"You think I'm worried about a little danger?" she barked. She was entirely expecting danger. Only it would be the Starbleeders and the Engineers who would suffer the losses.
"You haven't changed a bit. I want you to understand that this is my operation. Dismiss whatever desires you have of claiming credit for yourself."
"Since when do I have to think the way you want me to?"
"Think however you like. But our combat scripts and protocols are well aware that you may try something and have prepared accordingly. You could find yourself on the receiving end of a molecular splitter. That said, help us achieve our mission and there's a place in the Starbleeders network for you."
"Understood." She doubted there was any reward in this for her. Because she assumed the Engineers would destroy them. Even if the Starbleeders won out, she couldn't see Voke-lanaris helping a former enemy.
Likely the only reason he hadn't terminated her yet was because she would be their key to harnessing the black goo if it became necessary. He'd at least had the good grace not to make her link to a breaker. Not that she would have.
"Good. Then I'd like to inform you that we've lost control of an asset. The offspring of Raksamat."
Kai threw back her head and laughed. "The Engineers must've helped it escape. Do you have any idea where it is now?"
Voke-lanaris shook his helmeted head. "I've only just been told, and the data is limited."
They attended to several other details for the next few minutes.
"That covers everything then," Jace.blek said. "Thank you again for agreeing to sponsor this operation."
Given his past, she figured Jace.blek might have more grievances to blame on the Starbleeders. But he'd managed his emotions quite well. Maybe he'd rationalized the Starbleeders' abusive training methods by twisting Phoenix into the scapegoat. Or perhaps he planned to betray them much further into the future.
Approximately six minutes later, they boarded an omega-class ship and synced with the other Starbleeder troops via a psi.link. One hundred twenty-eight Starbleeder Engineer-soldiers served as their gift for Phoenix and his Engineers.
Kai got a good look at them in the ship's ready room.
A heavy, yet sleek, angular dark gray and black armor ornamented their mostly humanoid forms, their helmets variations of lifeless, intimidating designs.
Aboard the vessel, they all activated their godwebs. Then that ship joined the others that had gathered in the hollowed cavity deep under Burkos. Together, the eight bulky cigar-shaped vessels cruised through the silver maelstrom that contained the Engineers' institute. Once inside, the ship jettisoned Kai, Jace.blek, Voke-lanaris and the other Starbleeders out over the jungle of Phoenix's institute.
Their formation of death rallied through the night air to the monolith's butte.
The ones that didn't fit atop it hovered around.
Further overhead, a violent, orange-brown nebula churned among the stars. On her HUD, the ships' sensors classified the nebula as a cosmic storm but offered little other data.
The eight omega-class ships surrounded it, their godwebs protecting Voke-lanaris, every one of the Starbleeder Engineer-soldiers, Jace.blek, and even Kai in their aura.
<No sign of Phoenix or the other Engineers.>
<As we expected,> Jace.blek thought.
<Deploying psionic disruptors.> The disruptors were configured so they wouldn't affect their psi.links, but would limit Phoenix's powers. Theoretically.
<Destroying target black-four.>
Patches of the monolith behind him began graying as if by a fungus spreading at light-speed. Then the protrusions on it and pieces of its surface began flaking off. Through the psi.link, Kai became aware that this was the work of a tiny Kugelblitz bomb as well as Jace.blek's smart dust.
The Kugelblitz bomb chewed away the black goo coating the false karma pylon shard on a microscopic level. For fleeting seconds the crystal itself glowed white before vanishing into nothingness.
"Tactically speaking it was incredibly foolish to preserve their life force in a single point," Voke-lanaris said. "But I guess that was the tradeoff for resurrecting your lost Engineers."
After the message from Raksamat, Jace.blek had deduced that his students here weren't novice Engineers, they were the dead grand masters of the Engineers' long history. Now they were gone once more to history.
"Everything you worked for is being destroyed and you won't even try to prevent it?" Voke-lanaris taunted.
