Daughter of Time 1: Reader (22 page)

I found myself improvising, and in a giant mental sweep, like summoning a wave from a quiescent sea, I sent a burst of mental distortion across the hordes of Dram soldiers. I was in some strange hyperkinetic state, and the power I let forth caused scores to drop instantly, some, I am sure, permanently. Seeing another horde coming through the main entrance, I recalibrated and released another burst, sending all but a handful down on their faces. Those remaining looked stunned, unable to function, and they wandered aimlessly around the room for several minutes before falling down, staring vacantly, and doing nothing. I don’t know if these were permanently brain damaged.

I felt a powerful swell of anger and realization rise behind me, and a venomous urge strike toward me.
The Emperor
. I read its mind all too easily. The monster who had directed the pain of so many aliens and humans filled my consciousness, and I sensed its thrusting of a deadly weapon in my direction.
It knew.
It would seek no Tribunal to decide my fate. Funny, I had not seen this in the visions! Too close to my person, I suppose.

Waythrel screamed, “Ambra! Behind you!”

Poor Waythrel, so worried! By the time I turned to face the Emperor, Waythrel sent out thoughts of shock and awe, and stared at the Dram ruler. The beast stood still, its upraised claw clutching a weapon aimed in my direction. The creature gasped for air, yet could not move, trembling in a tremendous effort to break free of the invisible bonds holding it in place.

I walked slowly up to the insect, staring into its many eyes.

“Emperor of all Dram!” I shouted at it. “Now you will hear
me
.” And then, I let thunder in its mind:
One way or the other!

The Emperor tensed as my anger slapped at its consciousness, and fear flowed toward me like a cold river.

“You are right to be afraid,” I said. “You have a debt to pay for all the souls you have tortured, murdered; the light you have extinguished.”

I could not help myself, I felt my thoughts squeezing, tightening in their fury. The Dram began to make wheezing sounds, pitiful throaty wails of an alien physiology, yet no less desperate than a human being strangled.

I slapped its mind hard.
I know what you have done
. I felt desperate cries of pain and fear from the creature, but in response I gave no pity or mercy, but played out in its mind the scenes of my visions. The Dram Emperor recoiled in shock at my knowledge, and my power, seeing now that its executioner was near.

“Ambra,” Waythrel whispered near me, but the Xix was only a butterfly near the hurricane of my vengeance.

“See them scream, Emperor? See the billions boil and burn? I’ve seen them. Day after day, night after night, I have seen them, and I know you decreed their deaths.”

Tighter and tighter I squeezed. The creature could no longer stand on its own power and began to sag to the ground.

“You gave your victims in your dungeons no rest! Up with you!” I felt myself invade its mind further, and, overpowering the normal biology, I diverted energy from other vital life processes and strengthened the signal to the legs, forcing the Dram to stand, turning its eyes that flailed vainly for help or escape, turning them toward me. I filled its mind with my image, my anger, and its imminent demise.

“Ambra, you must stop!” Waythrel cried more strongly.

“Know now the helplessness of those you have tormented and murdered. Feel their histories drown you.” I opened the valve of vision and directed the terrible currents through my mind into that of the Dram Emperor. I watched as the captive consciousness was battered in the visions of other lives, other worlds, other dreams and hopes that could not be processed. The insect began a terrible trembling across its body, the legs, even under my tyrannical control, losing strength, the creature’s body near the breaking point.

“Ambra, don’t become a monster!” a voice pleaded with me. “Release it! Don’t let your own power consume you!”

There was a pause, a breath in Time. Only my awareness was mobile. In that moment, somehow, some part of me heard the plea. Some part of me looked and saw the mad she-god I had become, summoning a deathly storm of power around me.

I stepped back from the edge of my own damnation. I can’t analyze how it happened or why, but like waking from a dream, I shook off the crazed mood and released the Dram Emperor. It fell unconscious to the floor. Alive, yet forever wounded, always to remember and experience the suffering it had created.

Waythrel grabbed my shoulders with its spidery arms. “Down to the airlock. A ship is docked.”

We raced through the Dram ship, the surviving members of the Xixian team loping like crazed ballet-dancing spiders, incapacitating the stray Dram that got in our way. We reached the airlock, entered the chamber, and transferred to the connected ship of the Resistance.

Within seconds, our ship and the remaining Resistance craft that had not been blown out of the sky converged near the Orb. Crew members screamed that an armada of Dram death boats was headed our way and would be within firing range in minutes.

“Ambra, please, get us out of here.”

I looked over at Waythrel, not even sure I was really sane yet—from what I had seen, and done, to what I would see, and do. It all blurred together. Time—it was churning through past, present, and future. It was hard to know which way was forward.

“Sure, Waythrel. Got an express ticket.”

“To where?” it asked.

“Home, and nowhere, Waythrel.” I shook my head. “You can never go home, they say.”

I fixed my mind on the destination and flexed my thought to open the Orb. And it opened, filling my mind with radiance, filling the eyes of all around with a different light. We dashed through a million dimensions of nowhere and everywhere, leaving behind the red of Dram, filling the windows of our ship with the golden rays of Sol.

