Authors: Greg Fish
The horrified Dark Gods could only watch as their key supply of liquid hydrogen was being boiled away. High in the icy atmosphere, the water would start to freeze, mixing with sulfur and rendering it no longer practically viable for fuel when it fell as a dirty, gray show. But this was only the beginning.
Deep inside the Dark Gods’ territory, the IGFs rained on military bases, key nodes in their supply lines, and even several research labs. Tens of thousands of battleships were obliterated and thirty valuable objects vanished in the monstrous mushroom clouds which turned planets inside out, knocking several worlds out of their normal orbits and shattering three low density moons into twisted, burned bits. After the shock finally started to wear off, a few Dark Gods who once upon a time dealt with the infant Nation, remembered tales of an old weapon used on Earth to deliver nuclear ordinance to any part of the world without involving fighters, bombers or destroyers just like these odd missiles delivered their devastating payload to their targets. It seems like the Nation had enough accurate intelligence for a first strike and a pretty good first strike at that...
[ chapter _ 031 ]
After a three month journey, a giant space city settled into high orbit around Abydos. On its observation deck, Christine and Steve looked at the planet below and studied the ancient craters that pockmarked its surface. They knew that most of these craters were made by powerful bombs rather than meteors. Although worn by millennia of erosion, the scars of war were still visible on this dark world. On the northern shores of a green ocean, in a vast desert valley surrounded by mountains the size of Everest, a complex array of lights shot into space. It was the capital city of the Nation.
They took a sleek transport down to the surface, gliding in slow, lazy spirals over the dark oceans, mountains and deserts, heading towards the dome shaped hangar of a spaceport. Passing through the wispy gray clouds, the humans caught a momentary glimpse of huge, jagged spikes reaching several miles into the sky. Another glimpse and they saw that the massive stone spikes were organized, standing upright like buildings. Finally as the transport lined up for the final approach, they realized that the forest of giant spikes shrouded in a fine, greenish-gray mist was actually a city with many smaller, alien structures between them.
“Is that what I think it is?” Steve asked the cyborgs sitting next to them.
“What do you think it is?” smiled Nelson.
“I think it’s the city of the last Sentry...”
“It’s the City of Ghosts,” nodded Ace. “We think it’s somewhere around two million years old and we’re pretty sure that it was built at the heyday of the Shifters’ empire. After the Shifters went into exile, pretty much everybody and their third cousin twice removed tried to explore the city. As in go grave robbing. Very few of them survived past the city gates.”
“What happened to them?” asked Christine.
“Nobody knows for sure,” Ace shrugged with an evil smirk. “ But they say when you go into the city, you get lost in a maze of dark pathways and then... a living darkness starts following you wherever you go. Alien ghosts so old they have no names cry out to you. And if you don’t go crazy and run out screaming by then, the living darkness turns violent and hunts you down.”
“You’re kidding,” Steve shook his head in disbelief.
Ace’s expression remained conspiratorially evil.
“You’re not kidding...” Steve mumbled and cleared his throat. “I just thought that if the City of Ghosts was that creepy, you wouldn’t build your capital right next to it.” He paused for a moment and triumphantly exhaled, “or would you now?”
Ace smiled, flashing one of his fangs.
“Now you’re thinking like a Shadow Demon,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll love meeting the rest of the High Command.”
Their transport gently descended to the circular runway around the spaceport and rising just a few inches off the ground floated into a giant hangar sparsely populated by other transport ships. Steve and Christine put on their helmets to keep out the planet’s toxic air, thick with carbon dioxide and inert gases. After months of waiting, they were ready to meet the rest of the Nation’s true masters.
Deep in the maze of the City of Ghosts, an inky darkness slithered its way through the abandoned spires of its past masters. It stalked these ruins for a million years now, protecting untold secrets buried deep inside the ancient structure. For a very long time, it was utterly alone in the gloomy silence that settled over Abydos when its creators had abandoned their home world.