"I'm sorry. I was seeing off Raksamat. He's been reunited with his family, and I couldn't help but get a little teary-eyed," came Phoenix's voice.
<Detected audio of target primary-one. No visual.>
<No shit,> Kai thought, earning a collective laugh from the psi.link unit.
"The Starbleeders network isn't kind to traitors. We'll find him after we finish with you," Voke-lanaris said calmly. "I hope you don't think you're being slick, altering yourself out of the visual spectrum. That's child's play. Right, Jace.blek?"
Like that, the Buejentoe vanished for a second then reappeared. "You see, Phoenix, I am still very much capable as an Engineer despite your best efforts. I deserved to be on the front lines. I could handle it."
Materializing where the monolith had stood, Phoenix assumed a severe-looking pose in his polished black and dark gray greatcoat, heavy-looking boots, leg armor.
<Visual target acquired. No godweb detected.>
A look of intense focus had replaced Phoenix's normally dull complacent expression. His eyes glimmered curiously. "You're incredibly smart, Jace. But even a Buejentoe can fail to be objective. You have your ambitions. It was my job as your teacher to protect you from those. To be objective when you couldn't."
<Proceeding to contain in gravity field.>
<Attempt to contain in gravity field failed. Attempting second cycle.>
Whatever resentment Jace.blek must've felt, he contained it well, his words calm and collected, according to Kai's translator. "If I could laugh, I would. Maybe I wasn't being objective about the risk. But it was my decision. You couldn't accept it. Because you weren't objective either."
<Second cycle failed. Proceeding to contain in smart dust swarm.>
Swirling clouds of silver sand formed into constricting dark sheets around the Engineer. But as the sheets closed around him, they disintegrated.
<Attempt to contain in smart dust swarm failed. Attempting second cycle.>
Phoenix nodded as the second cycle of their swarm vanished. "I'm sorry for restricting you. The truth is that you were justified in your rebellion. But that doesn't make you justified in this."
<Proceeding to contain in environmental restraints.>
"It's a little late for apologizing," Jace.blek said. "It also feels self-serving given that we've got you at our mercy."
Stats at the edge of Kai's HUD detailed the drop in temperature, the reduction in oxygen, the rise in ultraviolet radiation and atmospheric pressure around Phoenix. It was all thanks to smart dust affecting the space around him. Yet he didn't look any worse for the wear.
"Mercy? Who said anything about that?" His reality-warping allowed his voice to carry like normal.
"Without the monolith, you can't warp reality as effectively as before," Jace.blek said.
"Not necessarily," Phoenix said.
<Time is karma, as they say. No more restraints. End him.> There was more than a hint of unease in Voke-lanaris's order.
"You know I could see you guys coming a trillion miles away," Phoenix said, snapping his fingers. Yet he'd allowed them to come this far. Kai decided not to think about the implications of that.
<ERROR: Godwebs suspended involuntarily. Unable to
reboot.>
<ERROR: Nexus-based psionic capabilities suspended. Unable to reboot.>
<ERROR: Psionic link error. Closing link now. Unable to reboot.>
<ERROR: Electromagnetic communication fallback failure. Unable to reboot.>
She gritted her teeth as the hovering soldiers fell to the butte's surface. Anger overtook her, but her mods kicked in. After a couple seconds, they tamed her anger, letting her analyze the situation.
Analyzing it didn't help much.
Most of their weapons would produce collateral damage. Presently, the assault unit possessed only one reliable combat position. The butte. And without nexus messaging they weren't going to be able to request any support or relay their combat scripts. And the ships seemed incapable of warping out.
"I've disabled the psionic disruptors," Jace.blek reported. They obviously hadn't worked on Phoenix.
"That doesn't do us much good," Kai grumbled.
"Not us. You." The mushroom boy reached out and pressed a metal orb into her hand. Upon touching her skin, it bled into smart dust that her frame absorbed.
At that, a data node showed up in her feed. Puzzled, she parsed it.
