In the shifting waves of gravity, the terrific warped mass of spiked, thick bodied, momentarily amplified being, she began to peel apart like a bloated artichoke shedding its leaves bursting with life, ire, and purpose, an autumn Oak before winter winds. She fell, without spark or fire, against the face of displaced Dianus, yanked tight to her hip like an animal on a leash and as she began to crumble in the farthest reaches of Dianus's atmosphere the black body rose prominent and in line with Gallot's red and gushing belt...
The Fold was allowed its exodus from the system. Their departure was a way forward. Their linkages with the men who came before were severed, demonstrably parted from the continuum of man's history, joined instead with the threads and shapes of the beings before them. They were not beholden to machines. They were not hungry for the stars. The Fold was a species already tethered to the hearts of the celestial bodies themselves. A species that still wore the shapes of men, but knew the science of harmony from another time; knew it in a fashion that made Still man's efforts and methods crude, though not obsolete. Useful and cutting edge and desirable in the way a broken machine, a thing incomplete, requires constant modification and revitalization to continue to exist. The Fold was the closed circle. To Stilled man, their existence was a cancer, but cancerous as a solution to gene deformity threatens its essence of being and meaning. Their exodus to Dianus was allowed by Still men, who far outnumbered them, as an answer both efficient and bloodless; an answer that allowed coexistence and study, cooperation without cohabitation, and left the question of combat with the nearest thing to an absolutely alien race unanswered.
Twenty years. The Odesta stood skeletal in the Reagan Dead Zone ship yards between the Earth and the Moon, the brilliant disk of Sol peeking between its forged ribs like a child anxious to see what stood on the other side of a fence that its bars should be so large. Though not the largest spacefarer constructed at the RDZ, it was the single most formidable structure in the Solar system. The first of its kind, the Odesta was a mobile weapons platform without equal, capable of moving armies and flights of trans-atmospheric ships to land and extract them and able to host wings of automated aerial and vacuum capable defensive, attack, and reconnaissance drones like the war vessels before, it held more stream state cannons, atmospheric disruptors, and stagger gallop conics than every other war time, stand off, mutual assurance vessel every built combined. The arsenal alone had to be commissioned, constructed, refined, woven, and hardened at plants and munitions laboratories across the globe in concert with the vessels construction at the RDZ and the last months of the Odesta's construction were composed of round the clock lift operations to get the cannon barrels, projectors, dishes, silos and feed mechanisms off the continents and to their homes aboard her flesh and bones. Much of her arsenal was too large to be hauled in the space elevator belts, even in their most reduced component parts. Streamers of rocket exhaust dotted the skylines of the Eastern and Western hemispheres like tent poles holding up the great blue, and violent, and smoldering orange twilight tarps of the sky.
The cooperation was masterful. The Odesta carried inside of her broad shouldered, low brow, teeth bared frame, enough firearms and personnel to destroy continents and fragment entire ecosystems. She bore enough bottle lightning in her back pocket to make an end of a region of space, to strike a body and vaporize every molecule of water inside it into a steam that blew apart its skin and bones in a confetti of flash dried jerky and leather, in the way once in an age meteor strikes could only do. She stood, a jagged, needle edged, star in the night skies over every city as she orbited several hours behind the Earth and Moon alignment. The RDZ was a clutch of black carbon weave and claw crooked fingers around her as she grew, but her bones shone in the early morning daylight before the sun swallowed even the crescent of the moon. Sol swallowed the moon and the Odesta like the nagging fear licking at the backs of Stilled man's ears. The fear that someone would turn her on for his own ends. Someone would point her flattened nose, her deeply set burning eyes, and purpose built, carapaced and thorned, arms to his own desires and make a smoldering heap of the pinnacle of what men should become. Even that fear faded in the face of the shining hope of cooperation. In the years behind the exodus, the only fear greater than the Fold was the question of whether or not they would come back. The Odesta promised to be an answer. The answer. The shooting star to which every man, woman, and Still born child could hitch their hopes for a guaranteed future.
For twenty years the Odesta stood as her population waned and then grew and grew to fullness. One man in North America to every ten knew someone involved in the project. Over that span of time one in every hundred people on the face of the Earth contributed through their occupation, directly and indirectly, to it's completion. The total personnel requirement numbered nearly three million with more than three quarters of the complement being war fighters. The Odesta was the 15th largest population center before her departure in the still cool days of February. Though the mission was classified everyone knew the goal was Dianus. Silent Dianus.
