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Farewell, Part 1
Bogal Mountain towers over Corbenic like a wall. At over thirty kilometers high, it even beats the largest mountain in the solar system, Olympus Mons. Humans were few here, for this was the heart of the Strider territory.
And high up on the cloud-covered peak, the eldest of the Striders, the Witch Queen, lived in her castle.
Many Striders climbed the mountain again and again, carrying baskets full of people to feed their leader. She hated humans. For her, they were nothing more than food that should not go against its intended purpose. Her abhorrence of human independence went so far that in the Great Desert and the Valley of the Strider, if you did so much as speak ill of her, you would be irretrievably turned to stone.
None of this mattered much to Elli. She, along with Dean and a Lin whimpering with fear, sat on the right shoulder of Gomo, who climbed the mountain with considerable skill. To keep him from getting bored, she yelled jokes in his ear.
"-AFTER THAT, HE SAYS, 'NO, BUT A DOZEN SHEEP'."
Gomo's laughter set off a small avalanche of rocks nearby. Dean watched as the rocks fell into the depths.
"WE ARE THERE," Gomo then rumbled as he heaved himself to the top.
While it was said that the Witch Queen lived in a castle, that was because even the smallest of Strider dwellings seemed like castles to humans.
Basically, on the plateau that was the summit of Bogal Mountain, there was a single-story house about fifteen kilometers tall, built of huge boulders that seemed to have been fused together.
The entrance door, made of titanic logs, seemed to be made for someone more than three times the size of an average Strider, which is why Gomo used a smaller door built into that very door.
The house was so huge that it had its own weather. Elli thought she heard a storm raging in one of the adjacent rooms. Probably clouds were swept away here regularly. The room they were in now consisted of a very long dining table with matching strider-sized chairs, next to it there was a primitive throne made of black stone. And on it…
If you think Striders are absurdly huge, you haven't seen their leader yet. The Witch Queen measured ten kilometers when she stood upright, and something similar could probably be said about her girth. She was so fat that her mass probably bent space-time and made people near her age more slowly. Otherwise, the only thing that set her apart from other Striders was her slightly longer head of hair and softer facial features.
On the right armrest of the throne was a bowl of stone from which hundreds of people were trying to escape. Apparently, it was dinnertime. The Witch Queen reached in, pulled out a handful of panicked screaming people, threw them down her throat and began to chew.
Elli knew that what happened to these poor souls was not a pleasant fate, but at least it was temporary. Unlike other Striders, who didn't have to eat, the stay in the body of their leader was only temporary, that is, two to three months. One retained no more of it than trauma, which compared to the other things Striders could do to a man, was like a light tap on the wrists.
"BOSS, GOMO IS BACK!", Gomo greeted her.
The witch queen turned to face him. There was a flash of insidious intelligence in her eyes, uncharacteristic for Striders.
"HM? IS THIS SOME KIND OF CHALLENGE AMONG YOU, WHO CAN GET THE MOST PEOPLE UP HERE WITHOUT A BASKET? CUT THE CRAP! I WANT TO EAT!"
"UUHM, NO BOSS, THAT'S BLONDI. GOMO TOLD YOU WHO BLONDI IS."
"BLONDI?"
Gomo's superior leaned forward with interest, which looked like a mountain trying to stand on its peak.
Gomo held his palm to his shoulder for Elli, Dean, and Lin to step on, who then switched to the Witch Queen's outstretched index finger. The finger was so huge that its papillary ridges looked like hills and valleys. If this strider's fingerprints were anywhere, they would have been taken for geoglyphs.
"HAVE NEVER SEEN ONE OF YOU COME TO ME VOLUNTARILY," she commented. "HAVE HEARD YOU TELL GOOD JOKES. THE OTHER DAY THE STRIDERS HERE WERE ROLLING OVER LAUGHING SO HARD THAT A COUPLE OF THEM FELL DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. NOT GREAT, ALL BRUISES."
The Witch Queen opened her maw to devour them. Lin cried out in shock.
"WAIT, OH HÉKATI-BØGAL!" cried Elli. "WE'RE NOT HERE FOR EATING. WE HAVE AN OFFER FOR YOU!"
