HEART OF THE WORLD
MACKENZIE COUNTY, AB
11 NOV 2011, 03:55 MST
“Donna? Donna? DONNA! Talk to me please.”
“G’way.”
“WAKE UP!” shouted Gwen.
Duncan startled awake, and tried to gather his scattered thoughts. All he came back with was pain, far more pain that should be possible for someone without a body. He cursed loudly, then looked in every direction at once. All he could perceive was echoing emptiness. “The demons! Where are they?”
“Gone. We finished the enchantment,” reported Gwen, her voice tinged with regret.
“Fucking excellent.” Duncan lost focus for a time, curled up around his pain.
“Duncan!”
“Leave me the fuck alone. It hurts so much...”
“Where’s Donna?”
Duncan sifted through the shattered remnants of his psyche. “Broken. Fucking shards.”
“Stop cursing.”
“Fuck you.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“Took a lot of hits keeping you safe,” grated Duncan. “I feel like a bag of broken glass. Donna’s... in there. Sorta.”
“Can she...” Gwen couldn’t finish the question.
“I don’t fucking know, okay? I can barely function. Dia’s curled up in a corner of my mind, screaming. Everything hurts, and I don’t even have a fucking body.”
“So make one.”
A cracked crystal formed amid the desolation.
“Let the power of the Moon wash through you and heal you.”
“Don’t you think I’m fucking trying? Nothing fucking fits. It’s all broken shards, a jigsaw puzzle with a million pieces. Hurts to touch them, never mind pick them up.”
“So don’t. Remember who you were, and just... pull. Let them sort themselves out.”
There was silence on their shared resonance for long enough that Gwen called out, “Duncan?”
“I don’t... remember. All I see is cracked kaleidoscope images, jumbled up.”
“Ah.” Gwen sighed. “Let the Moon see you.”
“Like this?” asked Duncan, horrified.
“Yes. The good and the bad. All of it is there. She knows Her own.”
Duncan’s crystal body rose into the sky. Above the enormous gaping crater, still glowing from the heat. Above the slowly settling miasma of radioactive dust. Above the mushroom cloud. The Moon shone upon the broken crystal then, and Duncan sighed in relief at last. He found himself in a dream-space he had not inhabited since the early days of coming in to his power. He flinched away from the gaze of the Moon, but Her great eye was relentless. Every flaw, every imperfection She saw. And loved him all the same.
Duncan wept bitter, jagged tears, that fell into a puddle of glass. The puddle stirred and formed a ragged image, shot through with gaping holes. He recognized Donna there. She met his gaze, shuddered, and fell away. What was left coalesced into something simpler, a sparkling snowflake of crystal.
“I don’t understand.”
The dream ended, and Duncan found the pain... manageable. More or less. The crystal he was inhabiting had become a complex snowflake, matching his dream. Donna rested within, held in a dreamless sleep that he hoped would let her heal.
“Hey,” called Duncan softly over the link.
“Better?” asked Gwen cautiously.
“Sorry for earlier. Still hurts like hell. But there’s time now... I think she’ll heal. Eventually.”
“Ah... about that.”
“Hm?”
“Look to the northwest.”
Duncan spun in place, sent his focus that way. Something glowed on the horizon, a colour that was not meant to exist in this universe. The portal in Detroit had glowed faintly of it, but this one was bright as a new dawn. “What the hell... How the fuck did they build a giant portal right under our noses?””
“Agent Brown says it just... showed up, fully complete. They checked the recordings, the other half of the wing of demons from China fell off the radar there. They must have hidden somehow, and in the chaos of the fight nobody was paying attention to demons that weren’t attacking.”
“Well, that’s just fucking dandy. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, sending a probe to take a closer look.”
A small crystalline device appeared next to Duncan, pure and gleaming, a sharp contrast to the dark, hazed crystal of his own body. It raced away to the northwest. If Duncan had a breath to hold, he would have done so. “It’s enormous. It must be over a klick across.”
“The Yanks say it’s just a hair under a mile.”
“Jesus. Nothing in their arsenal is remotely that big. What were they planning... Fuck!”
“What?”
“Something’s coming through.”
“How is that possible?” asked Gwen. “We’ve blocked all their designs... Oh. We blocked all the designs...”
“That we knew of,” completed Duncan. “Fuckers had another ace up their sleeves, and now we get to see just how screwed we are.”
The thing emerging from the portal looked rather like a misshapen mountain, and was roughly the size of one as well. Its upper reaches nearly brushed against the portal. Duncan couldn’t see any obvious form of locomotion, it seemed to just sort of flow forward. Like a lava front, except... immense.
“I think the China solution is appropriate here.”
