“What I fail to comprehend is the why of it all,” he goes on. “Why were you willing to endure such hardship, willing to sacrifice yourselves for such petty defiance? Why is Luminous so determined to depose us? How can you be so certain we are not your gods?”
“Who cares, Father?” Xorin bellow. “They piss on the gifts we’ve bestowed upon them. They spit in our faces. End this farce of a trial and let me execute him!”
“‘Bestowed’ and ‘execute’ eh? Don’t overexert yourself there, big guy,” I say.
The God of War surges toward me only to be restrained by the two nearest Savior Gods, his brother Q’lun and sister Fhariyya. They harbor no love for me but they do fear the displeasure of their father. I sneak a glance. Overhead the Dominions twitch and tense, provoked by the outburst of near violence.
Their movements, though, display a trace of uncertainty. Hesitance, almost.
As though something’s up with their programming. As though a ghost has somehow entered the machine.
I stifle a tiny grin.
“Show a modicum of self-control, Xorin,” admonishes Trakiin. “Once I have my answer you may do with him as you wish. Now, Mr Nash, before I cede your life to my eager boy, would you kindly answer my previous question?”
“It would be my honor, your most beneficent majesty,” I say, “though I’ll confess I’m beginning to have some misgivings as to your omnipotence.”
Trakiin motions for me to get on with it, clearly arriving at the end of his patience. The time has come. With luck, I’ve stalled long enough. I think I may have pulled off what I intended to. I think.
“How did we peg you for the charlatans you are?” I say. “Simple, really. We killed all our gods long before you arrived in orbit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our gods — Apollo, Loki, Enlil, Anubis, Kali, Ryūjin, Yahweh — all those ‘mythological’ deities whose archetypes you shamelessly counterfeited for your own personas, they were real. And we killed them all.” I state this matter-of-factly. Matter-of-factly because every word of it is gospel truth. “Luminous, the Illuminati, has existed in one form or another since the dawn of history, fighting from the shadows to free mankind from the shackles of oppression. We’ve slain every Supreme Being who sought to lord it over us, and we’ll sure as shit do the same to you.”
“Silence!” Trakiin snaps.
“You’re frauds, nothing more than cheap imitations of the real gods, and they couldn’t even subjugate us for long. So what chance do you think you have?”
“I SAID SILENCE!” roars Trakiin.
“And to top it all off, your genealogy is seriously fucked up. It’s no wonder Xorin was born effectively brain dead. That’s what happens when you keep it in the family.”
That does it, as far as Xorin is concerned. He breaks free from his siblings, throwing them to the floor, and hurtles toward me. Time seems to slow to a crawl while he barrels ahead like a sentient wrecking ball, eyes bulging, teeth bared, spittle flying.
Then a thrust from a blast-lance punctures his back. The weapon’s pointed rear tip skewers his heart and erupts out through his left pectoral. Confusion scrunches his thick brow as though he were trying to add two to two and getting five. Xorin takes another step forward, and the Dominion levitating behind him withdraws the blast-lance, swings it around so that the business end is against the back of his skull, and releases a plasma bolt that flash-fries his cranium.
Around the chamber the Savior Gods balk at this audacious display of mutiny from one of their trusted protectors. Q’lun is the first to react, leaping to avenge his fallen brother. He smacks aside the blast-lance before it can get another shot off and he hammers a fist into the android angel’s abdomen that cracks its carapace, but before he can deliver a second blow another Dominion swoops down and stoves his head in with a mighty airborne roundhouse kick.
Yet more Dominions descend from on high, and the chamber degenerates into total anarchy.
Most of the Savior Gods attempt to fight. Those more inclined to self-preservation make for the exits in hopes of escape. I watch Jhan S’reen, Goddess of Death, hold her own against three Dominions. She weaves between blast-lance thrusts and plasma bolts, her agility contradicting her ample girth. Her touch corrodes the Dominions’ reinforced shells and her talons shear through the weakened material with ease. She plucks the wings off one of her attackers but it latches on to her and creates an opening for the other two to finish her. She perishes with a moan of ecstasy.
Hlaarina’s dies attempting to resuscitate her daughter Yuu’oria, the Goddess of Love. A series of plasma bolts splatters the two of them across the floor. While their family is being butchered around them, Bræsheen, the Goddess of Agriculture and Harvest, and Kloxiin, the God of Mischief and Partying, cower under the walnut banquet table until the Dominions drag them out by the ankles and transform them into postmodern art.
One by one they all fall until only two of the Savior Gods remain — the King of the Gods and the Goddess of Hunts and Wilderness. Trakiin and Fhariyya stand back to back, armed with the blast-lances of their vanquished foes. They strike and defend like they’ve performed this dance before, father and daughter leveraging each other’s strengths and guarding each other’s weaknesses. Demolished Dominions pile up before them, and it’s looking as if they might win through when Fhariyya slips and a blast-lance spears into her stomach, exit nozzle first. She tries to pull herself off the lance but the Dominion ignites a plasma bolt and cooks her from the inside out.
Trakiin lets out an animal cry and flies into a rage, obliterating her assassin and the nearest assailants. Blood sheets down his face from a laceration on his forehead. His chest heaves like a set of bellows and his muscles bunch grotesquely under his tattered robes. He spots me through the red haze and takes the shot. The blast-lance rockets through the air — a javelin aimed right at my heart.
A guardian angel dives to intercept the missile, trading its cybernetic life for my own.
The Dominions encompassing Trakiin close ranks and he vanishes from sight. Blast-lances piston in and out, arising bloodier each time, and through gaps in the androids’ formation I watch him sink to floor. I approach and the Dominions part to allow me through. Before me Trakiin lies incapacitated, wrestling to find his breath.
“How?” he croaks.
“The techno-virus,” I tell him. “NASA discovered a back door in the Dominion programming and developed a virus that would cause them to obey and defend whoever is the virus’s host. Roth injected me with it before he died, thinking I could hide the virus in my blood and escape to pass it on.”
I turn to one of the pair of Dominions who are now flanking me, blast-lances at port arms, like an honor guard. “Do you mind?” I present it the manacles binding my hands behind my back. The android angel breaks the chains and for the first time in hours I can stretch my arms above my head and roll my shoulders to unkink them.
“I never expected to wind up on Kha’cheldaa,” I say, “let alone be invited into your private chamber. And then you permitted me to monologue long enough for the virus to replicate and work its black magic. So, thank you for that. Thank you and fuck you.”
I gesture like a Roman emperor at the Circus Maximus pronouncing death for a defeated gladiator. The Dominions — my Dominions — oblige. Trakiin lets out a last defiant, desperate scream, a guttural yell of furious disbelief that is brutally cut short.
I climb over his body, the giant somehow diminished in death, and cross the chamber to that chalk-white throne. It was too large for Trakiin, and it’s wayyy too large for me. I clamber onto it, have myself a seat, and survey the carnage I’ve wrought. The victorious Dominions kneel in a semicircle before me, setting down their blast-lances and bowing their heads.