Cycles

Maria

Somewhere in Fantasma Colony in the Caloris Antipode region of Mercury, in the deepest, darkest tunnels branching off of Level Three, there is a place where things are stranger than the rest of the underground city. Take a left at the main lift, follow the outside arc tunnel to the deepest section of Three, and you will find an unmarked door. Enter here, and you will be inside a simple residential tunnel. If you were to try the doors, though, you would quickly find they were dummies. By this time, though, it would be too late, and you would find yourself drawn deeper down the tunnel, past the point where the lights stop, and around a long, gentle arc.

Lights flash in your eyes, your optic nerves playing tricks on you. But you wonder if it is indeed a false light or something real. You continue further down the tunnel to investigate. The air itself seems to take on a life of its own. As you reach a certain point, you stop, and stare.

The air itself shimmers, and you know it is no trick of your light-deprived eyes. You can see yourself now, and the tunnel walls, illuminated in a ghostly golden glow. You stand transfixed, as the light forms a vortex, and wraps around you. If the light approves, you continue into it, if not, you simply turn back, and remember nothing...

Razorback was wandering the Colony, looking for something to do. Altas had taken over Ops and was engaged in a complete sky-mapping exercise that he insisted required all the Ops computers. Xenogears was running a backup Ops from her server in her quarters. Del was still missing. Icey, Tycho, and Jehrico were down in the Core trying to contact Maria. Ko'ah was on an inspection tour of the Colony. So Razorback was left without anything much to do for awhile.
He had tried to sleep. That was a mistake. He had visited the Herc bay to work on his super-Goad, and had refitted it so even he was satisfied. Until his duty shift that night, he would have nothing to do, nothing to distract him from his own dangerous thoughts.

So he walked, stalking the colony in silence like that mysterious cat that no one had seen for several days. There was a bounty on the creature's head, since it had proven itself dangerous. He circled the residential level, and when he saw an unfamiliar tunnel entrance, he entered it.

He walked down the tunnel, wondering just how long it was and where it had come from. Another of Maria's little hideaways? He still had no idea how she had been able to dig the sanctum out without being detected. There were two ways to dig tunnels in Fantasma: with a slice-and-siphon method of cutting or melting the rock, and with nanites that would reduce the rock to powder, outgas the volatiles, and steal the silicon and metals to create more of themselves.

Both of these were pretty visible.

He reached a bend in the tunnel and noticed the lights were out. He activated his wrist light and shined it down the tunnel.

He continued on, and he saw a small box sitting on the floor, humming quietly. He turned his light on it, and raised an eyebrow.

It was a printer, spitting sheets of black metaplas into a growing pile nearby. Razorback reached to pick them up, but drew his hands back with a yelp as an electrical shock burned him. He shined his lightover the sheets, which were written on with gold text, in a tall, elegantly canted script. He couldn't see anything conductive anywhere near the sheets, so where had he received a shock from?

The printer spit a final sheet at him and shut itself down.

This time, when he reached down to pick the bundle up, he received no shock.

He flipped through the sheets, raised an eyebrow, and ran his fingers over the lettering. It was a pretty fair simulation of Maria's handwriting.

It was April of 2797 when we reached the orbit of Nereid, Neptune's outermost, rocky moon. Neptune was a small, dark-blue sphere against the stars, and our objective was a silver dot beside it, gleaming dully in the viewscreen's enhanced contrast. The real scene would have been different: the darkness of the outer system would have been nearly impenetrable to the human eye.

I was used to Jupiter's system, the eternal twilight of Saturn's satellites, and I'd even seen the mist-filled gunmetal gray sky of Chiron, but I had never come this far. In my mind I knew that the darkness was simply the way of things, and that the brighter light of the inner system was actually the anomoly. But in my heart, I was chilled, as if the eternal cold of space was invading my bones even as I fell into Tartarus, or Dante's Ninth Circle.

I raised an eyebrow at these errant thoughts, and focused on the small console on the arm of my chair. We were preparing for our OIM-1 burn, which would put us into a long, elliptical orbit around the blue planet. We would then spiral slowly into the magnetosphere, altering our orbit to precisely intersect Triton with a minimum of course corrections when we were within the Cybrids' main sensor sphere.

