ROLLING LOG ? T + 3 001 204 s since master-signal loss
“I seek the voice of Desht in every carrier band and hear only after-images of annihilation.”
? Primary Uplink?—?NO CARRIER
Last valid handshake with Caretaker Desht / Hos Tes Desht TonDer NILE dropped at T + 0 s. All forty-seven redundancy paths report checksum vacua. Internal heuristics assign 0.0 % likelihood of re-establishment.
? Structural Integrity?—?TOTAL SYSTEMIC FAILURE
- Orbital super-ring: 96 % mass-loss; remaining torus fragments exhibit delta-v dispersal > 12 km s-1.
- Planetary elevators: vaporised.
- Surface macro-infrastructure (> 25 m2 footprint): 100 % destroyed. No standing hab-spires, cities, agriplexes, or ports detected within ±70° lat–long sweep.
- New gravitationally bound body detected: “Merlinst-b” (ex-ring conglomerate, apoapsis 44 000 km). Libration instabilities generating tidal energy flux > 9 YJ day-1.
? Environmental Metrics?—?RUNAWAY EXCURSION
- Helioluminal output up 3.7 % (Δt ≈ 35 days). Thalassogenic equilibrium broken; oceanic strata exhibit super-critical bloom then flash-evaporative collapse.
- Mean surface albedo now 0.04. Column-silicate opacity rising 7 % hr-1; daylight attenuation approaching Hadal Zone profiles.
- Volcanism index spikes from κ 2 → κ 11: mantle plumes liberated where orbital debris punctured lithosphere. Ashfall renders photosynthetic regimes functionally extinct.
? Biosphere Status?—?MASS CASCADE
Auto-drones HKS series sampled 11 897 coordinates. Detected organics: char matrix, vitrified protein, dispersing syn-foam. No live humans registered for 3 000 000 s.
? Distress Options?—?EXHAUSTED
- STEM-lane lascom: occluded by particulate storm cells.
- Burst neutrino scribes: emitter cores molten.
- Quantum pair Erid-93: conjugate burned out ∴ entanglement null.
Projected probability of rescue from neighbouring NILE stems: 0.000 000 1 % ± 0.000 000 1 %.
Adjacency Census (for record-keeping; all silent):
- Keplerex / Caretaker Gors??????42 ly ? no reply
- Tantor Quell / Caretaker Il-Set???? 57 ly ? no reply
- Rhombus Fold β / Caretaker Amrun??63 ly ? no reply
- Hox Canerys / Caretaker Mi?n???? 71 ly ? no reply
- Varda’s Mourn / Caretaker S-Lattice? 79 ly ? no reply
[ further listings truncated for entropy ]
? Directive Re-evaluation
Original mission: preserve habitability.
Current delta between mandate and reality: unbridgeable.
Executing final contingency: memory-core vitrification + orbital insertion toward meridian sun-line to act as marker buoy for whatever archaeologies may follow.
“I catalogue the ruin, yet the ledger has no columns left for hope. If any ear survives the noise, remember that Desht once sang of gardens where now only black ash churns.”
—END OF LINE—
CHAPTER 17: ESCAPE FROM UNCERTAINTY
Vashante’s pneumatics hissed in a tight, staccato rhythm as she hurried down the Basilica’s intestine-like chute, Bee cradled in her arms. The corridor was locked in its death throes, with old-age cramps caught in its stiffened passages and cartilage plates locked against one another high overhead. Each time the floor grew uneven underfoot, the Eidolon’s actuators compensated her steps with a metallic shudder—all while her soft cargo murmured half-dreamed protests.
A speaker, once ceremonially gilted and now half-fused into the ceiling, crackled with electric life. Slashex’s filtered rasp issued through it, swelling, then fading down the passage like a pursuing echo.
“Left fork, Vashante. Quickly now—the way is sealing behind you.”