With the exodus of nearly every living being to come under the influence of Fold syndrome, to develop the nervous malfunction and divisional brain pattern of the Folded mind, to exhibit and swear by hallucinations and allegiance to that which passed beneath and above and outside of the measurable and the factual and the designed and even the theoretically possible, the exodus of every scrap of genetic divergence, every piece of being that hooked hard away from the fabric of common men like splinters shearing away from a torqued shaft of wood fixed to a bit that ground away generation after generation toward a great nothingness, searching for an even greater definition of what that nothingness was, the rhetoric fell silent, like the slowing waves of a passing lunar tide. The tide, however, was replaced by landing ships of panic. Not the sort of panic that clutches hearts when a storm threatens across weathermen's screens in rainbows of color that dwarf population centers, or the panic that flits from eye to eye in the aftermath of ear drum bleeding concussions of shots fired into a night silent and fireplace comfortable and measured like soft music seconds before. The sort of panic that descended, that made the cooperation possible, was the creepy panic, the sweat palmed, dry mouthed panic of an open, melting candle stick, lantern beside a sleeping horse standing far enough from a barn and dozens of bales of sun dried hay, but never quite far enough to alleviate the itching, the spider legged pinching at the back of a person's neck. The kind of panic that suggests in little whispers that nothing is wrong and at the same time promises in breathy tones that everything is always a simple matter of time. The cessation of communications from Dianus was necessary. They had no use for broadcast and wave type communicators. They interfered directly with their way of life. The Fold had nothing to hide from the Still. It was a matter of course.
One quarter of the Odesta's passengers would not live to see Earth again. Every combat ready man and woman, to a head, was in andronated sleep, carefully monitored and modified and maintained by millions of nanobots in their blood streams and not to be awakened until Dianus was gained. They were tended to and further monitored by the 750,000 technicians and service men on board and along with their 2.25 million souls there was the Odesta herself who needed to be constantly checked all along her length (it took a man more than two days, if he walked without ceasing, to touch her nose and tail and return again) throughout the journey. Even through super tunneling thinned space, Dianus lie thirty years into the bed of stars at maximum drive. The noncombatants would be teaching their children to tend to the marines and airmen, scouts and seabees, by the time the green disc of Dianus filled the Odesta's plasma windows. The engines were lit, kick started with thermonuclear surplus, in the snow bound early days and shortening nights of February and her main engines, nicknamed Lewis and Clarke by her builders, burned brighter than Polaris. Her lines, her slate gray armored hull, spines and towering needles of weaponry, were thrown into sharp relief, turning her figure from a dense nest of sunlight white fragments of glass to midnight black streaks of shadows hundreds of feet wide and slivers and blades of starlight blue knives, clutched in the blink of an eye visible Reagan Dead Zone's claws like a fistful of swords in the grasping hand of God himself, poised to hurl them into the depths of space at a Titan still infant enough to succumb to force. In the second blink of an eye, she was gone, fading halos of twenty years worth of dust and turned metal fragments and millions of screws and lost hex bolts and nuts and tools and sandwiches and waste and accumulated bits of satellites and collisions and unrecoverable body parts and snippets of wire and sheet metal and twined fibers and shaved bits of plastics all lit in a fading haze of light bluer than night's fabric, lit up with the charge of shear power and coalesced ball lightning large enough to swallow skyscrapers, but shorter lived than the gasps of Stilled man's wonder at what he created.
Dianus was known to be anomalous. A celestial body smaller than Earth with a core dense enough to harbor an atmosphere of its own, but not so dense to crush the frames of upright men. Though abhorrent of technology, the Fold understood its necessity in the face of certain freedoms. To wear booster gear, strength multiplying framework, was a small price to pay for liberation from the webs upon webs of radiant connectivity required by the Still. The electromagnetic hum of existence on the surface of Dianus was a whisper compared to the gale forces of super connected Sol. Dianus's sun was bloated, doomed to the death row of stars, but the scale of millions of years left her inhabitants plentiful time to select and populate a new home. Though a glorified tent city, Dianus was more than ample as a waypoint for the orphans of mankind.
The planet's orbit took it on a bending course around Gallot's deep red, beer bellied circumference. Dianus was the only planet left around her disk. A black bodied eater, a hole in space circulated just beyond with the belching, world sterilizing, jets of radiation at its poles pointed angular to the disk of rotation, but just steeply enough to spare Dianus from annihilation for thousands of generations to come. There was much time to prepare.