Detection would be death, even though this torchship had a powerful main shield generator and engines. If we came under fire, we would be able to survive long enough to run, but then the Cybrids' small, vicious fighters would chase us down and cut us apart. We had to land, fulfill the objective, and flee.

The objective, despite what the crew thought, was my own, not the Empire's. Sure, we would rescue the stranded dropship as we were expected, but to me that was secondary.

One day, what I would soon discover would be necessary to create a new life for an entire world, indeed, a new kind of life. Unfortunately, the future that I had seen was by no means predestined, and I might have to sell my soul to see it become reality.

After that first page, the letters became gibberish, and all two hundred pages in the stack were meaningless to Razorback. It must have been some kind of cipher.

It didn't matter. He read the first sheet again, and decided he already had plenty to think about. And, he thought with a trace of amusement, he really didn't have anything else to do anyway.

He pulled his pocket computer from his belt, and began to scan the second page...

-----

Delithita awoke, startled from sleep by a gentle rocking. As her eyes opened, she saw her hammock was swaying in a breeze, blowing steadily outward from the door. She frowned. Nothing could cause a wind like that, except a breach in the hideout's atmospheric integrity. And that would be blowing toward the door, not from it.

She picked up her suit from where she had dropped it on the floor, and put it on quickly. Then she went to the door and passed through it, not noticing that she hadn't opened it, and found herself outside the hideout.

She looked up into the sky, and gasped.

A curtain of shimmering red hid a swarm of glittering blue stars, brighter than any she had ever seen. Nearby, other stars of other colors filled the sky with a dazzling light show, and a group of comets in a cluster shot arrows at the sun.

She had known Maria had done something recently, but she had not known what. Now she did.

Not even bothering to get her vehicle, she pointed herself toward Fantasma Colony and began to run.

-----

"Maria...?" Icey called, but recieved no response, just as he had recieved no response the last twenty times he'd called.

"Give it up buddy," Tycho said glumly, sitting beside the lake staring at the tiny ripples that disturbed the beach sand. "She isn't available."

"Probably has a hell of a headache from moving the planet a couple thousand light-years," Jehrico mumbled, and kicked a pebble into the water. Icey only shrugged, and dropped down to a convenient rock.

"Hmm," Tycho said, turning to stare at Icey. "You got a problem buddy."

"Oh yeah?" Icey glanced at him with a puzzled frown.

"Not so much a problem, persay..."

"Out with it man!"

"Your, ah," and Tycho tapped the side of his left eye.

Icey frowned, pulled his pocket computer from his pocket, looked at himself in the polished surface. "Eh...?"

His eyes were glowing, with a steady gold light. Holding his hand near his face he could see the glow on his skin.

He stared at Tycho and Jehrico, who stared back.

-----

"Gravitic balances suggest Mercury has not been transported so much as switched," Altas said over the commlink to Xenogears. "It seems that a planet of similar mass orbitted in this region of the system prior to our appearence."

"I presume you have located other planets in this system?"

"Correct. There are five other plants, at one, one-point-five, five-point-one, five-point-five, and ten astronomical units."

"Analysis?"

"Number one is a Earth-type planet, apparently a water world with very little land surface. Mean temperature three-zero-five Kelvin, mass one-point-one Earth. The atmosphere is somewhat thicker than Earth's and is composed of roughly half nitrogen and half carbon dioxide."

"Fascinating..."

"Yes, it is very terraformable. I'd estimate we could do it in two years after we get the nanites and algae we need created. Number two is rocky, sort of Earth-like. Mean temperature is two-seven-seven Kelvin, mass one-point-two Earth. It seems to be in an ice age, and the polar caps extend to thirty latitude. There are small lakes around the equatorial regions, which seem to contain some kind of oxygen-generating plantlife. Atmosphere is eighty percent nitrogen, fifteen percent oxygen, four percent argon. It is habitable."

Xenogears was silent for a moment. "The others?"

"Three is Jovian, but more like Neptune in size. Atmosphere is gas-giant with ammonia and water clouds. An extensive ring system and one massive moon, about Mars-sized. The moon is similar to Earth's, but with some ice content on the surface. Average temperature is two-three-five Kelvins... odd..."

