with exactitude, obliterating the enemy offshoots.
A partial victory, so early on, built confidence.
But the greater mass of darkness was still advancing.
Magni’s people materialised then, glowing blue and directing destructive energy back along the length of the darkness, but still it came. And then space was glowing the colour of sapphires, and the best part of a hundred worlds shivered into existence, transported by an unimaginable spacetime distortion.
It was all the hellworlds, linked together and teleporting into place.
The Anomaly joining the fight.
And it reached out through the hyperdimensions into the crystalline warriors’ minds, eager to absorb them. It was Magni who sent the desperate call.
—Harij! We need your army now.
Seekers were everywhere among the squadrons, but this threat was something that Harij’s people needed to face together. In his original life, Harij had been the first to break Anomalous links; now his Seeker battalions fell upon the hellworlds, disrupting the distortions that were subverting human warriors and killing Haxigoji.
They died in their millions, those diving Seekers; but in doing so, they split apart the links, separating hellworld from hellworld. Finally, they reached a critical phase transition in the Anomaly’s destruction, like a neurotoxin preventing the chemical flow of thought; and every one of those planets exploded in time, but at such a cost.
The Anomaly was dead for ever.
And so were five million Seekers or more. Kenna sent out her questing thoughts with increasing desperation, but no answering resonance occurred, no response to the ping.
No trace of Harij.
Around the glowing line of the galactic jet, Roger and Gavriela and Magni’s forces were falling back, retreating towards the galactic centre, employing ever more frequent hyperdimensional jumps as the great mass of darkness chased them: somehow the dark vanguard dragged itself faster than lightspeed towards the core.
—Break off now, Kenna commanded from a distance.
She turned to her massed battalions: nine billion crystal warriors blazing with reflected light, floating in formations like quivering arrowheads, close to the centre of the galaxy they were sworn to defend, while a billion suns shimmered all around.
—This is our time, warriors.
Nine billion hands raised nine billion spears.
—Now.
They streamed out along the galactic jet.
*
Warfare is fractal, self-similar at every scale, a truth Kenna and Roger, as one-time Pilots in the ancient past – and Freya, given her own mu-space origin – had always known, deeply and intuitively.
To follow a skirmish or a continent-wide campaign is to understand geometry and weakness, aggression and failure, in a way that translates to two creatures fighting with claws and teeth, all the way up to a battle whose field is a galaxy, the fate of billions of stars and baryonic-matter life itself the prize.
But simulation and practice, even across a million years, were not the real thing: this was many times worse and more horribly exhilarating than any had imagined, even Kenna with her knowledge of other destinies, of infinitely many modes of failure.
The battle raged along the fifty-thousand-lightyear length of the galactic jet, and it was magnificent as much as it was tragic; because everybody dies, but how many get a chance to spend everything in a cause and setting such as this? Forget mythology: they were gods, and they knew it; and everything boiled down to this: defeat the vastest of enemies or let the galaxy perish.
Kenna would not allow that to happen, and neither would her warriors.
They gave their lives by the million, by the billion.
But still it came, the darkness.
—Fall back. Disperse.
No ruse this time: not the order Kenna had wanted to give. It advanced like a galaxy-devouring worm along the pathway defined by the glowing jet: the titanic darkness that was angular and complex, perhaps infinitely so, pouring onwards towards the centre. Legions and battalions of Kenna’s finest warriors were beaten back and fell away, meaning only one thing: the beginning of the end.
Shimmers of blue grew around the darkness, surrounding it. Then new, unexpected forces spilled out into view: crystalline creatures with jagged wings, angular and strange, a billions-strong army great enough to change the momentum of the battle, led by the war leader who had been missing from Kenna’s awareness since Roger’s vanguard engaged the enemy at Shadow Gate.
Kenna’s prismatic face split into a rainbow smile.
—Dmitri-Stígr. You are the Trickster.
The reply came resonating back.
—More than you know, War Queen.
Kenna had believed that the darkness would reserve its worst horrors for any who betrayed it. Could this be the critical miscalculation leading to her armies’ defeat?
Perhaps Dmitri had waited until now in order to be sure of which way the battle’s momentum went. To determine which side was the more likely winner, having devised some way of avoiding destruction by the darkness. Now, as he directed his forces to the attack, his analysis would be the same as Kenna’s: that likelihood was a weak term for the virtual certainty of victory that now obtained.
His Siganthian-derived warriors fell upon Kenna’s forces, killing multitudes.
I trusted the Betrayer.
Kenna bent her head and concentrated, linking to her six war leaders that remained: to Roger and Freya at the galaxy’s periphery, to Magni and Gavriela halfway along the jet’s length, and to Sharp and Rathulfr, whose forces were still standing off, ready to swoop at the opportune moment – except that Kenna no longer believed the moment would come.
—We are lost, she shared with them.
Overwhelming desolation suffused her: the pseudo-memories of all those other realities, that infinity of failures; and now this, here in the only physical reality, the only true life, that she would ever know.
Failure, bitter and total.
While the galaxy and every lifeform in it paid the price.
SIXTY-THREE
HOME GALAXY, 1005300 AD
Rathulfr moved through space, making distance between himself and his personal squadron, then bent down upon his floating shield, concentrating hard, creating total focus. In a moment, his questing ping was answered; and the tone of Dmitri’s reply was mocking:
—How goes it, brother mine?
Rathulfr’s crystal face hardened into diamond.
—I killed a poet once, Trickster. He reminded me of you.
Again, sneering amusement coloured Dmitri’s thoughts:
—Poetry? I’ll give you a poem. Listen to my saga of death, my epic of destruction.
—Wait, Dmitri . . . The darkness will kill you. You must know that.
—Actually, that’s not our agreement.