“General Shepard concurs. Missile is already inbound, should be here in a few more minutes.”
“How big?” asked Duncan. “Big enough to vape a mountain?”
“Ah... Brown says there are three warheads, each about 350 kilotons.”
Duncan growled. “That’s not going to do nearly enough. Gee, I could really use an antimatter weapon about now.”
“You know why we had to make that rule.”
“Yeah, yeah. Still a pain.”
Duncan sent the probe in closer to see what the misshapen mountain was doing. Just looking at it was disturbing, but the readings from the probe were even more puzzling. “Something is very wrong here.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell. It’s just... weird. Sending the probe in closer, it’s not like I can’t afford to ... son of a bitch!”
“Did it take out your probe?”
“It didn’t do anything. A couple klicks out, the probe just fell apart, as if...” Duncan sent a bolt of lunar magic racing along the same path, and it disappeared about the same spot the probe had. “Oh hell. It’s rewriting the laws of... Laser, I need a laser.”
In moments, various beams were lancing through the area affected by the mountain, and Duncan was more puzzled than ever. “It’s like the laws of physics are different inside that zone.”
“Impact in ten seconds. Want to fire up some high speed cameras?”
Duncan was already working on it. By the time he was ready, he could already see the incandescent trail of the inbound warheads. He watched through his probes as they landed directly on target. Three tiny craters appeared on its surface, and were swiftly absorbed.
“Where’s the kaboom? I expected an earth-shattering kaboom!”
Gwen snorted. “Seriously? Talking to Agent Brown now... The Americans are... upset, to put it mildly. Do you think the physics changes could have done something?”
“Must have. Crap. I would give anything to be able to fire an enormous bolt of cobalt-60 at him right now...”
Gwen hummed to herself softly. “There was... Do you remember the orbital manhole cover?”
“Oh! From one of their nuke tests. So we build a cobalt shotgun... but it needs to be outside that thing’s field.”
“How big is the field?”
Duncan sent out more probes and did further laser sweeps. “Uh... about ten klicks across. But I’m pretty sure it was smaller earlier. Can the Yanks tune their magic satellites to see it?”
“Working on it. See if you can figure out the rate of expansion.”
That required more probes, more calculations to keep Ducnan distracted. The answer he came up with worried him, so he measured again, then waited a few minutes for another series of measurements to be sure. “Gwen?”
“Here, love. Please say you’ve got something, Brown says they can only see the portal and the demon.”
“The field is growing. The rate of growth doesn’t seem to be changing. The problem is, the radius is growing linearly, about 700 meters per minute. Might not seem like much, but if they can keep it going, the whole world is covered well before the next full Moon. We have to do something now. Can you exclude it with the worldspell?”
“That won’t be possible. To prevent Walt’s abuse, I didn’t leave any easy way to add new exclusions.”
“And you can’t modify it, like they did in the past?”
Gwen hesitated then. “There’s something I have to tell you. We needed all four magics in the enchantment. Lunar and Divine were easy. But the other two...”
“You sacrificed Bunhill and Henry?”
“No! They built the enchantment from the inside out. They figured it out and didn’t tell me until we were about to close the enchantment, and by then there was no time to argue. They’re part of it. Still aware, but... we can’t do it again.”
“So we’re back to the nuclear shotgun. But we need something that’ll work from ten kilometers away. That’s an awfully long shot. Unless...”
Duncan darted forward. Gwen called out after him, but he didn’t listen. He stopped at the edge of the monstrous mountain’s field, and pushed back against it. It gave easily, like an underinflated balloon, so he pressed forward. The resistance increased as he went, the pressure of the new rules building up around him. Duncan grew then, from a fist-sized crystal to a man-sized one, and found that it helped. So he continued until a crystalline figure a hundred meters tall was striding across the landscape.
He could feel the mountain’s regard upon him, despite its lack of eyes, or anything else resembling any kind of anatomy at all. It started to push back, and before long Duncan ground to a standstill, a couple kilometers away. “This’ll do,” he grated to Gwen. “Can they see me?”
“Clear as day.”
“Tell them to take another shot at me. The biggest thing they’ve got.”
*** *** ***
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO
11 NOV 2011, 04:07 MST
“So he’s asking us to nuke him this time?”
“Third time’s the charm, right?” asked Agent Brown with a crooked smile.
The General shook his head. “I wish we had something big enough for this. A pity we never built another Castle Bravo device...”
“Funny you should mention that,” said Colonel Morrow. “The lab boys had a similar idea. What if we could miniaturize the Bravo weapon? They got some black budget funding to work on it with the simulators, and got the weight down from ten tons to just three.”