A second later, a wave of single-minded determination rose in her. Because according to the node, Jace.blek had developed a contingency plan in the event of Phoenix restricting their psionic powers.
Minutes earlier, as his smart dust had eaten away at the monolith's black goo coating, it stored the pieces inside collections of nanites. Within those, he exposed the bits to a specific type of irradiated nanite he'd been developing for the last few solar cycles in his nest. The effect was a pseudo-resurrection.
Just now, he'd fed her the freshly revived black goo remains and the data node through the smart dust ball, temporarily reinfecting her. The black goo would detect the alterations to her core left by the previous iteration of itself and fill that void, serving as her tool again. Albeit a much weaker tool than before.
The reanimated black goo within her would only be a dying ember. A means to an end. She could utilize its unique psionic energy to connect to the infectious black goo agent Phoenix had siphoned out of her earlier and reignite the blaze.
"Formation Delta-F718," Voke-lanaris shouted. In lieu of combat scripts the Starbleeders would have to rely on old combat formations.
Kai glided to the edge of the butte, not keen on getting between the Starbleeders and Phoenix. This was no longer her battle as she lacked the capabilities of the Engineer-soldiers. But thanks to Jace.blek's gift, her nexus could detect the psionic waves around her.
Two signals popped up on her HUD. One coming from Phoenix. And another from an unidentified entity, the wavelengths switching from short to long every few seconds. She couldn't get an exact location of the origin, but it had to exist here somewhere. Then her nexus lost it, and she muttered a curse.
Above, the flotilla of ships roared with the deployment of non-godweb weaponry. Highly accurate metal projectiles that would cut through flesh and soft tissue with ease, while limiting collateral damage. With no godweb himself, Phoenix might be susceptible to them.
Instead, hundreds of thin four-foot shafts plunged into the butte, forming a tight circle around him. At an almost imperceptible twitch of his hand, the shafts dissolved into nothingness.
Then the sky lit up with the red flashes of the ships' ion cannons. Yet the beams never hit him. They froze halfway to him, dozens of red streaks shuddering in place before they began to slowly reverse direction. But instead of returning to the ships, the beams sailed into the swirling nebula.
One by one, the sleek dark surfaces of the omega ships blurred and bent as if they were melting. The entire scene was both beautiful and horrifying. Like bleeding images of the vessels in a watercolor painting.
"He's unraveling them out of existence," Jace.blek said quietly.
As she drifted along the butte's cliff, Kai listened closely for any updates from the Starbleeder Engineer-soldiers. The lack of messaging, psionic or otherwise, raised a number of question marks about their combat plan.
Suddenly, her nexus picked up a huge spike in psionic activity from the Engineer-soldiers.
Apparently, they’d possessed some sort of backup psionic stimulators. They weren’t as stupid as she’d thought. What exactly that meant for their combat capabilities she could not say.
Her front-row seat to their light show alleviated her considerable knowledge gap on the subject.
Every second, a white ball enclosed Phoenix. They were hitting him with successive blasts of some terrible force. Each contained in a spherical field around him.
Since Phoenix had disabled their godwebs, the Starbleeders had to be creating them with their minds. Willing the explosions into existence and preventing them from spreading beyond the last Engineer’s position.
Yet between each blast, she glimpsed him standing there, untouched. Suddenly, a stream of roiling white energy shot upward, consumed by the nebula.
"You already know what I told Kai," Phoenix said. You'll never be able to kill me.
"How are you doing this?" Jace.blek asked. Seconds later, he seemed to catch on. "It's the black goo you extracted from her. Somehow you've sealed it and harnessed it inside your makeshift nebula. Created a Dyson sphere capable of absorbing its power and compressed it all into the space above us."
With this new theory, Kai focused the psionic waves from the black goo fragment in her on the nebula. She needed to pick up the original infection's signal again.
Celestial bodies and cosmic vortexes of every color and size swirled overhead chaotically in a maddening blitz. The nebula expanded like a giant sphere, dominating the sky. Distant planets, moons, stars—they seemed to stretch out for miles as the interstellar gas cloud spilled over the butte.
