Kei

  And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.

  --Vernor Vinge

  The whirling ring of blue-green plasma is growing in speed and intensity, turning incandescent as I watch. Normally I couldn’t stare into this much light without going blind, but my Gift has displaced and replaced me even as it has transfixed me.

  I can’t move, but I’m not really the girl Kei Kimura now, either. No part of me is. And my new eyes are just fine staring into radiance greater than the Sun’s.

  But my mind, or the part of my brain which still answers to me, remains frozen also, so I stand mute as I watch. I have no idea what this is.

  Some new threat? Some device forged from the Dragon’s dying ‘flesh’? Or some bizarre interaction between the beast’s passing and my own power?

  I cannot say. Indeed, I cannot even imagine. So I stand, silent and unblinking. Forced to wait for whatever comes next.

  I stare up into the sky, and barely notice when an angel with diamond wings alights on the mech’s other giant steel hand in front of me.

  “Kei?” she asks.

  One should never ignore the Angel of Death. Especially when she’s coming for you. But my mind isn’t really my own. Perhaps my soul has already left my body, and the rest of me is just operating on autopilot. Perhaps that’s why she’s here. To let my remnants know Death has already claimed me and taken me home.

  She’s welcome to the rest of me.

  I look over at her, finally, with the slightest motion of my eyes only. The rest of me still stands in rapt attention. But there is something about this emissary of heaven, a tracery of silver-white sigils forming a halo all around her…

  I start, my body jolting with sudden comprehension. “Andrea?” I ask, disbelieving.

  A roar of engines approaches, blue-white exhaust from the beneath the feet of a shining armored figure just beyond Andrea’s folding wings. A man in silver power armor draws up behind Andi and hovers.

  “Kei?” an electronically distorted voice says. “Are you alright?”

  “Christopher,” I answer, and say nothing more. I didn’t think my head could be swimming any further, yet somehow as my dizziness fades, my confusion grows.

  “Yes, we came to help,” Chris nods. “Have you seen…?” And he halts suddenly.

  I nod in return, though. “Yes.” They look at me in concern, so I explain. “I saw Anton earlier. A… parasail? He came in here.” I look around. I don’t know where he is, though.

  “Yes,” Andrea agrees, seeming relieved. “And he’s already left.” She waves towards the Library. “Via another route.”

  “Hammersmith,” Chris calls out, “how are you? And your systems?”

  The great mecha gives a slight cough, behind me. I’ve almost forgotten her, which seems almost impossible, given that I’m standing on her hand.

  I suppose that says something about the day I’ve been having, though.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Better,” a girl’s voice, slightly distorted, says through loudspeakers in the mech’s head. “It was bad, though. If it hadn’t been for all of you…” She trails off.

  “Sorry we couldn’t do more,” Andrea volunteers, though she seems uncomfortable with the words. “But as soon as we got in, the small Dragons swarmed us. Hundreds, at least.”

  The mech nods, her titanic helm bobbing slowly up and down. “Getting them off of me helped a lot. You can’t imagine how hard it is to fight that many at this size. It’s like boxing an army of fleas.”

  Chris looks up at the whirling ring of blue-green fire. “Looks like you and Kei handled the big one, though. Any idea what this is?”

  “Plasma?” the mech says, her voice slightly sarcastic through the distortion. “Sorry, my sensors were hammered in the fight, and weren’t all that advanced to begin with. I’m scanning it, but my AIs have barely any data to build on.”

  Chris gives a slightly robotic-sounding sigh. “I get it. My equipment’s pretty dated, also. Best I had on hand. And I can’t even say ‘the Dragon ate my homework.’ This model never had decent sensors in the first place.”

  “Dated?” I ask disbelievingly.

  “Our best gear isn’t in our dorms,” he answers, spreading his hands. “If it’s even out of the fab, yet.”

  “You have a full suit of power armor,” I comment. “That flies.”

  Christopher shrugs. “It’s a competitive school.”

  “And your friend has a mecha.”

  “You can see how competitive.”

  Andrea coughs, unfurling her shining wings slightly to seize our attention. She doesn’t look inadequate or full of false humility.

  “Be that as it may,” she says, “let’s pool our sensory input and processing power, and see what we can figure out. I’d like to know if that thing is a threat, an opportunity or a simple sideshow.”

  “Agreed,” the mecha echoes, and I jump slightly again. It’s amazing just how fast I can forget about the over 30-foot giant holding me in midair.