The master of the Strider paused and closed her mouth. Lin breathed an audible sigh of relief.
"AN OFFER? WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I'D NEGOTIATE WITH YOU HUMAN WORMS?"
Elli rolled her eyes. This was exactly why she hated talking to gods and god-like beings. They all had minds of their own, including god corpses like Ku.
"OKAY, THEN EAT ME. SEE WHAT HAPPENS."
The Witch Queen opened her mouth again to accept the challenge, but paused again when she apparently realized Elli wasn't bluffing. She closed her mouth again and regarded Elli appraisingly.
"AN OFFER, YOU SAY? WHAT COULD A HUMAN ASK OF ME? AM I TO SPARE YOUR PEOPLE?"
"QUITE THE OPPOSITE, OH HÉKATI-BØGAL!" roared Elli at her. "FOR YOU, THERE'S PROBABLY THE BIGGEST MIDDLE FINGER IN IT THAT YOU'VE SHOWN THE DADDYLONGLEGS JALAKÅRA IN MILLENNIA, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS GET US INTO THE CENTRAL DATA CENTER OF THE THREE MOONS INITIATIVE ON…. uh, well… THE THREE MOONS! THERE I'LL GO APESHIT."
The Strider leader tilted her head.
"YOU'RE GOING TO TAKE ON THE SPIDER'S LAPDOGS ALONE? WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH WITH THAT?"
"ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU LAUGH, OH HÉKATI-BØGAL! I'LL MAKE SURE THE WEAVER GOES DOWN ON HIS KNEES BEFORE ME."
A ghastly grin crept onto the Strider Queen's face. It appeared as if a crevice in the ground was opening.
"YOU KNOW, JUST BECAUSE YOU AMUSE MY BOYS, I'M GOING TO TAKE YOU UP ON YOUR OFFER. I WILL TAKE YOU TO YOUR PLACE, BUT KNOW THAT ALL THE CURSES OF THE STRIDERS WILL COME UPON YOU IF JALAKÅRA EMERGES VICTORIOUS FROM YOUR BATTLE."
"I CAN WORK WITH THAT," Elli assured, catching her breath. The conversations with the Striders were beginning to get to her throat after all, despite all her regenerative powers.
A toxic green bubble began to surround them. Behind them, Gomo waved goodbye.
"THEN SHOW ME WHAT'S IN YOU, HUMAN," rumbled The Witch Queen with satisfaction.
The green ball shot through the roof with its contents.
"BOSS, IF BLONDI LOSES, CAN I KEEP HER?"
His superior laughed.
"YOU'VE GOT A LOT TO LEARN, GOMO. NOW GET BACK TO WORK!"
Girard S. Niang, Eternal President of the ☽☽☽ Initiative, was working his way through a never-ending stack of papers. He had an ornately furnished office in the Impenetrable, JALAKÅRA's fortress, several light years above Corbenic. The fortress was actually made almost entirely of the god's silk, but they had paneled the room with wood and carpeted it.
His phone rang. Video chat.
"Niang here?" he answered, annoyed.
He had made sure that humanity in Corbenic had been spared the true hell under the rule of its terrors, but somehow he felt that he had traded that for his very own hell of paperwork….
Lt. O'Brian's face appeared in the picture. Nothing more than his wrinkled face could be seen, as he was still in his gear….
"Here O'Brian, we have the irregular."
"Let's see it!" demanded Niang instantly.
JALAKÅRA had been more serious than usual in his command. Not only serious, he seemed to have had some sort of anger toward this woman. He had projected her image into Niang's mind and told him how to calibrate the gauges to detect her.
Only, what O'Brian showed him was neither blonde nor an adult woman.
"Are you kidding me, Lieutenant?"
"Sir?" asked O'Brian, confused. "I don't quite understand. We didn't have a photo of her, but the readings are clear. This girl is from another dimension. And is mortal."
"What?"
Niang's mind raced. He would have to inform the Great Weaver about this.
"Okay, um, for now, take her to headquarters and activate at least three reality anchors near her. I'll report back to JALAKÅRA.
"All right, sir, praise JALAKÅRA!"
"Praise JALAKÅRA," Niang replied, ending the call.