Stretching out its fluid, flexible tentacles, it watched and listened for intruders as it had done over the eons. Sometimes it would sit in this highly receptive state for centuries, bristling with flowing tentacles in anticipation. As it felt the warmth of bodies, it knew that its wait was over. These particular aliens had been coming to the City on a very frequent basis. It was time to meet them personally.
The formless, fluid creature slithered down from its perch atop a giant temple and leaked down the jagged stones to the ground. Like a stream of inky, black water, the thing proceeded towards what it saw as three burning, red embers floating above the ground, surrounded by auras of white energy. It moved at a slow and measured pace, like a big cat stalking its prey. The cyborgs seemed oblivious to its expert approach.
As it entered striking range, the shapeless creature slowed down to form itself into a black puddle. Out of the puddle rose its tentacles, the delicate tendrils attached to them solidifying into sharp spikes. It prepared to shift its shape one last time and attack.
The cyborgs stood still.
The creature slithered just an inch closer.
The silence around the cyborgs grew tense.
Two of the cyborgs shifted on their toes, a motion the creature’s senses couldn’t detect. To the odd, shape shifting predator patrolling the ancient city they seemed to be frozen in place.
With a roar the creature pounced, collecting itself into something absolutely horrifying. It reared up on three legs bristling with claws, its back sprouted a forest of sharp spikes which aimed in virtually every direction, and its huge mouth on an extendable trunk was lined with countless gleaming fangs.
This unholy amalgamation of spines, claws and fangs shot itself towards the cyborgs, using two of its side legs as gasping hands and its rear leg as a spring. Its mouth shot forward in mid-jump, opening wide enough to swallow a cyborg whole. Its strike was a textbook example of a sneak attack.
Yet amazingly, it failed.
As the shape shifter struck the ground, it splattered itself all over the gravel and returned to its puddle form. Almost immediately, its quivering tendrils shot out in search of the cyborgs. Instead of warm bodies, it picked up a strange echo all around itself. The cyborgs had it in a force field, deflecting their energy away from the shape shifter and trapping it between them.
Irritated, the creature fused its tendrils into a single fluid tentacle which rose eight feet above its liquid body. The tentacle’s top rounded itself into a black sphere which peeled away to reveal a single, green, compound eye. This spherical eye stood still while the tentacle did an angry, writhing dance underneath it. Using its eye, it could see the world around itself in color instead of just heat and fine patterns of radiation.
From the darkness, three robed scholars emerged. Each carried a dark, semi-transparent sword with a flowing red aura dancing around the edges of the blade. They held the swords like expert killers. For a moment, things looked very bleak for the shape shifter.
Its fluid base erupted with dancing spikes, signaling that it didn’t mind a fight with the Shadow Demons surrounding it. But instead of attacking or getting closer, the cyborgs sheathed their swords with a soft click and pulled back their hoods to reveal their faces.
“That won’t be necessary,” said one of them.
The shape shifter calmed down, but didn’t retract its spikes.
“Do you want to stay in the city?”
The shape shifter’s spikes rippled in a highly organized wave.
“You don’t need to stay here anymore. We have another job for you, the job we discussed with the others a little while ago.”
The creature produced another complex ripple through its spikes, very different from the last one.
“Yes. We were sure they told you.”
A calm, relaxed ripple moved the shape shifter’s spikes. Visibly, it cooled down as it recalled a conversation its siblings had with these strange creatures in cloaks just thirty rotations ago. It was time to leave this old city. Its skills were needed elsewhere. Its skills and that of its ancient brethren who lived all over the City of Ghosts...
After an expansive tour of the Nation’s capital, Steve and Christine were escorted to the Temple of the Shades. Inside, the building was sealed, sterilized and pressurized to allow them to take off their spacesuits and change into white robes decorated with complex patterns of silver glyphs and runes. Nelson and Dot put on the same attire while Ace donned a black robe decorated by red tribal designs. The robes were loose and comfortable, tied together with a sash and worn with only a bare minimum of clothing underneath.
