The creatures didn’t seem to care about the “fallen god” at their feet. One of them touched the disk glued on his neck.
“Great Baila, the protocol has been activated!” he said, spitting the news in a hurry. “We found a Sigian mummy with a bracelet on his arm!”
Gill couldn’t see how Baila IX received the news, but surely he was searching for the Sigian artifacts with at least the same fervor as his current successor, Baila XXI—so it must have pleased him greatly. And indeed, it seemed that the mood of their invisible host suddenly improved because everyone—save for the body lying on the floor—raised their heads and grinned broadly.
“Five days ago, the rebels ambushed a column north of Odert River, and many tarjis died, Your Greatness. The temples had to take the enemy outpost in Samarrin to make sure it would never happen again. The siege was short and bloody. After the battle, a prisoner led them to a secret vault in the basement of the main tower, where he showed them the Sigian!”
Some Sigians died on Antyra I, too, realized Gill, not surprised by the news. After all, two ships left Mapu, and Tadeo only discovered one.
“An ancestor of the prisoner had found the mummy on the bottom of a crevasse, almost a hundred years ago. Since then, they kept it hidden in the tower.”
What a huge mistake Kirk’an made, to abandon the destroyer on Mapu! Instead of meeting the Rigulians, they ended their lives buried in ice caverns or ripped apart by enemy lasers on Antyra II. And Raman’s world didn’t fare much better, either: the great ancient cities were turned to ashes, with Baila I becoming the new ruler of the Antyrans.
“The three Antyran guardians of the code brought the remains to the Mordavia Temple. As soon as we got the signal, we took off to recover them.”
“May we show it to you?” another god dared to ask.
They turned and ran back toward the ship, followed faithfully by the holoscanner even after they climbed aboard. Gill got a glimpse of a highly irregular ovoid room with bulged walls, curved inward up to the ceiling, apparently made of a moist, organic material. They walked through another irregular opening, and right in the middle of the room, there was a floating platform bathed in a milky light. Five “cerebral” creatures were swarming around it. Needless to say, all of them were identical to the first creature.
The remains of a Sigian, dressed in what appeared to be an almost-intact orange battle suit, were laid on the table. His bones were covered with patches of paperlike dry skin, his skull still holding a few scattered tufts of white hair.
But the most fascinating thing was on his right forearm: a golden bracelet!
“This is it!” exclaimed an awestruck god, walking to the table.
The five “cerebrals” turned to the holoscanner and made a deep bow. Then, without a word, one of them carefully removed the bracelet from the mummy’s arm and froze, apparently unable to grasp that he was holding it in his hands. After a few moments, he slowly came back to his senses and walked to another translucent table floating nearby.
Their excitement didn’t last long, though, because as soon as the creature left the bracelet on the table, a deafening buzz burst into the lab. Gill couldn’t hide a satisfied grin, knowing all too well what was about to happen. The aliens knew it too—or at least suspected it—because they started to squirm uselessly while their nodule-ridden faces deformed even more. In the end, one of them found enough courage to grab the bracelet from the table, turning it on all sides.
“I don’t understand,” the cerebral being whined. “Your Greatness, the information was wrong… It got activated even without wearing it. What shall we do now?”
“The base is doomed! The ships have to leave now!” shouted one of the “muscle heads,” suddenly awoken from surprise and proving in a rather vocal manner that he, too, was able to use his synapses. He jumped at the closest holo-display to warn the other starships hidden in the cavern.
The gods were waiting in silence, gazing at the deadly bracelet whose buzz doubled in intensity. A few began to whisper something in a dull hum while others ran at a translucent display to get the ship out of the cave. In a moment, the engine’s deafening sound roared again.
It seemed, though, that they didn’t have enough time to make it; a blinding flash followed in an instant. The godly hologram imploded in a sphere of light, which slowly shrank into a shiny dot. Then it disappeared altogether, under the prophet’s grieving eyes.
“The gods died, and we lost Antyra,” he wailed.
So that was the untold story of the Kids’ War! The gods hid on Antyra, inside the distortion, until they got killed by the Sigian artifact they hunted so feverishly. “The history is never what it seems to be,” the great aromary Laixan wisely said. Everything was related to everything else; life throughout the whole universe, animated by its seemingly chaotic laws, was in fact a tumbling waterfall of interconnected events; the smallest lever presses in unexpected places changed the destiny of other civilizations—a supersymmetry principle in action. Gill had witnessed an avalanche of interplanetary consequences.
“Why didn’t the gods reveal themselves to the Antyrans when the Kids’ War started?” Gill voiced his curiosity. “They could have stopped the riots on the first day.”
“Baila IX was blinded by pride. He thought he could win without their help.”
“It would have cost him nothing to do it,” he exclaimed.
“You don’t understand! The gods can’t… cross the wall as they please,” the prophet said with difficulty, aware that he uttered another huge blasphemy. “Baila thought it could take hundreds of years to find a bracelet. Who knows what the inquiring kyis of the unbelievers might have discovered about them in the meantime, had they known the secret of their presence here.”
“And our science gets better by the day,” Gill grinned. “If the creatures hadn’t died, we might have detected them by now.”
“Baila IX considered this small detail when he decided that the gods had to stay hidden,” the prophet said, noticing Gill’s sarcasm. “But his biggest mistake was to forbid them to attack the rebels on Klikoh. They could have bombed them from orbit without fear of being seen or smelled, and the starships wouldn’t have been surprised by the blast inside the base.”
Once more, the hologram of the glacier popped up in Baila’s hall.
“Baila IX was left alone with the godly tools,” the prophet said, sighing. “No Antyran was allowed to see them, not even the three Mordavian protectors of the code. And so, the prophet became a simple spectator of his fall from power, unable to turn the tides of the war… unable to turn around the eye of the satellite stuck forever on the same valley.”
The temple soldiers reached the last stretch of the glacier. Here, the rugged path was crossed by countless crevasses and seracs, which soon brought their advance to a halt despite the best efforts of the pathmakers. And it was happening near the hill where the thermal shadows were waiting in ambush…
With their narrow bridges hopelessly clogged, the soldiers scattered to search for a way around the largest cracks when, all of a sudden, a mighty battle cry erupted from the nearby hill! Thousands of foot rebels in leather armor burst out of their snow pits, screaming, and charged down the slope, followed on their wings by two small packs of moulan riders dressed in full orzac regalia.
On the top of the hill, hundreds of moulan slingers called sakka36 sprang from the wooden hatches hidden under the snow. They quickly aimed their slings at the swarm in the valley and hurled the bombs all at once.
Being placed so high, the first salvo flew more than fifteen hundred feet before landing in the middle of the temples’ vanguard, wreaking havoc. A few well-aimed bombs fell on the bridges and on the unfortunate troops crossing them. The decks immediately caught fire and broke like tinder—not so much due to the fire, but from the commotion caused by the frightened beasts. Howling in terror, scores of soldiers and moulans fell to their death, pulling one another into the dark abyss.