After a few seconds, the distances returned to normal and most of the celestial bodies zoomed off, too far away to see. It was only Kai, Phoenix, Jace.blek and the Starbleeders on the butte. In the middle of an abyss rich with a canopy of stars and tides of orange-brownish gases.
It was faint, but she had the black goo's signal again.
A few seconds later, Kai pinpointed the location of the signal's origin. The black goo lurked thousands of miles away in a Dyson sphere as Jace.blek suggested. She aimed her nexus's psionic waves at the coordinates.
"Your Engineer-soldiers are quite talented," Phoenix said. Every second, mini plasma bursts and solar flare-like emissions lashed out from his body and distortions ravaged the space around him. Whether that was from him or the Starbleeders she couldn't say. "Trying to move us into the nebula to free the black goo from the Dyson sphere. Unfortunately, they're limited. Their training methods and experiments are based on finite changes to reality that enhance your combat capabilities. Increasing a godweb's magnitude, refilling fuel cells, mind-control. But real science isn't just crunching numbers and running tests. It's adventure, it's curiosity, it's ingenuity. It's risking your ego against the absolute truth."
"You're referring to abstract changes to reality? Altering the very definition of how we understand it," Jace.blek said.
There was a hint of pride in Phoenix's gaze. He winked. "Sapient life was supposed to be better. And we Engineers were supposed to bring about the best. But when I failed you and the other students, I knew I wasn't who I needed to be. From here, I sought out answers from every dark corner of the universe. And I learned my purpose." Phoenix studied the soldiers surrounding him, looking as calm as ever. He chuckled. "You all operate with backup frames. I could've told you that only restricts your ability to connect to the Akashic Record."
"Stand down," Voke-lanaris said, raising a hand.
Just then, her nexus pinged at a massive outpouring of energy from the direction of the Dyson sphere. She took that as a sign she was close to reestablishing a connection to the black goo Phoenix had stolen from her.
Voke-lanaris adopted a cordial intonation. "Phoenix, I recognize that we can't kill you. But from what I understand, y
ou seek to combat the black goo. Perhaps we can be a part of that. You could reclaim your institutes and—"
Without warning, the frames of the Starbleeders Engineer-soldiers and their proto dropped dead.
Kai fell to her knees in utter disbelief, trying to wrap her mind around this. He'd killed them all. Their minds weren't lost, of course. They'd either eventually reboot in backup frames light-years away or their additional living frames would carry on. And because Phoenix had restricted their communication capabilities, their backups likely hadn’t synced, and they'd have no memory of their deaths here.
An internalized storm of disbelief raged in her. How could an Engineer be this powerful? She'd only ever heard stories about the Great Ones and their omnipotence. Phoenix's powers verged on something like that. Even Voke-lanaris had accepted the futility of this operation.
Yet a fog clouded her mind as the frequency of the extracted black goo's signal skyrocketed. The butte assumed a dream-like quality. She was on the verge of losing herself in the mental haze, but then a renewed hope eclipsed it.
With a rush of excitement, she felt confident that the black goo could escape the Dyson sphere and willed it to manifest back in her.
For the moment, Phoenix was fixated on his former student. A shadow passed over his face. "You came this close to completely eliminating the Engineers." He made a pinching gesture and shrugged. "I doubt I can revive the others a second time again."
"You brought the lie on yourself," Jace.blek snarled.
Something shook loose in her. Foreign emotions she couldn't quite grasp pervaded her mind. Intoxicatingly, she felt the black goo from the Dyson sphere bond with the embers Jace.blek gave her, threading itself through her, expanding her consciousness. The psionic signals of the old and the new united, and the fire in her was reborn.
"Objectively speaking, maybe I did," Phoenix said. "But the more important issue is are you satisfied? Did you get the revenge you wanted?"
"A very reasonable question. Yes, I sense we have carried this encounter to its logical end. Harming you further would seem unnecessary."