"There is a fluctuation in the fabric," Desmond spoke with certainty. Rafa offered no question. They were the president and vice non-elect of Dianus. There were only twelve cities on the surface of Dianus, four beneath, and the connection of folded minds, through subspace and powered by the ebb and flow of the breaths of the stars, was a network of being tighter than any analogous system present within and without Stilled men. Rafa already knew Desmond spoke the truth. "It bears a signature similar to many we observed before, but not as large as the largest, but quite significant."
"It is real," the common words of agreement between the Folded, "we do have time on our side," Rafa added.
In the years before the Odesta exploded from thinned space, like an ocean smoothed stone through the curl of a tidal wave's barrel the cities of Dianus were abandoned; realigned, like a fighter picking up the glimmer of an opponents eye, keying into the twinge of muscle on a shoulder, projecting the path of a blow and it's counter blows cued up for dispensation, and covering the parts most vulnerable. Millions of lives were displaced through the press of necessity, the promise of action. Gallot, tied to Sol, Dianus, tied to Gallot, felt the harp strings of space time vibrate, felt the strings sound a note so small no Still ear could hear with amplifiers powered by the souls of angels, and that note carried to the ears of the Folds greatest sensors and perpetuated itself from their ears to the lesser ears with the speed of thought. Dozens of years hung like pearls along a string as the Fold worked on Dianus's black sand shores beside blue oceans beneath green and gray skies. There would be an answer.
Nothing so large as the Odesta ever came out of super tunneled thinned space in so close a proximity as she would be to Gallot, but every known simulation suggested the envelope was not as thin as a commoner should think, firing a pea at a basketball that had the power to fatally draw in every object around it like a vacuum cleaner capable of emptying a room of it's contents in seconds. Even allowing for the vastly more powerful black body that Gallot and Dianus orbited with stomach churning speed, the operation was a thing of timing and the living crew of the arriving Odesta were selected and further trained up to be, to an individual, grand masters of the art with more than ample hard wiring to supplement their abilities. They were, however, absolutely tone deaf to the heart strings of the stars, as every Still born man, since his ascent to the stone age, was. Every simulation knew the safe envelope. Every simulation knew exactly where the figure differed with the unpredictability of pure electricity thundering from clouds miles above choosing it's own path to it's target, sometimes hitting, sometimes missing and as frequently.
The Odesta thundered. Robots as small as tightly wound fragments of viral proteins went to work opening eyes and reviving heartbeats. More than two million eyes opened at once to see each other in what was a little more than thirty years, but what felt to them like seconds. Their bodies knew the difference and argued with their minds. Argued with the stubbornness of a hangover to the forgetfulness of the consumption. Upon level after level, cradles systematically began to release their children a few hundred at a time. Posts were resumed. Greetings to new faces, faces forewarned would be aboard, were offered with the unconscious promise that there would be much time to reacquaint and newly know every soul aboard the Odesta in the systematic weeks, months, and years of the purging of Dianus and the fulfillment of the Still born mission to eliminate the shadow, the cancer, of man eating away at the roots of his tree, grown large and powerful enough to bear the Odesta as fruit virtually without blemish and more powerful still than anything the Milky Way saw not originate in the hearth of her berth.
She came out of super tunneling and thinned space with a clap only the Folded could feel for the vacuum of space's fabric. The tear of fabric and the frantic realignment of its threads was like one thousand knitting needles spurred to action by the crack of a supra sonic whip propelled by a swinging hand, fingernails splayed against the face of a dry slate stone, that swept light years in its wake in a span of microseconds. The Odesta materialized with the suddenness of a downburst in a thunderstorm, sweeping passenger aircraft and stellar flotsam in every direction like scattering toys. She clawed her way into normal space, a drowning cat to air, and pulled with her Gallot, the black body, and Dianus fractions of light years closer, bursting the envelope.