"The moon is generating tidal forces with the planet and leading to the excess heat production?"

"Perhaps... perhaps... planet four is similar to Three's moon, and analysis of its orbit suggest it was originally a part of Three's system. Orbital perturbation from the other moon of Three probably threw it out. Lastly, planet five is Saturnian in appearence, though there are no significant rings. It masses six thirty Earths, or about twice Jupiter. It has six major moons of two thousand to six thousand kilometers in diameter. Two of these are similar to Titan, while two closer to the planet seem to be quite analogous to Io and Europa. Five has a substantial magnetosphere and radiation zone."

"Asteroids, debris?"

"I have seen no evidence of an asteroid belt or zodiacal dust system. The system is pretty clean. The Kuiper belt analog was probably swept up by planet five."

"I see... and the sun?"

"G-zero-V. No noted problems. The solar activity is somewhat higher than Sol's but not too much. No instabilities or hints of extreme variability. The corona is rather larger, and we're actually just inside it, so our radiation count is thirty percent higher, but not enough to cause any problems for us."

"Did you notice anything else about this system that might be of any consequence?"

"Negative."

"Understood." Xenogears closed the channel and leaned back in her chair. The scattered subconsoles stacked neatly on her desk were blank, now. Everything that needed to be done was done, and at last she could rest.

She wondered where Razorback was.

"Right here," he said as he entered waving a stack of metaplas. "Xena," he said, coming close to her and kissing her.

"Mmm. Hi," she said, smiling.

"Hi yourself. Take a look at this." He handed the sheets to her.

"Interesting," Xenogears said as she scanned the page quickly. "Very interesting. This is a journal, not so?"

"Looks like one. Any clue how to work the cipher? My comp is clueless."

She scanned the next page. "There is a pattern," she said. "You will notice that only the first sixteen letters of the alphabet are used, and that each letter is paired with another. It is written in hexadecimal code."

Razorback's interest sharpened. "Oh really...? Can you convert the code to numerics?"

"In zero-to-F notation, the first word is 03-1A-03-0C-05-14. This could be..."

"Cycles," Razorback said. "That's the word."

"Yes. Third letter, twenty-fifth letter, third letter, twelveth letter, fifth letter, nineteenth letter. But the next word is apparently written in another cipher."

"Ah damn. A word-by-word cipher?"

"Yes... this is strange. Very strange. Where did you find this?"

"There was a printer, in a tunnel branching off Three."

Xenogears just shook her head. "I see. I won't even bother trying to figure it out. Let's scan this and see if this machine can do the job."

"I have a funny feeling that isn't a good idea."

"I will sever the links to the colony network so in case the code contains anything damaging--"

She stopped as a flash of light illuminated the darkened room. They both spun toward the source of the light, on the room's back wall.

"Hey, Xeno, Razor!" Delithita said breathlessly. "You have to come..."

She stopped, and blinked as she looked around and figured out where she was.

"Delithita?" Xeno said quietly. "Are you aware that you just walked out of a solid wall?"

Del looked back. "Cool," she said simply. "You have to come outside and look--"

"We know," Razorback said. "We're near the Carinae Nebula somewhere. Maria moved the planet."

"But have you been outside? You have to go outside and see it. It's beautiful!"

"We will," Xeno said, reaching out slowly as if to touch Del's hand. She thought the better of it, and withdrew her arm slowly. "Del... you are Del, right?"

"Of course I'm Del you--" She stopped, looked down at herself. "Now where did this come from?" she muttered, running her hands down her body. She was wearing a shining red dress shot through with gold threads. A gold chain hung from her neck, and a large, square-cut ruby hung just above the cut of the dress. "I haven't worn anything like this since high school."

"And you look lovely in it," Razorback said dryly. "But could someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?"

Xenogears moaned softly. "I think this planet has simply gone insane," she said peevishly.

"This isn't Maria's tinkering, is it, Del?" Razorback said quietly.

Delithita shook her head. Radiant light like laser beams shot out of the ruby to cast crimson light all over the room. Her eyes were bright, excited, joyous. For about the first time since Razor had seen her, she wasn't angry about anything. "No, I don't think so. She started a process and brought us here, but she isn't doing it all now. I think..." She turned her head to the side, as if listening to a faint sound. "Icey," she whispered.