Could anything here work the way he knew in the world of the living for a change?
He set off…
JALAKÅRA was a titanic spider with the face of a bearded man. As usually, he rested on a web corresponding to his size in the center of the impenetrable. Here you could see the walls were made of silk.
Niang entered through a massive gate.
"Uh, oh lord, I come with… News, I come with news."
The patron god scrambled lazily toward him.
"Speak…" he asked.
"Uh, we've caught the Irregularity-"
"Excellent…" applauded JALAKÅRA. "You can't imagine the danger she poses to all of us…. Now that we have her in custody…. We may be able to harness her… You could finally leave Corbenic and not have to rely on drones to help the worlds…"
Harness her? Niang shooed away the question. The Great Weaver's ways were, after all, inscrutable.
"Uh, sir, the Irregularity is not the woman you described to me, though. It is a teenage girl. With white hair."
JALAKÅRA shifted his weight a little.
"Huh? That's weird… She shouldn't just give up control-"
The spider god suddenly gave an eerie shriek.
"She's still out there! She's stripped of her greatest weapon…. But still a threat… She must be caught, no, better yet, destroyed!"
Niang understood less and less.
"Do you mean the blonde, oh lord? She is only one person and we are several trillion, spread all over Corbenic, not counting all the anomalous beings under our control. What can one person alone do?"
"We may crush her in numbers…," JALAKÅRA replied anxiously. "But she is more devious than all of you put together…. You must put everyone on alert…. For you have stolen from her those she considers her brood! I wouldn't be surprised if she already makes her move…"
"THAT WAS YOUR PLAN!?" roared Dean as the acting G-forces did their utmost to bend him.
The Witch Queen's green orb continued to accelerate as they left Corbenic's atmosphere and headed straight for one of the three moons. Now that it was getting closer, it turned out to be an Earth, as were the other two.
Meanwhile, the flesh of the two women was running off their bones, making a response impossible. The sphere gradually began to fill with endlessly generated blood.
It took about thirty minutes for the sphere to begin to decelerate. They were still approaching the Earth's atmosphere at a frightening pace.
Finally, Elli and Lin were back up enough to start screaming. Lin with sheer terror, Elli with excitement, as if she were on the best roller coaster in the multiverse.
They broke through the clouds. An imposing black structure became visible below them, rising out of the landscape like a crystal and as tall as a mountain.
"THE COMPUTER CENTER!" cheered Elli.
Dean watched the whole thing with some concern, because he could make out small black dots that turned out to be helicopters as they got closer. Troop carriers. Apparently, they had been expected.
Elli rummaged around in her bag a bit, while Dean stared spellbound at the roof they were approaching.
With the force of a jet, they crashed into the data center and through countless floors down to the ground level.
The sphere burst like a soap bubble. Lin fell into a puddle that was half her own blood. Elli was covered in blood and held her pan at the ready.
They were in a kind of atrium. It was decorated in futuristic white with black surfaces and covered with plants to such a degree that one could think the architect had tried to create a jungle.
Through the greenery, numerous gun barrels were pointed at them.
"DON'T SHOOT," Elli commanded.
All the soldiers fired at her.
There were strange cartridges made of crystal flying toward her.
Just to be all turned back before they could reach Elli or her companions and bore into the shooters who had fired them. Without exception, all of them fell to pieces.
It took a while, but then silence reigned again. Those who were still on their feet retreated to other rooms.
"EL-DEGÜELLO ammunition!?" snapped Elli, aghast. "Oh, ouh… Oh crap…"
She ran to one of the dismembered shooters and tried to reassemble it without much success.
"Lin?" asked Dean, picking himself back up. "What are you doing?"
"EL-DEGÜELLO -ammunition," the servant explained. "I don't think the Master expected to be, well, 'incapacitated'."
"They're trying to put me down, Dean," Elli confirmed, aghast, as she returned.
"As if that's new…" retorted Dean dryly. "How did you do that and where do we have to go?"
Elli started moving but kept talking at Dean as the dragged Lin behind her. She left a red trail on the floor.
"You don't understand, these soldiers will never walk again…or anything else for that matter. This is ammunition against immortals. Why are they using this on us when they were happy with Pacifiers before?"
