Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

me you remembered how it was, before the
Qax. But Symat said all the old pharaohs died during the Occupation.
That nobody remembers.’
    Cana’s face was expressionless. ’If Suvan said that, it must be
true.’
    Luru hesitated. Then she closed her hand around the tablet and put
it in a pocket of her tunic, her decision still unmade.
     
    When she returned to Mell Born she found it immersed in shadow,
for a Spline ship loomed above the ruins. The Spline rolled
ponderously, weapon emplacements glinting. There was a sense of huge
energies gathering.
    Her flitter skimmed beneath the Spline’s belly, seeking a place to
land.
    The crude shanty town was being broken up. She could see a line of
Directorate staff - no, of jasofts - moving through the ramshackle
dwellings, driving a line of people before them, men, women and
children. Beetle-like transports followed the line of the displaced,
bearing a few hastily grabbed belongings. The jasofts were dressed in
skinsuits, their faces hidden behind translucent masks; the raw
surface of Earth was not a place where inhabitants of the great
Conurbations walked unprotected.
    A small group lingered near the electric blue walls of the Qax
facility, robes flapping, their stubborn defiance apparent in their
stance. One of them was Symat, of course. She ran to him.
    ’I didn’t think you would return.’ He waved at the toiling,
fleeing people. ’Are you proud of what is being done to us?’
    She said, ’You are manufacturing superheavy elements, here in this
facility. What is the real reason? Have you lied to me, Symat?’
    ’Only a little,’ he said gently. ’We do understand something of
the creatures of the rocky forest that has flourished beneath our
feet.’
    ’Yes?’
    ’We know what they eat. We have tried to provide them with food,
to get their attention - ’
    Without warning a thread of ruby-red light snaked down from the
hide of the Spline. Where the starbreaker touched, buildings
disintegrated, panels and beams flying high into the air. From the
heart of the old Qax facility came a scream of tortured air, a soft
concussion, a powerful, blood-red glow. The ground shuddered beneath
their feet.
    ’It has begun.’ She grabbed Symat and tried to pull him towards
her flitter. ’Symat, please. You were my cadre sibling; I don’t want
to see you die. This isn’t worth a life.’
    A blankness came into his eyes, and he pulled away from her. ’Ah.
Not your life, a pharaoh’s life, perhaps.’
    ’I am not yet a pharaoh - ’
    He wasn’t listening. ’You see what a dreadful, clever gift this
is? A long life makes you malleable. But my pitiful life - a few
decades at best - what is the use of such a life save to make a
single, defiant gesture?’ He stepped away from her deliberately. He
closed his eyes, and raised his arms into the air, robe flapping. ’As
for you - you must make your choice, Luru Parz.’
    And from beneath Symat’s feet a bolt of dazzling light punched
upwards, scattering debris and rock, and lancing into the heart of
the Spline. There was a stink of meat, of corruption.
    A shock wave billowed over her, peppering her with hot dust. Luru
fell back in the rubble, stunned. Symat was gone, gone in an
instant.
    And the roof of flesh above her seemed to tip. The Spline sank
with heavy gentleness towards the ground.
    And she was going to be crushed beneath its monstrous belly. She
turned and ran to her ship.
    The flitter, saving itself, squirted towards the narrowing gap of
daylight beneath that descending lid of flesh. Luru, bloody, bruised,
filthy, cowered in her seat as immense pocks and warts fled above her
head. A dark, steaming fluid gushed from the Spline’s tremendous
wound; it splashed over the ground, a lake of blood brought from
another star.
    Suddenly she burst into daylight. From the air she could see how
the raking starbreaker beam had left a gouge in the earth like an
immense fingernail scratching a tabletop. But the gouge was
terminated by the dying Spline, a deflating ball, already
grounded.
    The flitter, in utter silence, tipped back and lifted her up
towards the edge of space.
     
    The sky deepened to violet, and her racing heart slowed.
    She tried to work out what had happened. There must have been a
cache of the strange, ancient supernova creatures, she decided, drawn
there by Symat’s superheavy-element bait. Perhaps the eruption had
been purely a matter of physics, a response to the sudden release of
pressure when the upper