Zoa thought at first she was seeing the technology of Cyon. The thought made her heart cold with fear.
Cyon could track up the shipping containers but it could not do so and put around the device and relay a field that convinced the weapon's as yet undetected sensors that barometric pressure and motion were irrelevant. Cyon's task was to maintain a force field against the possible emission of superluminal quanta and the problematic burst of radiation should the weapon go off within the atmosphere.
Zoa heard only a whoosh of air as the containers unsealed from the ground. On her hand-held, the massive metal containers read like cocooned things. She could not see the cocoon, but her instrument, linked to the Cyon's auxiliary array, saw the energy blossoming around the containers as well as a wave pattern she could not identify or record.
The bio-wave was a mystery, she supposed. Too much energy.
It wasn't that the signature fluctuated, or was elusive. The wave pattern was, simply, too immense for file storage in Zoa's palm machine. The mystery, of course, could wait.
Hephaestion had gotten on his knees, turned his face to the ground. His hands rested in his lap. He looked like he was praying.
Where was the Lady?
Zoa's instrument said the Lady was everywhere, in every aisle of the terminal, on every container, in every container.
Unreliable readings. While the Lady exerted herself, there was going to be interference.
Cyon rotated and climbed. The containers edged upward. Zoa checked the head's up display on the face shield of her protective suit. No superluminal particles detected. The Quiranium, too, was emitting no radiation.
Syrinx spoke to her through her headset. "What is happening?"
"From here it looks the same as it does up there. The device is rising. Its sensors are fooled."
"How do we know the sensors are fooled?"
"The weapon hasn't detonated."
Syrinx signed off.
Zoa marked the containers rising above the harbor. Her display gave their altitude. She performed a cursory check of Hephaestion's bio-functions. Normal, all normal. But for the energy emanating from him, he appeared to be resting.
Her sensors pointed at him, she tried something else. Ran it through the uplink to Cyon, through the auxiliary array. She blinked at her screen, startled. Was Cyon seeing this? Oh, yes. One mystery solved. And this she could record, store, and replay. She'd tell Hephaestion, when it was over, what his demigod looked like in elemental terms. She'd show him, too, what he looked like when his power overtook him, the fantastic swirl of light pricks, a thousand miniature stars plunging through him and away into the sky.
A smudge, a dot now, the metal containers as they rose. The clouds had them. The clouds did, but not Cyon. The ship focused on the force field.
Cyon breached the floor of heaven.
A trickle of sweat behind Zoa's ears as her heart leaped against her chest.
More data from Cyon, altitude, speed of ascent, how many kilometers to go.
The Lady, Zoa was thinking, could lift the containers beyond the atmosphere. Quite possibly she could achieve such easily. Lift them like they were toys. What she did now was no different, for her, than reaching between the old continents of Hephaestion's world, causing the Enegris. Her energy bonding with like, seeking like, sampling and investigating. What would Hephaestion say when he saw what Zoa had recorded? An interesting thought--
The Lady wasn't going to fail, no, that was not what went awry. Zoa imagined it an instant before it happened. Hephaestion. And then she got busy on her link, confirmed communication, the well-being of Cyon, the impact to the planet on which she stood.
Communication restored quickly. The hull of Cyon was built to withstand such blasts. Confirmation of minor damage, and that the weapon had detonated.
Impact to the planet?
None.
The device went critical outside gravity. Hephaestion's "blanket" had failed there, just outside the atmosphere. Zoa's palm machine fed her details. She didn't spend much time with those, only enough to distract her from the fact of Cyon's radiation force field, which funneled what it had been tasked to contain back into the atmosphere like a chute.
Radiation expanded down to the surface.
Hephaestion had wanted to be inside Cyon's force field, had not wanted to risk diverting his abilities to contend with an energy field. Cyon's force field therefore was a cone that ran all the way to the ground.
Too late to disengage. The radiation wave would disperse if she gave the order. Without Cyon's force field, the lethal wave would spill into the sky over Amorium.
She didn't try to give warning. Not that there was time. She could only watch.