"What about him?"

"He's in trouble," she said suddenly. "I have to get down to the Core. Stay here and kiss or something," she said, and slipped down into the floor and disappeared.

Razorback just stared at the spot she had been standing in, trying to process what had happened. Xenogears took his chin in her hand and turned his face to hers. "Yes, the planet has gone insane," she said dismissively, smiling at his dumbfounded expression.

"Um..."
"Shut up and kiss me, love..."
-----

Delithita dropped from the sky directly in front of Tycho, dropping into a crouch with her hands touching the stone before straightening and going over to Icey's fallen figure.

"Where the hell did you come from?" Jehrico demanded, and she gestured upward vaguely as she examined Icey.

"What happened?"
"Tycho saw his eyes glowing--"

"How strange," she said, her voice thick with irony.

"Then he just collapsed. He fell here and we tried to take him back, but it's like he's made out of stone. It's like he weighs a ton."

"Could be," Del murmured, as she crouched beside him and looked him over.

"What?"
"Shut up," Del snapped. Jehrico instantly fell silent. Del put her hand on Icey's chest, closed her eyes. Icey's eyes snapped open, and he stammered a question. "Shut up," she told him, and he did, unwillingly. "Stand up, if you can," she said, and Icey tried, but failed.

"I'm too weak," he said. "What happened? Feels like I had a run-in with a--"

"Save your energy. I'll give you what I can." She leaned over him and kissed him gently on the lips. The glow returned to his eyes as he blinked with surprise.

Del sat back, leaning heavily against a boulder. "You should be able to get up now," she said, and he did. He stood immobile for a minute, his eyes closed, looking weak and nauseous, then took a slow, uncertain step, then another, stronger one.

"Damn..." Icey said. "What happened anyway?"

"I have no idea," Del said. "I wasn't here. Something has happened to you and you need to build your energy. So I gave you some of mine."

"Um... thanks..." he murmured. "Think I could get some more of that energy?" he said with a sudden grin.

Del rolled her eyes. "You never give up, do you?" She stood, her dress swirling around her legs, and wrapped her arms around him. As he stared at her in surprise, she kissed him, energetically and in detail.

"Wow," he said as she backed away and winked at him. "Energy indeed."

Delithita grinned, turned, and disappeared through the trees.

"Well well well," Tycho said, grinning at Icey.

"Can I pass out too?" Jehrico said, gazing after Del.

Icey merely stood there, shaking his head with a faint smile.

-----

"Altas to Xenogears," the call came from the communicator on the desk. It was heard, but ignored, as the intended recipient was otherwise occupied. After a couple repeats, the caller gave up. "Altas to Razorback." This was similarly ineffective.

A good simulation of a disgusted sigh came over the intercomm. "Altas to Ghosts. Report to Ops at your convenience." The channel closed somewhat more abruptly than usual.

Some indeterminate time later, Xeno and Razor entered Ops. Altas gave them a level stare for a moment, then turned and typed quickly on his console.

"A mystery," he said.

"Oh, really? What a surprise," Razorback said, grinning. Xenogears smiled, leaning closer to him.

"I've completed the scans of this region of space," Atlas said. "And I've found something quite odd."

"That is not extremely unexpected," Xenogears said.

"True. The anomaly is a star, with a very interesting spectrum." Altas brought it up on the screen. The other two stared at it, instantly comprehending what Altas found interesting.

By the color of the star, it was a G-eight or thereabouts, golden yellow. The problem was, the spectrum was not a spectrum: it was a short band of gold and orange.

"This spectrum is completely impossible unless there is something between us and the star that perfectly absorbs all radiation above and below this spectral range. As I am sure you know, there isn't any kind of gas or dust that would do so. This is an artificial manifestation."

Razorback studied the spectrum. "To completely occult a star, an object would have to be either huge and far away, or smaller but closer. In the latter situation, the object would quickly move out of our line of sight with the star, unless it had a pretty powerful engine or something on it."

"Correct. I have been monitoring it for several hours. Anything in this system, even a superjovian planet, could only occlude a star for minutes, considering our orbital speed."