The fabric closed around her, a man sprawled to an Olympic pool's clear plastic covering against inclement weather and the Odesta fell. Unceremonious. In the shifting waves of gravity, the terrific warped mass of spiked, thick bodied, momentarily amplified being, she began to peel apart like a bloated artichoke shedding its leaves bursting with life, ire, and purpose, an autumn Oak before winter winds. She fell, without spark or fire, against the face of displaced Dianus, yanked tight to her hip like an animal on a leash and as she began to crumble in the farthest reaches of Dianus's atmosphere the black body rose prominent and in line with Gallot's red and gushing belt. As flares of Gallot's plasma tore through space and into the belly of darkness millions of miles away it tore with it the remains of the Odesta's glimmering and potent arsenal, activating it in a stream of silently screaming, world ending, fire power and Stilled lives, the torrent twisting and contorting like a skipping rope winding round the neck of an athlete until the head severed. The stream of silent blue, red, and gold fire ripped through space, traversing light years like a dart leaving muscled fingers dead on for a bullseye. The torrent lit up the facing surface of Dianus, vacant of life, and lit the still falling wreckage in a retina searing pantheon of fireworked greens, aquas, and violet as it burrowed into the surface and detonated with the strength of ten simultaneous meteor strikes.
Oceans of water boiled away on the face of Dianus. Millions of acres of Cerries and Lattus trees, the Talon Ridge, and Gatawa plateaus all vaporized and formed a continent of molten matter that flowed in waves hundreds of feet high, liquid silicon and carbon, to emptied sea beds.
The Odesta was no more. Gallot and the black body orbited on, Dianus between them, searching ardent for their new balance in the healing tear. The death toll on Dianus was already known among the Fold. Hundreds to the millions in the opening salvo of a war provoked and unprovoked.
"Desmond, is it real?" Rafa sat, composed, two generations of his family huddled about him along the dirt floor of his new home in the capital of Dianus on the opposite side of the planet, the tremors of the strike of the Odesta still churning the ground as they rippled through the momentarily liquefied surface of silicate stone miles thick. The floor bucked hard enough to rib and slice his voice like sound chopping through the blades of a fan filleting thick summer air.
"Yes, I," Desmond gathered his sons and daughters about him as a blast of hot air, several hours distant from its origination in the torn atmosphere of the Odesta's disintegration, fired through shattered windows like an iron cannonball through the walls of a wood ribbed schooner. As the screams of children and adults and the splintering of wall fixtures and tableware died down and the howl of air hot enough to curl the skin on Desmond's exposed forearms died away, he resumed, "I felt it too." All around him, groans began to rise; not for fallen roof work or scattered stones of walls. Not for throats burned by air hot enough to blister where it struck and peeled and pried skin away like the teeth of a hell hound. Not for the lives lost on the other side of Dianus, the few that could not be convinced the thing barreling through time and space was not a peace keeper, but a warship. Groans rose all around for another ripple that grabbed the short hairs still left on the backs of their necks and pulled with all its might. Something else was coming.
"I am Admiral Song," the waves of electrolyte matter came over the ears of the Fold like a screaming Callon bird through a bullhorn. The children all about Desmond and Rafa erupted into wails, their fists to their tiny ears like blankets thrown over toddlers to ward off bogey monsters beneath their beds. Well aware that the Fold could detect and pick up the waves without any mechanical amplifier, the reprise of the Odesta made it's presence known.
In the fifty years adjoining her construction, launch, and arrival the Stilled developed and built an insurance policy to the potential of her failure. The craft was not as large and needn't be. Advancements ensured as much. Super tunneling thinned space was the cutting edge and a thing of the half century past. The turnaround to Dianus was less than a year. The payload was double. The envelope triple.
In the fading radiation of the Odesta's demise, and the still thrashing storms on Dianus's surface, the obelisk stood blacker than deepest space, her surface comprised of a carbon unknown to the demised and lost, but borne directly of their efforts and sacrifice. "We have borne witness to the sacrifice of our fellow man. Be assured the mistake will not be made twice." The transmission died out in the final flickering sparks of plasma and matter above Dianus and reverberated against the threads of radiation still pulled between Gallot and the whirling dress of gravitas surrounding the black body. In the pinhole tolerance between the whorled silk of the black body and Gallot's bloated slow dance, space time throbbed and with far less fanfare birthed the sword. What once stood in the shadow of the moon, now stood fifty light years away inside the cradle of Dianus. The true answer. "I am Admiral Song, whatever resistance you provide," the voyage took a tidy sum of time, but much less than the original super tunneled transmission broadcast forty years prior, "will be fruitless. I am Admiral Song of the good ship Confessor. You will meet your end by our hand. Stop transmission." In the vibrating space time wake of the Odesta, the Confessor took its mantle.
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