"Maybe because we've infiltrated their headquarters?" speculated Dean with large amounts of sarcasm. "But now again, how did you do that with the bullets?"
Elli pulled a black disk with a blue glowing edge out of her pocket.
"Reflector shield, I got it from the SKP assortment that ended up in the Nexus. I pocketed it because I thought I had a little more time left… Anyway, it works against all kinetic projectiles. But watch out for laser and plasma weapons. Oh, I feel so bad, Dean…"
That was a first…
"Elli, you specifically told them not to shoot."
"I thought it was a good joke," it came back, agonized. "How was I supposed to know they'd pull out EL-DEGÜELLO ammo…"
Elli rummaged in her pocket and pulled out her flask. She drank from it for quite a long time.
They found several doors, but they were all locked by bulkheads. The entire building was on lockdown.
Elli pursed her lips in pique until she noticed a computer terminal nearby that had been squeezed into a white counter. It appeared to be normally manned by a security guard.
"That gives me an idea…" she said.
She pulled out her hacker stick with the kittens on it and used its computing power to hack the security system.
It took a few minutes, but then the bulkheads opened again.
And others lowered.
"They just went to get new weapons, so that should hold them off for a while until I get what I want," Elli explained.
"Did they really connect their entire security system to the counter?" asked Dean incredulously.
"The Three Moons Initiative is the largest organization in the multiverse, so it's inevitable that hostile camps will form. That's why all the major buildings are designed to be quickly retaken from within in the event of an enemy takeover. Normal siege tactics don't work on immortals, after all, and you can't just blow these things up."
"Sounds like the Initiative always assumes it has numerical superiority," Dean remarked, shaking his head.
"The Initiative has always numerical superiority," Lin explained to him as they started moving again.
In fact, they didn't encounter a soul as they descended the stairs and made their way to the lowest floor of the headquarters.
Unfortunately, they had not counted on the security of the Three Moons Initiative.
The soldiers had set up a railgun there on the lowest floor, a device that was about the size of a small tank gun and looked similar as well.
It was set up at the end of a long, straight corridor whose concrete walls were unplastered.
The gunner fired promptly as Elli came down the stairs. The shield continued to function, but the forces acting were too much for the projectile, causing it to explode.
Fortunately, only in the direction of the defenders, who quickly took cover from the blazing hot splinters until the hail was over.
Then they pointed strange guns with thin barrels at the trio.
Someone began to read them their rights if they surrendered now.
"Those are plasma rifles," Elli dryly explained over them.
"I'm not immune to plasma," Dean noted.
"I know, Dean. SAVORY!"
The password Elli had shouted corresponded to an edit on the control center's defense system. Immortals logically could not be stopped by force of arms alone, unless you were firing things like EL-DEGÜELLO ammunition at them.
That's why some "more solid forms" of defense came into play.
Such as corridor walls moving toward each other.
It happened so fast that none of the target data had a chance to fire. With a sickening crack, the walls met. Blood and other fluids ran from the gap between them.
"AND EXHALE!"
The walls backed up again. Lin behind them seemed to have to fight nausea when she saw what came to light. The railgun had left dents in the walls, but in its present form it was more reminiscent of a burnt cutlet than a weapon.
A very bloody cutlet.
It splashed as Elli and her companions reached what the soldiers had been trying to protect.
"That's what you get for thinking the enemy can only deactivate the system," she commented.
At the end of the corridor was a large gray bulkhead with a retinal scanner in the wall next to it. "HUB 01," was spray-painted in white on the gate.
"Dean, yank the scanner out of the wall, please, Min, watch it and let us know if anyone comes," Elli ordered. "We've got about two minutes before these guys come around. They'd probably be faster if they'd waived their body armor and especially the helmets, I mean, we're unarmed…"
Dean did as instructed while Lin reluctantly turned around and tried to ignore the bodies on the ground that were gradually regenerating with resistance from bent metal.
The screws gave way with a groan and the panel came loose, held only by myriads of cables.
Alarm bells began to ring. The walls began to move toward each other again….
"Elli?" urged Dean.
Elli, meanwhile, fiddled with the wires.
