Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 71: Flow Chamber, Megascale (Patreon)

“Since when?” Novak asked.

“That’s a secret.”

“Fine,” Novak agreed easily. “I can understand that. “But the only thing that justifies this cooperation is his uncle’s death. It’s the only thing you can give him. And he’ll be very offended if that opportunity passes him by.

“So why didn’t you seize my offer with both hands?” Novak asked.

“You promised to keep quiet for ten years,” Aoran reminded him.

“I remember.”

“And you, Jake.”

“Me too,” I said.

Aoran didn’t drag it out any longer. He evidently understood that this was the one piece of knowledge we wouldn’t leave without. And so far, we had agreed to keep quiet only about Vezhkar being a spy, not about his latest game with his cousin.

“Ghaurzakh can’t simply suck a planet dry,” the xeltar began, in the tone of a lecturer explaining the obvious. “Demons have long and successfully drained entire megacities, so their rituals for that are well honed, but the result of those rituals is crystallised qi, which they then use for cultivation.

“There are conversion losses both at the crystallisation stage and at the absorption stage. Besides, crystallised qi itself is rather unstable and dissipates far faster than natural crystals. Even insulation doesn’t help much.

“This time, the demons are trying to build something like your Flow Chamber on a planetary scale, with a flexibly adjustable flow. Lower conversion losses, and the ability to switch the flow off and reconfigure it.”

“I kept wondering how they meant to pull it off,” Novak said. “Obviously, they’d need a vast network of physical cornerstones on the ground, which we’d destroy at every opportunity.”

Aoran nodded.

“Vezhkar passed us the blueprints. They’ll need only eight powerful orbital stations. Their fleet can easily defend that many sites. Provided, of course, they first get rid of yours, along with all the orbital defence platforms. In fact, under those circumstances, orbital debris could do more damage than the people on the planet below.”

“You have the blueprints!” Novak said, offended. “And you didn’t share them?”

“No!” Aoran answered sharply. “We examined them and found several critical vulnerabilities.”

“So Ghaurzakh really will burn up?” Novak asked, recalling Aoran’s earlier words.

“He will,” Aoran said carefully. “If he’s helped along.”

“And Vezhkar is the one who’s supposed to help him!” Novak nodded and fell into thought.

“He knows what changes need to be made to the design, and he’s the only one who can make them. Now do you understand how important it is that Vezhkar survives?” Aoran asked.

For a while, Novak drank his tea. Aoran stayed silent, waiting for an answer or for new questions.

I looked at Aoran and thought it was elegant in its own way. Not one of the Federates lands a hit, no Federation ship crosses the wormhole, no war breaks out between the clans and the Federation. Ghaurzakh kills himself with his own hands and his own greed.

No Stage Nine, no new great threat. Except that Earth stays under the demons’ heel, and the clan’s new leader knows exactly what not to do to suck it dry.

“How many people will die in the process?” Novak asked, looking Aoran in the eye. “How many lives does it take to burn an Eight?”

Aoran picked up his cup again, as though it could protect him from something.

“Not all of them!” he said. “I can’t answer that question more precisely. It will certainly be the weakest. Insects, small animals…”

“The sick,” Novak continued for him, raising his voice with every word. “The wounded, the old, children!”

Aoran finally looked away.

“Damn it!” Novak went on. “It’ll probably kill all the bacteria and fuck up the entire biosphere. Even if part of the population survives the ritual, it’ll doom the planet. There’s a good chance it can’t be saved and will die anyway. Then again, nobody knows which will come first. Ghaurzakh’s death won’t destroy the stations, will it?”

“One, perhaps…” Aoran said.

“So the demons can replace it and finish the ritual under a new head, who’ll certainly understand how the ritual is supposed to work so it doesn’t fry his arse.”

“We have an agreement that he won’t do that, or we’ll intervene,” Aoran said.

Novak smiled bitterly.

“And of course he’ll keep it, because he’s a man of his word!

“How long does your fleet need to reach Earth without the portal rings, and how long will the ritual itself take?

“He’ll be home before you’ve even delivered a note of protest!”

Now I understood why the offer to run had seemed so dirty. They were offering me a seat in a lifeboat because they knew the ship was going to sink. My benefactors had drilled the holes in the hull with their own hands.

And the worst of it was that I couldn’t judge them with a clear conscience.

A few hours ago, I’d been sitting in the kitchen over half-eaten eggs, regretting that we’d used the captured portal only once. I’d wanted more, even at the cost of millions of lives. I’d been ashamed; I’d nearly thrown up, but I’d wanted it!

How was I any different from them?

Because I was ashamed?

Aoran was avoiding our eyes. He was ashamed too, but that didn’t stop him from doing his job.

The only difference was that those millions were closer to me than the billions Aoran was prepared to sacrifice.

“Two fucking doses of a drug are far too little for the life of an entire planet,” Novak said. “You’ll give us more! Much more, or your Vezhkar won’t live.”

“Keep it within reason,” Aoran said sourly. “What do you want?”

“I want you to lend me enough firepower to kill Ghaurzakh. Nobody will see who fired through the portal anyway.”

“But the portal’s limitation still applies!”

“Get round it! Modify it so it holds!”

“That would take a research centre, a team of scientists and at least several months of productive work on stimulants,” Aoran snorted. “And you’ve tangled everything up so badly that I barely have time to get you the stimulant.”

