Darkness.

Duncan tentatively felt outward, but encountered nothing.  There was supposed to be something, wasn’t there?  He wasn’t sure any more.  There had been something terribly important, terrifyingly beautiful, but... it slipped away again.  “Bother.”

“DUNCAN?  Oh my God, is it really you?”

Duncan tried to shake his... something he no longer had, to clear the ringing the loud shout had caused.  He stayed silent in his confusion.

“God, now I’m grasping at straws.  I could have sworn...  Get a grip, Gwen.”

“Gwen?” asked Duncan uncertainly.

Gwen spoke frantically.  “Are you really there?  Please say yes.  Oh please.”

“I... think so?  But it’s all shards and pieces.  Nothing connects.”

“Oh,” chimed Gwen’s voice worriedly.  “I thought you’d healed after the fight.”

“Fight...”  The word resonated in Duncan, shuffling memory shards.  Disjointed images flickered across his mindscape.  “Did we win?”

“For certain values of ‘win’.  The world is safe from demons.”

“Demons!  Right.  I was fighting demons.  And...  And I left something important with you.”

“Yes.  Do you remember?”

Duncan pieced bits of it together, then pushed the fragmented memories away.  “It hurt.”

“I know.  It was insane, but... you were right.  Your soul would not have survived the fight.”

“I should get it back.  Maybe I’d feel less hollow.”

“Yeah, about that...  Your stunt with the nuke brought the roof down.  Literally.  The cavern collapsed, and the borehole is shattered.  I can’t get...”  Gwen’s voice trailed off.

“You’re stuck?  That’s going to be a problem.  I doubt I’ll be able to bore down again until the next full Moon.  Can you handle a month down there?”

Gwen’s laugh flirted with outright hysteria.  “I’m stuck running at a thousand times normal speed.  You’ve been gone for a few hours, I think... but to me it has already been months.  Duncan?  I’m terrified.  I can’t do this for a century.  Alone in the dark...”

“I’m here.  We can sort this out somehow.”

“Are you sure?” asked Gwen desperately.

“No.  I can’t feel my... anything.  My memories are... maybe best left where they are for now.  I don’t even know where I am.”

“I can feel that you’re west of me,” replied Gwen, grasping for a problem she could solve.  “Almost exactly west.  A long way off, maybe a few thousand klicks?  But if that’s the case you’d be below the horizon.”

“Oh!  Maybe I’m in orbit.  I can’t feel anything around me, not within miles and miles.  Not even air.”

“I guess you jumped in time and space.  I yelled at you as the bomb went off, you were too spent to consider your safety.”

“Ah.  I... remember that, now.  It was...  Oh Gwen, it was so beautiful.  So perfect.  You know that feeling when you hit a shot perfectly?  Like that, times a million.  All that cobalt...”

“How much cobalt?”  Gwen’s tone was abruptly concerned once more.

That memory was clear and distinct.  “It started as a ten meter sphere.  Vanessa’s gift...  It grew.  Everything grew.  Over a million tons, closer to ten million.  All of it Cobalt-60.”

“Oh hell.  Duncan!  This is very important.  How much missed the portal?”

“I don’t know.  I didn’t see that part.  Before the gift, I’d figured maybe ten percent.  After... one?  Less?”

“That’s still tens of thousands of tons.  Five hundred tons, evenly distributed, would render the whole planet uninhabitable.”

“Oh, that won’t be a problem.”

There was a long silence.  The best Gwen could muster was a weak “What?”

“The polar vortex should contain most of it.  Avoid the north pole for a while.”

“And the polar bears?” asked Gwen, outrage leaking into her voice.

“Acceptable collateral damage.”

“People live up there, too!”

“Not many,” said Duncan dismissively.  “They can move.  We had to do it, Gwen.  The demons would have tried again, and we can’t keep gambling that someone will come along and stop them in time.”

“Was that worth Vanessa?”  Gwen’s tone was bitterly cold.

“She thought so.  I only understood her intention at the very end.  I doubt she was the first to make that choice, in the long history of this war.”

“And you’re going to be my only company for the next hundred years.  F...  Why?  Why did you do it?”

Duncan grew puzzled.  “I just said.  To stop them.”

“But you’re talking about genocide.”

“They started it.”

“That doesn’t justify what you did!” Gwen replied heatedly.

“It does.”  Duncan paused to sort through his memories.  “They were willing to kill all life on Earth.  They had to be stopped.”

“What if it was only some of them that wanted to kill us?”

“The others should have stopped them,” replied Ducan placidly.

“Augh!  I can’t deal with this.  You’re a monster.”

Duncan chuckled at the epithet.  “I know.”  Pieces of memory slid and skittered, sorting into place.  “I made this choice, Gwen.  I knew the price.”

“And you’re just... okay with this?  How?”

“Because behind the other door is the death of everyone I hold dear.”

Gwen emitted something between a sigh and a whine.  “Are you even human any more?  Is there no part of that left?”

Duncan shuffled through memory fragments, sifting through them for memories of humanity.  They had to be there, and yet...  “I can’t find those parts.  I may have lost them in the battle, much is just... gone.  The price of victory against an implacable foe.”

“Am I going to end up like you?” asked Gwen softly.  “I don’t think I can take it.”

“Then it seems likely you won’t.  And I am glad of it.  I will need you more than ever.”

“But will you listen to me?”

“Always.”

Gwen sighed again.  “Then I guess we’ll have to make the best of it.  Have you figured out where you are, yet?”

“I can’t sense anything around me.”

“What can you see?”

“See?” asked Duncan.  Patterns shifted in the chaos.  “Oh!  I had forgotten how.  Refraction, lenses, imaging surface...  There we go.  Huh.  I see... a huge white circle, the Sun, and the Moon.  They’re kinda fuzzy.”