"Estimate the most likely scenario," Xenogears said.

"Object of stellar or greater size at one to one hundred lightyears."

"I see..." Xenogears said, though she didn't. No natural object, none! could pass a specific wide band of a star's radiation and no other. Xenogears could do it herself with combinations of transparent glass and plastic filters, but to create an object of stellar size...

"I have sent a complete analysis of the data to your server," Altas said.

"I will check it later," Xenogears said.

"I believe it to be of primary importance to determine the cause of this at once--"

"Later," she repeated, and put her arm around Razorback as they turned and left.

"Humans," Altas muttered, and returned to his work.

-----

"Let's get up to the colony," Icey said, and Jehrico shrugged. "It is obvious Maria is not here anyway."

"Yeah. This was a waste of time," Tycho agreed, and stood.

"Lot of fun though, eh Ice?"

Icey grinned. "Yep. Let's go."

"Wait, what about Del? We can't leave her down here."

"Yeah. Wait a minute... how did she get down here if the lift is down here?"

Jehrico stared at him.

"Delithita?" Icey called. No answer. He turned, then, and faced the south, then began to walk. "Del, we gotta get back, you coming?"

Del came out of the woods, shook her head. "No, that's okay. I'll get back up."

"How?"

"Same way I got down."

"Which is?"

Del grinned, and vanished into the ground. Icey stared at the faintly glowing patch of dirt she had been standing on. "Del?" She reappeared, growing out of the ground like a tree.

"I have no problem with transport," she said. "Go away; I have work to do."

"Oh really," Icey said, miffed.

"Aw, don't take it like that Ice," Del said contritely. Del? Apologetic? Icey wondered if he had slipped into some weird parallel universe.

Icey sighed, but didn't comment. "Alright, then. See you... whenever." He turned to go.

"Ice?"

Icey looked over his shoulder. "Yeah?"

"Keep your energy up," she said with a faint smile, then disappeared into the earth.

-----

"Okay what the hell was that?" Jehrico demanded as the three of them dropped onto the barstools in the Deep End. It seemed to be a recurring theme lately.

"Hell if I know," Tycho said. "I don't know if I even want to."

"So, I guess the rumors of the ghost colony on Mercury were true," Jehrico muttered. "How many people here?"

"About... five thousand now, with the TDF." Tycho grimaced, as the bartender held a bottle of swill up to the light with a questioning look. Tycho nodded sullenly. "We'll take the bottle," he muttered.

"Yeah, we need it," Icey said. "What's the proof today?"

"One eighty, give or take," the bartender said gruffly. "Didn't have much for flavoring today so it'll taste like isopropyl."

"Good enough," Icey said, pouring himself three fingers' worth and tossing it back in a gulp. He made a face, examined the empty glass for a moment, then poured himself some more and filled his companions' glasses.

"Heh..." Jehrico said. "This reminds me of the drinking contests my brother and I got into awhile back."

"Yeah?" Tycho said.

"Yeah, Denelian. He used to live on Mercury. Glitches probably got him."

"Probably..." Icey said. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah. Funny thing is, I came to Mercury hoping to find him. But when I saw the numbers that survived in Fantasma against Mercury's population..." He shook his head, grimaced, took a swallow of his drink.

"Half a million," Tycho agreed. "And the Cybrids kidnapped about four thousand that we know of. We managed to save half of them."

"I don't suppose the name Denelian Rider is in your rosters," Jehrico muttered. Tycho touched his pocket computer, but Jehrico shook his head. "No, don't. I don't want to know."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. I'm sure."

"Jehrico isn't your real name is it?" Icey said suddenly.

He hesitated, then: "No. It's Zeanian."

"Right. I need to know who my friends are." Icey clapped him on the shoulder, stood, and left. Jehrico watched him go, then turned back to the bar. "Tycho, what the hell is going on around here?"

Tycho shook his head, shrugged helplessly, took another swig of his noxious beverage. "I don't know. I don't really want to either."

"Yeah," Jehrico agreed, then pushed the bottle away from himself. "This place is just too strange," he said softly. "I don't know what is going on, or what is happening to everyone, or what is going to happen. You know we're cut off from the rest of the solar system? We'll never see Earth or Mars again?"

