All was quiet for a moment, and then the other tried again but with only a trickle instead of a flood, while Jack gritted his teeth and held on for dear life. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t keep his head above water. He was swept away against his best efforts, and the two became one.
Chapter 52:
The Quiet
Amira Saladin stopped firing as the humongous alien disc flew overhead and filled the sky. Its passing was followed by a pressure wave that knocked everyone—human and alien alike—off their feet. At the same time, all of the shiny metallic bubbles disappeared from around her opponents, leaving them unshielded. Something was happening. Something important.
“What’s going on?” she demanded over the command channel.
The channel was full of chatter and she couldn’t tell if anyone answered. Then she noticed a group of words that kept repeating. “Nuke. Get down!”
She crawled toward the edge of the battlement and watched the disc go by, then saw the wave of panicked refugees flooding across the burnt landscape between the Ark and their line. More came out of the fortress every second. It was a stampede, and it was coming right for her.
Then she saw the most amazing and inexplicable thing she could ever imagine. Bolts of lightning crawled all over the Ark, and the metal hatches began to glow red. The disc stopped above it, and thousands upon thousands of liquid metal tentacles reached down and stabbed into the hillside. They tore through the fortress, rooted around inside and came back with a dense chunk of over-wrought machinery covered in billowing clouds of steam.
The bolts of lightning clung to that machine, as if trying to drag it back into the hole.
With the machine held beneath it, the disc blasted up into the heavens and disappeared. A moment later, the sky was filled with a blinding flash as intense as the midday sun. Sal hadn’t seen anything remotely like it since she was five years old, when the Sirius supernova filled the sky.
Seconds later, she realized how close to being annihilated they had all come. Judging by the quiet all along the line, she wasn’t alone in that.
Space. The upper edge of the atmosphere was so pristine and beautiful. So empty, perfect and still.
Amiasha Aum-Samaraya had barely escaped the terrible explosion. The Sey Chen within had worked their magics and shielded him from most of the blast, but he was still badly wounded. His outer shell was cracked and smoking, and there was so much pain everywhere, outside and in, that he could think of nothing else.
He tumbled through the void. Aimless. Broken. He was so young, but maybe it was his time to die.
“Jack!” a distant voice called.
Gravity pulled him downward. He fell down toward the alien planet, hot air rushing up and over him. So much terrible heat.
Death approached. He could let himself break apart, and burn up in reentry. Then his pain would be over. Perhaps he had done enough to earn an honored place in the great beyond.
“You have to wake up!”
Whose voice was that? Amiasha scanned everywhere within himself, looking through each of his ten thousand eyes for the source of that voice, until he finally came to the chamber. There was something strange going on inside.
They did not belong. Land-bound. Oikeyan and Nefrem gathered in a circle around the cradle. His Alarhya dead on the ground, and a Nefrem joined to him instead. Who was that Nefrem?
“Please wake up, Jack.”
Flash. He was looking at his own body lying in that cradle. He was the city and the Nefrem at once. The tide rose up and swallowed him again.
After all of this, couldn’t they just let him die? Let his suffering end.
The armor along his bottom was flaking away, exposing the soft inner flesh. He felt only the searing, white heat, blotting out every other thought.
The pain brought silence. The silence was a gateway.
Jack surfaced again, twitching between the circular prison and the reality of Amiasha Aum-Samaraya plummeting through the Earth’s atmosphere.
It would all be over soon.
“Jack!”
But it wasn’t just Jack that would die. Lisa, Charlie and Nikitin would also. Ferash and Dojer, too. It wasn’t just Amiasha who would die. Sey Chen in the thousands would perish.
He couldn’t allow this.
Thrust. His tired and bleeding organs surged into action, and he pushed. He fought against the unrelenting pull of gravity. Still the ground approached. Still the searing heat increased.
He poured everything into the struggle, but it wasn’t enough. He didn’t have enough.
When no hope remained, only then did he hear the chorus of the Sey Chen. They sang quietly but with beautiful voices, and their strength grew with every passing moment. Their singing filled him with light and life. The five stars burned inside of him, brighter, stronger and hotter than ever before, and he found new power.
Thrust.
The ground approached, and Amiasha Aum-Samaraya braced for impact. He howled out as he crashed into the Earth, and the ground split beneath him. The world quivered at his touch.
He was down and it was complete.
“Are you okay, Jack?”
He couldn’t tell. His head hurt bad, like he’d been on an all whiskey diet for two weeks straight, and he felt displaced. Displaced?
He groaned.
“Can you open your eyes?”
He tried. Something was short circuited in his brain. He knew what he wanted to do but couldn’t find the switch.
The darkness was kind of a relief.
Then he found it, and his eyes slowly creaked open. Everything was blurry. There was vaseline on the lens.
“Lisa?”
“Yup,” she said.
His eyes began to focus, but the splitting headache continued unabated. “This seems familiar. I could really get used to seeing your face when I wake up.”
She smiled.
“We don’t have to run anywhere, do we?”
“Not this time, hero.”
“Thank God,” he said, and tried not to fall back asleep. At that, he failed.
Chapter 53:
Aftermath
Marcus Donovan and Vijay Rao walked down a wide, blue-green street overflowing with activity. There was so much foot traffic that Marcus could hardly see a few feet in front of him. It was another fine example of humanity’s ability to cope in even the most dire of circumstances, and it impressed him and Legacy to no end.
Four months had passed since the Battle of the Ark, which unexpectedly ended with both sides withdrawing.