“But the treaties, we’d never be allowed to make one...”
“The cool thing about the design is that it uses a W87 as an initiator. So they’re technically not nukes... until you mount the W87, anyway. We built six. Haven’t tested them, but simulations show a yield between 12 and 33 megatons, expected yield about 18.”
“But the only thing that could launch a warhead that big is a Minuteman, and we retired those.”
The Colonel smirked. “Most of them, yes. We... didn’t tell the Soviets but we kept a few back, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“Giant meteorite, alien invasion, that kind of thing. You never know when you might need a really, really big weapon.”
“Okay, how long to get one operational?”
“Give the order, and it’ll be airborne within the next two minutes.”
The General would have preferred to wipe the smug smile off the Colone’s face, but instead he just growled, “Do it.”
*** *** ***
HEART OF THE WORLD
MACKENZIE COUNTY, AB
11 NOV 2011, 04:09 MST
“Missile is away. Should be here in seven minutes.”
“Good,” groaned Duncan. “Holding this back is getting harder by the minute.”
A wordless song of support echoed around Duncan, wrapped him in divine power, and gave him a brief respite from the pressure. He sent a pulse of thanks back along the channel.
“You’re welcome,” replied Vanessa. “How bad is it?”
“The demons had another design, one the size of a mountain. It’s bridging the portal between our worlds, bringing their physics here. If we don’t stop it, the whole world will be rewritten. Life as we know it will end.”
“And if we stop them this time, what will they do next?”
“Genocide is already on the table. We have to end this. And... I don’t think this will be enough. I’ll channel and boost the weapon as much as I’m allowed, and maybe I can throw a few thousand tons of cobalt 60 at them. I want to throw millions, enough to saturate their world with it. They want genocide? I’ll give them fucking genocide.”
“As my Goddess wills it.”
Duncan felt himself alone again in that moment. It took all his strength just to stand before the regard of the maddening mountain, to stand and hold fast to the rules of his world. For long, terrible minutes he stood there, waiting and praying he could hold together for just long enough. The faultlines in the self he’d reassembled after the fight were groaning, and then... beautiful music began.
There is a house in Victoria,
They call the Blue Vixen.
It has changed the life of many a poor girl,
And God, I know, I’m one
Duncan stood tall as Vanessa’s power swirled around him, and stared the mountain what he hoped passed for an eye. “Endgame, fucker.”
As the song continued, he built his weapon. A sphere of cobalt grew in front of him, flickering and bouncing in and out of existence as he skipped it forward in time.
“One minute warning,” called Gwen. Duncan was briefly puzzled, as the song was nearly over. It wasn’t like Vanessa to miss her timing. And then, at last, he felt her determination and knew what she had planned. If he could have found any other way... but no. He wordlessly sent her his gratitude, and his sorrow.
A new verse echoed around him.
Mothers, tell your children,
The price our Goddess paid.
When demons came to scourge our world,
She faced them sore afraid.
The missile was close now, and Duncan started to spread his time-sense out as fast and as far as he could manage. The warhead’s design spread out before his regard, and he could see everything about the detonation, and nothing past it. He could see how the layers and layers of specially designed foam, each slightly different in density, would channel the primary detonation and compress nearly a ton of tritiated Lithium into a sphere the size of a marble. The manufacturing wasn’t perfect, and while he couldn’t touch the tritium or the W87, the channels could be tweaked just so...
There is a house in Victoria,
They call the Blue Vixen.
We saved the lives of all we could,
My Goddess, I... am... done.
*** *** ***
11 NOV 2011, 04:16:06.477931 MST
Vanessa’s timing was as perfect as it had always been. Duncan was following the events inside the weapon microsecond by microsecond, building a tubular shield around it to confine and direct the result. Her voluntary sacrifice released an impossible torrent of power, and he poured it all into the core. In an instant it grew from a marble to a beachball, and the divine power wrapped itself into the nuclear fire.
His shielding lasted a handful of microseconds under that assault. He held them by sheer force of will as the future abruptly coalesced into view. He could see how the energy would lance out, catch the cobalt sphere as it reappeared, right in front of the mountain. Something about the nature of the power would ensure that every atom of cobalt would find the neutron it needed, while accelerating the whole to near-orbital velocities and converting it to plasma.
When his confinement fields failed, he knew the job was done, and wanted nothing more but to rest from his efforts as the star at the heart of the weapon boiled outward, consuming all before it.
It was beautiful.
And yet... Gwen’s voice echoed across the link, distorted by his massively accelerated time sense. He tried to ignore it, couldn’t. It was just one word, screaming “Jump”
And with a blink, he was gone.