“Good,” Novak smiled. “That means you have no time to invent new excuses,” he said, and added a question. “If Jake can stabilise the portal from his side, does the same hold for the other side?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “If you put an experienced Space user by the entry portal, he’ll be able to stabilise it!”

“Well, look at that, no need for a research centre and a team of scientists after all!” Novak said. “Find me someone to stabilise the portal and someone to fire through it!” Novak delivered his ultimatum. “Only then will Vezhkar be safe.

“And if Ghaurzakh dies before the stations are built, Vezhkar gets the clan and a pile of problems, but not Earth. Under your own agreement, he’ll be forced to withdraw. And he’ll be far less tempted to disregard it.”

Aoran laid his hand on the table, and his long fingers drummed out a short tune.

“Very well,” he said. “You’ll have your firepower. But on my terms.”

Novak tilted his head, inviting him to continue.

“First. You won’t know who’s firing. Not you, not your general, not any of your people. Build your cannon yourselves and hand us the finished product. We’ll fire from here. Perhaps from this very room.”

“Agreed,” Novak said quickly, but corrected him. “Two units!” And he wiggled his finger a few times between himself and me.

“Two units,” Aoran agreed. “Two shots.”

“Which we’ll test beforehand,” Novak added, squeezing more and more out of Aoran.

“If we have time. I don’t know when I’ll be able to assemble a team.”

“You’ve got enough staff here,” Novak said.

“They’re staff of a different kind and calibre. If it comes to that, I don’t want to do this to tick a box, Vaclav. And I don’t want your sacrifice to be in vain!” he said, far too emotionally.

One could have joked about how touching his concern was, but Novak stood up and bowed seriously.

“For that, I’m grateful.”

Aoran waved him off like a fly that had thoroughly got on his nerves.

“Go!” he ordered. “I’ve got a heap of calls to make.”

The door closed silently behind us, and the white background finally stopped pressing on my eyes. I hadn’t noticed that pressure while I was in there, but after that room, the grey corridor of the space base with its coloured signs seemed almost cosy.

Novak walked quickly; he was in a hurry to get back to Beta-Beta-Pi and hand out orders. The smile and the look of concentration never left his face, but my enthusiasm had faded somewhat.

I really didn’t want to die!

I really did want to kill an Eight!

If only I didn’t miss, or, worse still, fail to hold the portal…

Brrr!

I spent the whole way back to Beta-Beta-Pi lost in those thoughts.

Novak was summoned to headquarters at once.

I hadn’t even known there was any headquarters here. The room turned out to be even smaller than the meeting room at the destroyed mountain base. But the table with the projector was the same, minus the chairs. Everyone stood, watching a hologram of Earth with two red dots glowing. I didn’t know who was in charge here, but Kaluya radiated the most authority.

“Two dots,” he said instead of a greeting. “Eleven minutes ago, demons appeared in a pizzeria in Northern Europe, and six minutes ago in a cafe on the southern coast of Australia.”

“Orbital strikes?” Novak asked.

Kaluya shook his head.

“On Europe, yes. All in all, they worked record-fast. For the attacks, they chose third-rate towns as far as possible from the megacities our ships are hanging over, and the perpetrators were possessed. HQ is now working out a new coverage scheme and identifying the possessed. As if that’ll do us any good.”

“Sir!” one of the analysts at a console by the wall called, distracting Kaluya. “Something strange is happening on Ontel.”

“Show me!” Kaluya ordered, and the hologram of Earth gave way to Ontel.

So far, there was only a red marker and no precise data.

“Two objects. Rising from the surface,” the analyst reported, before the holographic sphere zoomed in and a telemetry window opened beside it. We could see the picture from the nearest defence platform: a grey, crater-pocked slope, thin shadows on the regolith. And two dark shapes slowly lifting off the surface, raising dust that didn’t billow in the vacuum but flew out in even fans and fell back.

“What the hell is that?” Kaluya asked.

“Ships,” another voice answered uncertainly. “Two large ships. Massive… Unknown class.”

The ‘unknown class’ was quickly surrounded by a cloud that was far easier to identify: drones. Hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny dots that immediately began fanning out, like a flock of birds startled by gunfire.

“I thought Ontel was untouched,” I said.

“So did everyone,” Kaluya answered. “But these shits somehow managed to build a ship under the surface there! Two ships!”

The ‘ships’ rose higher, the Sun lit them up, and I saw no hull at the centre of either.

There was only emptiness.

“They’re not ships,” I said. “They’re portal rings!”

“Rings!” Kaluya barked, almost at the same moment as me. “They’re bloody portals for ships! Destroy them!”

“They’re out of the platform’s range,” someone answered.

The operators on the other end had already realised the danger. The platform began to move, shifting its position in the moon’s orbit. The drones moved too, swarming to intercept.

The swarm split into several arms and stretched towards other platforms I couldn’t see. I did, however, see the yellow death rays. They lit up the other platforms for me, but the kamikaze drones weakened the rays enough that the portal wasn’t damaged.

It was still low. Gigantic engines were hauling it away from Ontel’s gravity, but that gravity didn’t stop the ring from activating. A black membrane filled it, and the nose of an almost-black enemy ship immediately began to emerge.