In the main chamber of the temple, a crescent shaped table was set for a meal of Earth’s finest exports preserved with elaborate containment chambers on their long trip and prepared just before the get-together. Sitting behind this table were nine members of the Command, also dressed in ceremonial robes.
Despite the traditional pomp, the atmosphere was like a cocktail party rather than an official meeting and greetings were warm and friendly. Everyone sat where they pleased and biting jokes easily flew back and forth. Stemless glasses in the form of inverted domes clinked as Ace, Alice, Sergio and Nelson toasted to new friends, old chums, and good fortune.
The High Command fully embraced the same principles of polite and casual informality by which the rest of the Nation lived and despite the unavoidable invocation of political euphemisms and several tight lipped verbal tiptoes around a few topics, the discussions between the humans and the cyborgs were open and cordial. As the official meet and greet with Steve and Christine started winding down, the conversation shifted back to the reason why they were all here. The Dark Gods and the results from the Nation’s counterstrike. While the intelligence from the field sounded encouraging, the cyborgs knew just how vast the Dark Gods’ infrastructure really was and that even a shower of IGF-laden missiles was more of an unpleasant inconvenience rather than a serious blow. The next step in the war had to be fully fleshed out.
“So how much is the war going to cost?” asked Nelson. “Are we talking hundreds of billions or even more than that?”
“Worst case estimate? Just shy of ten trillion astros up front and about six times that to repair the damage to the military and infrastructure over the next 33 years,” replied Sergio. “And of course, that’s not counting the costs of lives and the training for new commanders. I’m not going even going to entertain the best case, I’m not that much of an optimist.”
“And the odds of winning?”
“Slim. It would probably end up in a standoff.”
“With our current weapons capacity, right?” asked Ace.
“Right,” nodded Alice. “We’d need some sort of an edge, something a little extra to help us out...”
Ace’s lips slowly stretched into an ominous smirk.
“I’ve been wondering what can beat a Sentry,” he started. “I took a look at the history books we have and an interesting thing came to my attention. Every time a new Sentry won a war, it won when fighting with an almost evenly matched rival one on one and the wars could go on for as long as a hundred years. Most would take at least sixty on our timescales. But if we go back just a bit before the last ten million years, there was a really quick takeover by two species which teamed up against an opponent that would drain their resources in a traditional war if they fought separately. In a year, they kicked out the sitting Sentry.”
“Obviously that model didn’t work out in the end,” noted Alice. “If it worked, Sentry alliances would be common.”
“True,” acknowledged Ace. “In the end, the alliance turned into a war for dominance, but it illustrates an important point. If you can double your power by using the technology of another Sentry with your best guns, you can get the upper hand.”
“Are you going to tell us that you found another Nation and they want to team up with us?” asked Sergio. “Because I can tell you that there’s no way that...”
“No, I didn’t. But I did find that we can use something similar to that. The Guardians of the City of Ghosts.”
Ace’s eyes and runes ignited with an infernal flame. The lights in the main chamber faded and an ominous presence seeped into the room in the form of a black, moving puddle. Collecting itself next to Ace, the shape shifting creature from the City of Ghosts sprang into view, illuminated by the light emanating from the cyborgs. It’s huge compound eye glowed red, its stem undulated and its liquid base was a quaking forest of small spikes. As Ace began to move his hand, the alien creature swayed in the same direction. Powering up, Ace lit up his aura and in response, the spikes on the Guardian’s base grew and began to ripple violently. Its body churned with energy as the creature strained at its invisible leash.
“How... how did you do that?” asked Nelson, his jaw threatening to drop any second.
“We were very friendly with the Guardians when we came to this world,” replied Ace, “and since they’re here to guard the legacy of the Shape Shifters, we thought they’d be willing to help us in exchange for our help in preserving the city and its artifacts. Right now, I’m not controlling the Guardian’s mind, just suggesting where it should go and it’s more than willing to listen to me.”
“How would exactly they fight with us?”