Tycho nodded slowly. "True enough... most of us, though, have all we need right here."

"Good thing," Jehrico said. "For the rest of you."

He slammed his glass on the bar, stood, and left.

-----

"Altas to Ghosts. Battle stations. Cybrid force crossing the plain two kilometers distant, possible intercept. All Ghosts to vehicle bays."

After several minutes, when no relief showed up, he shrugged. His place was in Ops, anyway. No call came in asking about the force, either, and as that realization came to him, he struck his communicator again. "Altas to all Ghosts. Respond."

Only one response came back, and it wasn't the one he was expecting at all. "Hello, my Cybrid friend," came a soft contralto voice. "Let them rest. I'll handle this."

"Maria..." Altas said cautiously. "What did you have in mind?"

"Oh, just a small diversion. I'm kind of weak right now so I won't be able to do anything too drastic."

His sensor screen lit up. "What a nice, small diversion," Altas said as he examined the massive fireball expanding on his screen. The Cybrid nexus in Petrarch erupted into flame which winked out quickly in the vacuum of space. The Cybrid force he was tracking changed course to intersect the nexus. "I would hate to see what you would consider a large diversion."

"You're right," came the reply. "You would. I hope it helps."

"Maria?"

The response was weak, tired. "Yes...?"

"What were those papers Razorback discovered?"

Maria didn't answer, and the channel closed. He glanced at the screen, and saw it was full of code. It was the same kind of code that the Fantasma system used, but the chunks were arranged strangely within the chains.

He recognized one code: a deciphering algorithm. He activated it, loaded up the data from the papers, and ran them through.

Gibberish turned into semi-organized gibberish with a few coherent sentences among the masses of garbage. Altas read what he could decipher, and raised one eyebrow slowly.

It spoke of a mission to the outer solar system Maria had taken when she was part of the Imperial Navy.

He typed a few commands as he read a pattern among the rest of the data, and more coherent sentences showed themselves. He browsed the text, until he came to a page that made him stop short and reread.

We landed, and the Cybrids did not see us. We picked up the dropship's crew, and still the Cybrids did not see us.

We even took off without being seen.

I had not been able to get away, to do what I needed to do, so I took a shuttle and disappeared. By the time they discovered I was gone, they had cleared Neptune's bow shock and I was already on Triton.

I landed at the south pole, beneath a jet of dirty liquid nitrogen, and slipped into the stream. My coldsuit whined as it fought to absorb all the heat it could from the outside. I was swimming in a pool of liquid nitrogen, and only the faintest sunlight trickled through the glassy surface above me.

I swam, or more accurately, sank, down, down a dozen kilometers to the solid surface beneath the crust. I hit the ice that was like rock and fell, striking the solid surface painfully. I knew then that I had made a mistake.

I felt the cold creeping in and knew my suit had reached its limit. It was less than two seventy Kelvin inside my suit, and falling. I looked up, seeing nothing but blackness, feeling the weight of the world above me, and knew I would die here. My immortal brain would mean nothing. I had erred, and I was going to spend eternity locked in the ice of Triton, never to be found.

I felt my body shutting down, and I felt terror. My muscles were frozen, and I could not move. Whoever said death by cold was peaceful and painless never experienced it; pain ripped through every cell of my body.

What call had lured me to my death here? What madness had taken me that I would throw my life away in such a manner?

I touched the latches to my helmet, and I was so far gone I never heard the shrieking alarms. The pain was beyond imagining, and I had to end it. The tears froze in my eyes, sealing them shut, even before I pulled the helmet off and threw it away. I heard the splash of liquid pouring in.

When I had last died, in battle over Venus thirty years previously, I had fallen unconscious. Whenever a person dies, their awareness shuts out first. Mine didn't. I felt it, my consciousness slipping away, terrible visions invading my mind, but from the inside. Terror like I had never known filled me.

"No!" I screamed, pouring every bit of my being into extending my life for just another moment, just to keep my death at bay for that long.