“You need to focus.”

Duncan did so.  “Doesn’t seem to help much.  All I can see are clouds.  Size of the Earth suggests I’m about 400 klicks up, horizon should be about two thousand.  What’s that glowy thing out your way?”

Gwen snorted.  “Your doing.  The whole world is still ringing.”

“Shouldn’t the fireball have dimmed by now?”

“Yeah.  But the mushroom cloud is probably the size of Alberta.”

“Ah.  Well, that gives me one bearing, the Sun and Moon give me two others.  Damn it.  I had all these tables memorized, and they’re just... gone.”

“What about Ray?  Can you feel where he is?”

“Ray... who is...  Oh!  Yes, I can find Ray.  Given the angle that puts me... right over the Gulf of Alaska.  Huh.  If I could see through these clouds, I might be able to sort this out.”

“Radar?” asked Gwen.

A moment later, Duncan cheered.  “I see the coastline.  Hm.  That’s not right.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve seen video from the space station.  The ground goes by pretty fast.”

“You’re running at a thousand to one.”

“Still.  I should see it shift.  Let’s see, what can I use as a reliable time frame?  I don’t have any cesium crystals...  What’s the resonant frequency of quartz?”

“Beats me.  You could ask Ray for a time check, if you can throttle to his speed.”

“I could do that, but then you’d be all alone.   Oh!”

“What?”

“Donna’s awake, and willing to talk to Ray.  Going to take a while, though.  I spy with my little eye...”

“No.”

*** *** ***

Ray woke to the sound of a familiar voice.  He sat up from the cot in his office.  “Donna?”

“We survived.  There’s a problem, we jumped about 400 klicks up to avoid the blast.  Can I get you to count off seconds for a bit?”

“Sure.”  Ray glanced at the clock on his desk and called off the seconds as they passed.

“Thanks, that’s enough.  Duncan was right.  We’re 400 kilometers up, but we aren’t in orbit.  The ground isn’t going by fast enough.  Or at all.”

“So you’ll hit the atmosphere in...”

“About three minutes, accelerating all the way.”

“Yeah, but that only gets you up to what, Mach 5 or so?  Haven’t you jetted around faster than that?”

Donna hesitated.  “Oh.  Really?  I don’t remember that.  I don’t remember a lot of things, but... it sounds like something Duncan would do.”

“You’ll be fine.  How soon can you get here?”

“When does the Moon set where Gwen is?”

Ray pulled up his lunar cycle app on his phone.  “Looks like you’ve got a little over an hour.”

“And you’ve got another hour after that for whatever your crisis is, right?”

“It’s a big problem, but it can wait.”

“Good.  Catch you later.”

Donna poked at her tattered memory, trying to piece together anything resembling a magic-fueled jet.  Abruptly, a brand new design formed in her mind, with every detail lovingly crafted.  The blueprint had Duncan’s signature in the corner, and she sent him a glow of gratitude.

In response, the signature block changed, adding “Thanks.  But get on with it!”

Donna chuckled, and formed the aerospace fighter around her crystalline self.  A moment later, she was rocketing off to the east at a ridiculous acceleration.  She went racing past her target, despite how glaringly visible it was, and had to loop back.

*** *** ***

Duncan stared down at the glowing lake below them.  “Well, crap.”

“What?” asked Gwen.

“The whole area’s a mess.  Some kind of glowy shit all over the place, I’m going to have to drill from an angle.  A shallow angle.  I don’t know if we can make it in time.”

“Please.”  Gwen put a lifetime of emotion in the word.

“Going to do our best.”

A lance of lunar power speared into the ground, boring through it swiftly.  And just as swiftly, a shift of the rubbled rocks collapsed the hole, and forced them to restart.  Two more such failures later and Duncan was cursing up a storm as they started yet another drilling attempt.  This time, they paid more attention to the sidewalls, making sure to reinforce them heavily, and diffuse diamondoid patching compound through any nearby cracks.  The next shift only cost them a few meters progress.

Ten minutes later an aftershock rumbled through, and broke the borehole in three places.  “God FUCKING damn it.  I don’t know Gwen.  The whole area’s too unstable.”

“I can’t spend a century down here.  Keep trying, you’re making progress.”

Duncan fished through the borehole and pulled the broken parts together again.  “Okay.  As long as we don’t get any worse shocks than that...”

They did, of course.  Two more shocks, one bigger that cost Duncan several minutes of repair time, and one smaller one that made them scramble to keep the borehole reinforced, but didn’t manage to break it.

The progress was still slow.  Too slow.  Donna tugged at Duncan’s attention – the Moon was brushing the horizon, and they still had almost two kilometers of borehole still to dig.  “Fuck, fuck fuck.  We’re out of time.  The Moon is setting.  We are so sorry, Gwen.  Maybe we can finish this tomorrow?”

“Can you store that much power?” asked Gwen.

Duncan tasked Donna with the job of building an enormous mana crystal while he continued to dig.  “Tempted to just fire one hell of a laser blast down this thing and see where we get.”

“Do it.  You’re offset enough, it shouldn’t affect the Worldstone.”

A last pulse of power from the setting Moon raced down the borehole, shattering and vaporizing the rock ahead of it.  The blowback collapsed the borehole, and Duncan nearly cried with frustration.  “Fuck, sorry.  That was a mistake.”

Duncan could hear Gwen’s voice dopplering away.  “Close enough.”

It took a moment to understand the significance, but the pulse of happiness from Donna brought Duncan down to normal speed. “Gwen?”

“I’m still stuck, but I’m not running at hyperspeed.  After seven subjective months down here, another month is nothing.  Especially one where I can talk to Ettie for half of it.  Thank you.”