"Automatic system, I couldn't control that from above, just slow it down," she explained calmly, digging out her flash drive. "Ah, there you are…"
She pulled off a cable and plugged in her stick. Fortunately, through its multiport, it fit.
A wall had almost reached in and threatened to shear the cables off. Dean estimated her chances to escape in time as non-existent, the kill corridor was too long for that.
"Let's see, it did have an automatic retina search mode, I think…" mused Elli.
Lin already began to position herself sideways.
The wires were caught by the approaching wall.
And the bulkhead opened with a banging sound.
"Took longer than expected," Elli commented as she walked through. "Must have had to go through a security program that activated after the panel was destroyed…"
Dean and Lin followed her. Dean noticed with annoyance that they were all leaving red footprints. The beautiful spotless floor!
The room contained walls upon walls of black computers. The room stretched so far that it was hard to see the end, and the computers towered meters above them.
The air was so cold that Dean could see his exhaust fumes coming out of his nose in bursts. The women, however, seemed to breathe only occasionally, if at all.
"Welcome to the main server room of the Three Moons Initiative," Elli declared as she paced the black-tiled floor. "There must be a terminal here somewhere…"
Behind them, the bulkhead closed again with a loud crash.
"How did you know where to go?" asked Dean. "Have you been here before?"
"I've had to hack the Initiative databases several times," Elli explained. "Ever since I got here, they've been trying to drag me in front of the Damnation Committee to trial me for my life. So far they don't know who I am, but hopefully you can imagine I'm not very eager. I've… probably had more people weigh on my conscience than any other being here…
Dean had no idea what Elli was talking about, but he decided not to dwell on it, given the way she had said it. Maybe sometime later…
"Anyway, several blueprints to the Initiative buildings also fell into my lap in the process. I memorized them. Ah!"
She had finally found a terminal standing in a gap between the walls of electronics. It was a futuristic-looking screen with an integrated computer, a keyboard and mouse on a white table.
"So what are we actually doing here?" asked Lin. "I don't quite understand this computer thingy."
Elli pulled out her flash drive again with a wicked smile.
"Excellent question, Lin. Look, this stick here is capable of single-handedly destabilizing entire countries, provided they have a level of technology similar to that of the Three Moons Initiative.
She plugged the stick into the computer and began typing on the keyboard like a virtuoso.
"The problem, though, is that the Initiative is already much bigger than a planet by itself. That means I need more computing power to annoy the guys here. And I just got that… Hehehe…"
With a diabolical grin, she hit the enter key….
The helicopter landed in what was probably the largest military base Chloe had ever seen. Meter-thick and kilometer-high walls surrounded the area on all sides, and everything in here seemed designed to look as defensible as possible. Soldiers and technicians scurried about among tanks and transports, weapons systems were being loaded and inspected, and in general there was an atmosphere of that bustle that immediately turns a gun on anyone who disturbs it.
She was handcuffed between two soldiers and could barely move until the helicopter landed and she was rudely dragged out.
In front of them was a skyscraper of sorts, towering like a stalagmite, and it was tall enough to actually scratch clouds….
The atrium was huge but sparsely decorated, but Chloe hardly noticed any of that as her ten-man escort moved with her straight as a die toward an elevator.
A seemingly eternal ride later, she was dragged through drab gray hallways and finally chained to a chair in front of a table in one room. The room was painted white and had a single window. There were no other furnishings.
Chloe felt as she had when she had been captured by the Saiga factions1…
The first time she had met Elli….
Surprisingly, this time she was not afraid. Somehow she knew that these soldiers wouldn't hurt her. Couldn't do anything to her. But she didn't get to the why.
It took quite a while again, which seemed even longer to Chloe because her guards didn't exchange a word, then a woman entered. African by appearance.
Judging by the bright white uniform decorated with gold, she was a general, her brown hair stuck under her cap.
Chloe estimated her to be forty, although biological age probably no longer had any meaning here.
The general took a seat in a chair across from her and slapped a thick stack of documents on the table.
"I take it you're not the wanted criminal Elli?"
"Who wants to know?" asked Chloe in a bad mood.
The general's eyebrows twitched.