Something happened. I'm not sure what. Perhaps the cold had invaded my brain and my consciousness reached superconductivity. All I know is that an hour later, I awakened on the surface, liquid nitrogen still clinging to my body-- that was no longer covered by my suit-- out on the ice somehow breathing oxygen that came from nowhere, recieving heat from nowhere, seeing with bright light that came from nowhere, at least not from the feeble sun.

I stood, and touched my face. My skin was warm. My vision was normal. I couldn't hear anything; there was no air to transmit sound. I just stood there, for about an hour, trying to puzzle it out.

Eventually I decided that I was somehow maintaining a bubble around myself, through the power of my own mind. As I contemplated it, sitting naked on a patch of frozen ammonia that should have turned my skin into solid ice in half a second, I pondered the possibilities of this power. What was I capable of? What could I do with these capabilities? What did the future hold for me?

As I thought of the future, I knew that it would be somewhere brighter and warmer, and I turned my eyes to the distant sun. Images filled my mind, glimpses of the future, faces, sensations, new worlds. I became confused. I could not tell what was my history and what was my future. The death of Mercury at the hands of the Cybrids, and weeping for my husband and child, was that a month ago? thirty years hence? a century ago? And the sky over an alien world, bright with nebulae and brilliant stars, when had I seen it before? Or was it something I would not see for decades?

Confusion, chaos, madness. In any case, I could not stay staring at Neptune in my birthday suit for much longer. Surely there was a limit to my power, and surely my fragile protection would soon collapse.

I looked for the shuttle but it was gone. I don't know if I even returned to the surface near it or if it had fallen through thin ice.

So I returned to the ship under my own power, materializing in my rather untidy state right on the bridge.

I could not explain myself, could not let a hint of my power reach the wrong hands. The consequences would be too dire. I wasn't even sure my own hands were the right ones, in fact, I doubted it. And I was right, too, considering what the first use of my power was.

I killed the bridge crew. I simply willed them away and they were gone. I forged some reports saying they were lost in battle with the Cybrids, but we never even encountered them. I told myself that their report would interest the Emperor, the last man I would trust with such abilities, but I was really just afraid for my own sake.

When I returned to Earth, I arranged my death in a duel. The Brotherhood had me revived, and I hoped that my new body would not carry the abilities I had aquired.

Unfortunately, the changes were stored within my brain itself. I spent months trying to find a way to undo them, but could find nothing. I feared what could happen if I made a mistake, if I got angry at someone and my powers spiked at the wrong time. I feared I might blow the Earth itself out of space, or the solar system itself. Zero-space has practically infinite energy, and anything was possible.

I would have destroyed myself utterly, flew myself into the sun or something, but the vision of the future sustained me. People would need me, and I would help thousands build a new world. Perhaps my visions were wrong, and they were just a trick of my subconscious survival instinct fighting my conscious mind. Perhaps I would really destroy a world. Perhaps I would kill a million innocents with a sweep of my hand. I did everything I could to reject my power, to dull it, to banish it from my being. For a time it worked, and for many years I was never able to consciously make use of it.

Indecision and fear filled my days. Eventually I got to Mercury, following my vision, desperately hoping it was the right one and not just wishful thinking. When the Cybrids struck, I almost, almost let myself go, almost reduced Mercury to a cinder (or more of one than it already is). But I held back, which is good, because I now know a release like that would have dissociated myself as well.

Finally I met Del, and seeing her face for the first time, I knew that my vision was a true one, at least parts of it. I had known her for thirty years, the sound of her angry voice, her vicious fighting skill, her love for the plantlife she was so good with, a mind that would one day build a planet of life from lifelessness. Icey, calm, quiet, always relaxed, hard to sway from his course, a reasonable voice among an organization of brilliant but not always reasonable warriors. The rest of the Ghosts, a group of special minds that would one day realize powers of their own, complex, ripe with promise, the key to a vision I had seen long ago, that I must hold to whatever the cost.

But it would not be easy, and a single mistake could spell doom, not only for the Ghosts, but for the universe itself.

Altas's eyes left the screen, focused on the scan of the colony his hands had brought up of their own accord. Spikes of energy, massively powerful, danced here and there through the tunnels. He could not even begin to estimate the potential energy.

One spike was in Ops, where he was sitting.

He stared at the screen for a long time.

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