Her hand-held remained on its secondary screen, the one with the bio-filter. Attacked by the radiation wave, the airborne portion of Hephaestion's essence, what Zoa would have described as a coalescence of light pricks, dissolved as though scorched out of existence. Closer to the surface, the light swirls thickened and vanished, like something mighty clasped them between invisible paws and then inhaled them. The affarite's power, the light, the energy, all of it, went out, leaving only the man.
"Hephaestion!" The microphone in her suit amplified her terror, fed it upward through the mechanical and psychic receptors to the ship in orbit.
Hephaestion screamed next. He screamed in pain. He should not have been able to. He should have died immediately.
Zoa, with him inside the protected zone, bounded forward. Her suit made her awkward, cobbled her legs.
With a convulsion, Hephaestion tumbled sideways. Arms and legs snapped inward, then flailed as he arched in agony. He screamed again.
Dropping to her knees, Zoa used the polymer pads fixed to the tips of her gloves to tap the screen on her arm. A pouch in her suit opened. She took a medical injector with clumsy hands. Arming the device, she touched the long column of his throat.
His mind was open-- from the moment the Lady let her have him again, his mind had been hers. And now it was a page written over in torment. His pain spiked through her.
She released the medication.
Slowly, the white teeth in his mind began to let go.
Another injector in the med kit presented itself, ready for her fingers.
She hesitated.
His legs and arms were still rigid, his face a rictus.
She poked his throat with the second injector, let his mind pulse through hers.
The pain, he began uncoupling from it, like a railcar unshackled from the train. His arms drifted slowly to the ground. His legs straightened. His lungs were able so far to move air but in seconds or moments their integrity would fail and he'd suffer a deluge of poisoned fluid in his airway. It hurt already to breathe, his mind told her. The furrow in his brow showed his struggle to evade the pain. Meanwhile every organ in his body was burning.
Carefully lifting his head into one hand, she sought his eyes. She loved them, his eyes. They had reminded her of the seas of her world, oceans like polished metal.
How are they working? she wondered. His eyes were unfocused and glassy. Yet he saw. How is he seeing me?
A mute query formed in her brain, sent by him, about the weapon. He wanted to know if the weapon had harmed anyone else.
"No," she told him. "You and I are still inside Cyon's force field." Though the atmosphere within the energy field was deadly, the air outside was untainted and safe.
His thoughts composed a note of relief, at which she winced.
"You're the only one," she struggled to say evenly.
He heard her sadness. Zoa, Zoa, he thought. It's okay, it's all right.
-- Not for me. But he could not find that thought from her in the ether. The telepathy was one way, now. He hadn't the power to receive her thoughts. "Not for me," she voiced. A weapon meant to destroy the world had snuffed the power of the world's oldest being, taking with it into the vacuum the only thing in the world worthy of her interest.
His chest rose and fell, shallow and ragged. It was hard to move the air, hard even for blood to slog through his veins.
"You suffer, my love. If I give you a third injection, you'll die within moments."
-- I'm dying anyway, he sent to her.
She reached for the last injector, pushed the medication into his skin, his still intact skin, and saw his chest settle in gratitude.
His gaze drifted, as perhaps he searched inward. The Lady?
"Hit, as you were. All her ... special ... her essence burned away, like yours, by the radiation. I can't detect her." She almost added, "But she is all energy, only energy, while you are not." No, he didn't need to hear that now. She said, "Does your power renew itself?"
He tried to nod, and then his eyes swept shut.
She understood, and looked elsewhere. She said, moistly, "Then your god will resurrect."
The Lady would. He would not. He needed his power to anchor him in the world, to prevent his soul from passing the so-called gate. The power that had been eaten away, reduced to nothing. She could see that it had been erased by looking at her instrument. He must have known through some other, more intimate sensor.
Without his power, he was not going to become dormant. That was his word, dormant. Without his essence, he was going to die. If ever his power came back it would find his flesh corrupted but, more importantly, his soul gone. He was going on to where she and the part of him that made him an affarite could not find him.
Zoa waited in silence, waited some more.
His mouth slipped open, and through it rose a tiny, shuddering breath.
A moment later she caught a final flickering thought. It was his: "At last."
Turning from her, his mind folded in darkness. His heart skidded to a halt. And she was left with but a shell of flesh, with nothing.
-- Next Chapter
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