"My name is General Janet Spiegel. I command a large portion of the ☽☽☽ Initiative's forces. And you are?"
The fact that her translation patch suggested she was on a you-basis2 reinforced Chloe's assumption that she was being treated with kid gloves here. But to what end? Because she was mortal? Because she was a child?
"Chloe Winter, junior high school student," she replied.
"Have you had any contact with Elli?"
Chloe's eyebrows drew together.
"What has she done this time?"
Spiegel flipped through the files briefly.
"Fraternization with the enemy, fifty cases of theft, including military material and secrets, five hundred and twelve cases of assault, three hundred and ninety-eight of them involving damage to property, two hostage-takings, both times an entire city, eighteen cases of defamation, including yours truly and JALAKÅRA, may he be praised, three cases of driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol, thirty-two cases of forgery, one thousand three hundred and thirty-one cases of fraud, three hundred speeding fines, nine cases of offending public decency, and the repeated sale of pirated copies. And that's just what she's been up to here in Corbenic. We had to reserve an entire database for her life."
"In ten years, respect," Chloe commented. "But what exactly does that have to do with me?"
"You were out with her," Spiegel explained, "We're hoping you can give us some clues as to how to proceed. Unfortunately, our troops couldn't get hold of her because a Strider interfered. And the reinforcements did not find her."
That was not the truth. They didn't drag Chloe in front of a general for that.
"And what else?" she therefore asked with a raised eyebrow.
The general was silent for a moment before answering.
"We request your assistance in our mission to help people in other realities. We can't leave Corbenic, even with our portal technology, but with the pocket dimension you control we could finally interact directly with mortal worlds and bring them peace."
So that was the reason. They knew they had to gain favor with Chloe if they didn't want her to just mangle them in the Nexus.
"And what's in it for me?" she asked.
"For your afterlife, you get SSSS-class Elysium residency privileges. In a sense, you would never have to worry about anything again. You would have more luxuries than some gods can afford.
Chloe gave an unimpressed whistle.
"And what awaits Elli?"
"That has not yet been decided by our master JALAKÅRA, long may he live. Given her rap sheet, though, I don't think she'll get around at least a hundred thousand years in the pit of meat cutters."
"So let me get this straight," Chloe summarized. "You drag me here with a gun to my temple, against my will at that, and want me to betray the one who saved my life in more ways than one, and play ferry girl for you afterwards?"
The corners of Spiegel's mouth twitched.
"Think about it. You'll end up here eventually, if you like it or not. And not supporting us is tantamount to treason against humanity."
"Says who?" asked Chloe with a raised eyebrow.
Chloe saw a vein pop out on the general's forehead.
"I don't think you realize the position you're in…"
"I'll return that to you," Chloe replied unapologetically. "I know you think you got this under control because you can do whatever to me to make me compliant, since I have no allies here. But the way I see it, you are subject to two misconceptions. First, I can leave this place, contrary to what you would have me believe, at any time by mortally wounding myself. Look at this."
Chloe rammed her forehead into the table. It hurt like hell.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the guards behind her flinch but apparently not know what to do.
"How many tries do you think it will take before my skull cracks?" asked Chloe. "I know everything that dies ends up in Corbenic, but where does everything that dies in Corbenic go? It doesn't matter where, I can just use the Nexus to get back home. And even if you force me to operate the Nexus with some devices, all that loses its meaning as soon as I enter it again, because everything in there listens to my command. Your soldiers would end up in the stomach of a Strider, and I'm off and running. And you explain that to this Jalakära, or whatever his name is."
Wait a minute, how did Chloe know all this?
Spiegel propped her fists on the table at this retort and pushed herself out of her chair.
An empty threatening gesture, they both knew Chloe was right, even if she herself had no idea why. Had that been a side effect of Ku's actions?
"Now listen, you little witch, I-"
The building shook.
About time…
"What was that?", Spiegel started up, pointing at a soldier. "You there, find out what happened, if we're attacked, I want to know by whom."
"I think I can answer that," came from a grinning Chloe. "That's the second thing you got wrong. I have allies. And they've just won against your initiative…"
Next time on Nexus:
Farewell, Part 3