33

Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power. 
—Marquis de Sade

Without willing it consciously, my mind darted back in time, deep into the recesses of the past.

For nearly three billion years this cratered rock had waited for its day. Circling endlessly, cold, silent, an outcast from the warmer rock huddled around a blue star, the largest of millions, yet failed. Orbit after orbit, the stars whirled across the rocky horizon, and yet it did not lose patience. It did not count the eons. Without promise, without hope, without thought, it held pregnant within its core a fate unguessed. And then, in the wink of an eye to this ancient entity, moving at the rapid pace of life, hundreds of small metallic gnats buzzed around it. Each nudged softly, surely, augmenting each other, until a crescendo built, and the old path was discarded. It latched upon the seemingly infinite energies of the tendril of an Orb, slingshot toward another star system, guided by malevolence, erupting from hyperspace with a swarm of demons blackening its outline. Inward toward the bright golden light it rushed, gathering frightening speed, aimed like an arrow with terrible purpose. Gravity.
Only gravity
. Slight alterations in gravity, then an exploitation of ancient and mysterious powers, leading to terrible accelerations and flight toward its final fate.

The cool morning breeze blew through a young woman’s auburn hair. A vivid blue sky welcomed a new spring day, and she watched the children run across the concrete playground in London. Other mothers sat nearby, or walked shepherding their young. All familiar to her, many known well. She squinted into the bright sunlight and made out the form of her three-year-old stumbling forward and pointing to the sky.

“Look, Mummy, there’s a falling star up in the sky!”

She followed her daughter’s finger into the cloudless day. A bright speck, as if it really were a small star, shone brightly in the west.

“Yes, darling, it must be a falling star. I’ve never seen one in the daytime before.” She smiled as the toddler grinned upward.

“Mummy, mummy, I’ll make my wish! I’ll make my wish!”

“Make it a good one!”

The little girl closed her eyes tightly, frowning in concentration. Suddenly, she opened them and hopped up in the air.

“Mummy, I can’t tell you. It’s a
secret
, or it won’t come true!”

The young woman smiled and glanced up into the sky once again. Her smile froze a moment, then faded as several lines formed on her forehead.

“Look at it. It’s so bright.”

High in the atmosphere of Earth, where each day thirty tons of material the size of sand grains enter and burn up in the atmosphere, something horribly larger ignited. One thousand miles away from London, a deep shadow darkened the capital of Iceland. Vendors on the street looked upward, people in office buildings glanced out of their windows, and frantic calls on military and national security lines screamed in urgency at the completely unexpected calamity set to befall. The Sun was blotted out, yet a second star now shone, moving like some crazed thing across the sky, erupting into a brilliance so terrible it could not be viewed by the creatures on the ground without causing blindness.

The atmosphere of Earth exploded over Canada. The energy of one hundred trillion megatons of TNT from the rushing object began its conversion into diverse forms of energy on the Earth. A fireball nearly two hundred times as bright as the Sun was born, igniting everything within its growing radius. As the Earth’s surface absorbed the impact, the thin outer layer of crust was peeled off in a growing wave from the center of impact, like the skin off an apple, thrown with tremendous power high into the atmosphere. On this skin were the world’s oceans, its land masses, every town, city, and state. Every living form on Earth. Underneath, and also ejected high into the now burning air was an ocean of magma. For all of human history, hidden from view by the cooled crust except for rare volcanic eruptions, enormous volumes now were poured over the Earth’s surface and into its skies. In front of the growing impact crater that spread like some yawning maw across the planet, a hypersonic pressure wave of compressed atmosphere rushed away from the impact, carrying the equivalent of winds blowing at over eight thousand miles per hour. Everything in its path was flattened and then set aflame by the fireball that followed. Earthquakes of magnitude fourteen on the Richter scale threw down anything else that somehow remained standing.

Within hours, the playground in London had been lifted off the Earth’s surface and thrown into space. Along with all the remaining crust ejected, it would then fall back to Earth as fiery meteors to rain destruction on the rest of a dying planet. There was no chance for any reaction, no ability of the small creatures dotting the planet to take any course of action that could protect them in any way. Those within several thousand miles of the impact were vaporized almost immediately. Ten billion souls cried out into the blackness of space, and then were silent.

Within a day, the entire surface of the Earth was a raging inferno, where the oceans boiled to nothing, all vegetation was reduced to ash, and every sign of life was wiped clean from the molten landscape. The once blue and white marble in the solar system became utterly black, lifeless, and still. The third planet from the star was now sterilized.

The Emperor’s will had been done.

34

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. 
—George Orwell

From the infinite maze of light, the starship plunged into the blackness of space. The glowing Orb behind us burned brightly for several moments, and then, as if a switch had been thrown, went dark. The Sun radiated at the center of mass of the small system of nine worlds and asteroids, its disk large in the field of vision near the third planet from the star. The Xix at the controls on the bridge exchanged rapid conversation. I could sense them three floors up.