  Though I’m dealing with a bit of sensory overload myself.

  As we stare upward again, I notice Chris pull what looks like an iPhone from somewhere on his armored person, stretch his arm out to the side, and absently drop it. He doesn’t even look away from the whirling circle high above us.

  I blink at him and glance down at the smartphone. Just in time to see it unfold tiny wings and flare blue-plasma jets. The iPhone-turned-drone zips away below us, banking into a wide arc towards the Library.

  “What…?” I say softly.

  “Just check on the fallen, Caduceus,” Chris says absently, as if still on the phone he just dropped. “See if anyone’s in dire need of medical care. Anyone whose biology you recognize, anyway.”

  “Sensor networks merged,” Hammersmith’s mech remarks, “and our AIs are crunching the numbers. Any suggestions? They’re good, but the less they have to brute force…”“See if the rings are multilayered, each outer one accelerating the next one in,” Chris answers. My gut sense is that he’s talking to his own systems and everyone else’s, not just Andi and Hammersmith. “And if they are…” He pauses. “How close they’re getting to relativistic speeds.”

  Andrea blinks and turns to look at him. “Relativistic speeds?” she asks, almost disbelieving.

  His metal shell shrugs. “Tidal forces should rip it all apart if they do. But if we’re looking at some extradimensional alien’s garage project to whip up a wormhole…” He spreads his hands, still staring at the ring. “I’d rather know before it goes critical, not after.”

  I look from them to the plasma construct and back again. “They’d have to solve all kinds of engineering problems, wouldn’t they? I mean, just the…” Words fail me for a moment. Just moving a few grams of particles fast enough to generate significant gravity would take incredible power. And even if you could get them almost to C – lightspeed itself – you’d then be trying to hold unimaginable mass in place in your circle. Even a dusting of particles at that speed would weigh…“Tons and tons,” Hammersmith agrees in a resonant voice, her whole titanium-steel body echoing in agreement. “Maybe they have. Maybe they know exactly what they’re doing. Or maybe they’re just willing to risk trying in someone else’s basement universe.”

  “The inner ring’s cracking,” Chris says, floating backwards. “I think we’re seeing tidal forces, but for a portal that large they’re way too small…”

  The blue-green ring of plasma suddenly began to shrink in diameter even as it blazed brighter. Like a snake eating it’s own tail, while also catching fire.

  “We probably need to disrupt that,” Chris observes, “from a very safe distance.”

  “Like out of this universe,” Andrea adds. “At least the city’s faded from the Nexus. We should do likewise.”

  “Um, could I catch a ride?” I ask. “I don’t really fly. At all.”

  “I’ve got you,” Hammersmith answers. “Hold tight.”

  Jet engines rumble beneath us, and I can feel the heat from the expelled plasma and hear just a hint of the air whistling into them over the roar of the supercharged plasma it becomes rushing out the other side. Slowly, we begin to rise.

  “Move fast,” Chris urges, his own power armor rising faster. “I’m going to start poking that thing, but I may have to disrupt it soon. Or at least try.”

  “Once we’re clear, Andrea can signal her friends to close the Apertures,” Hammersmith comments, gesturing at the Circle and the gate to the Maze above it. We are accelerating as she speaks, Andrea easily keeping pace with us while Christopher widens his lead. “And once those are closing, I can open up. From the far side.”

  Chris nods, and the blinding blue plasma from his feet and built-in jetpack turns into an incandescent torrent. He launches away like a bullet. One that only accelerates.

  I hear his voice echoing through Hammersmith’s speakers as she patches me in via speakerphone. “I’ll start tapping it with all kinds of energies. See what we’ve got on the spectrum that gives it problems.”

  Andrea is rising above us also, but I can feel our own momentum building as Hammersmith pours on the power. Her fingers gently curve around me. “Just hang on,” she tells me, staring again at the brightening, shrinking ring.

  I look up also, and have the worst feeling I’m seeing something collapsing into critical mass.

  The Dragon is gone, but now the Ouroboros is eating its own tail.

  And depending on what it’s trying to do in its own energized guts, we may end up irradiated, vaporized or staring down a wormhole into a hostile universe.

  I’d just as soon skip the live event and watch it on streaming video. From at least another universe away.

  Patreon page for subscribers there. The first chapters released on here are already up there, even for free subscribers.