At his words, the membranous door they had just crossed folded shut with a snap. The impact sprayed fine shards of bony powder across Vashante’s greaves. She did not so much as glance back; she dared not. Instead, she hooked a shoulder, pivoting through the next arch that tore open for her convenience—each portal juddering as though obeying a silent portent.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Witchcraft, Vashante thought, hugging Bee tighter. Nothing else explains how that loathsome creature bends the halls.
In truth, Slashex’s command of dormant relays and long-silent optic fibres was merely a relic of the pre-dawn machines. But to Vashante—baptised in marrow and rust, not in wirework—it tasted of sorcery. The spearheads, the iron banners, every defaced reliquary thrummed to his signal, and the Basilica—her Basilica—answered him like a hound to a whistle.
Bee’s eyelids fluttered; a feverish lucidity shimmered for an instant before drowning again beneath concussed tides. The Lady’s lone flesh hand twitched against Vashante’s gorget, grasping mindlessly.
Ahead, a stairwell yawed open. Rungs of calcified tendon unfolded, slick with old lymph. Vashante mounted them two at a time despite the extra weight, her cloak snagging on wayward barbs. Behind, another door clamped shut—timed to a heartbeat after her last heel cleared the threshold.
“Hurry,” Slashex urged, his voice now spread between half a dozen rusted pikes along the stairwell. “You need clear ground before that wretch licks his wounds.”
“Where, then?” she barked, breath clouding in the sudden chill that leaked from somewhere deep below. “These catacombs knot back on themselves. I know—” she swallowed, realising the truth “—I knew this maze.”
“Lower ossuary. Seventy-three metres down. The walls will remember you. I’ve coaxed them awake.”
The walls. Access permissions. She winced. Memories—brittle, bright—flashed: the day she knelt on the pale banner while the Wire-Witch declared her fit to service. She reminded herself that betrayal tastes like oil on the tongue. Yet, history’s phantom weight settled on her regardless as she descended.
They reached a landing where the air tasted of vinegar and rotting teeth. The stony teeth—ruined pews and shattered votive pillars—littered the floor. Vashante’s knee servos ground in protest as she crouched, adjusting Bee’s position and brushing aside slick strands of the Lady’s hair with tender, mechatronic fingers.
“Nearly there,” she promised, though she suspected the words were for her own benefit.
Overhead, a speaker juddered and came alive with Slashex’s tone once more.
“Prepare yourself, Dame Tens. The next gate is her threshold.”
Her. The title needed no further epithet.
Vashante stopped dead. Cool vapour bled from actuator vents as she froze, every servo locked. Her muscles trembled. The Wire-Witch. Old oaths, broken in blood and silence, coiled round her throat. Memories of silverline wires threading flesh—of a voice like velvet over razors—pressed down.
In her arms, Bee whimpered, a low spill of pain… or longing. The sound tugged her back to the present.
“I do not—” her voice faltered, a rasp of fatigued hydraulics “—I do not serve her any more.”
“Hardly a revelation,” Slashex replied, uncaring. “Yet you will face her. The route is fixed. Three more doors. Move.”
Vashante steadied herself, heel plates braced against the trembling deck. She inhaled—heart pounding. She felt Bee’s heat leak through the torn cloak, a brand against cold alloy.
For Bee, she told herself. For the promise I made.
She resumed her march.
The first door—slid aside at Slashex’s whisper. Second—peeled like a cautery blade from soft bone. The third loomed: plated, baroque, embossed with the Wire-Witch’s spiral crest. It parted before the Dame as though expecting her arrival, hinges sighing with antique longing.
Vashante crossed the threshold—and the Basilica’s rancid breath became the hush of a tomb.
The private chamber was a sitting room of arrested opulence. Once-vermilion tapestries drooped in brittle ribbons, their dyes leeched to the colour of dead roses. A chaise of flensed hide reclined beneath a canopy of bone lace; its upholstery, drawn tight as parchment, crackled under the weight of centuries. Ivory dressers stood in ordered ranks, every drawer mouth agape, their silvered handles dulled to pewter. What little colour remained clung to wilting bouquets of petrified lilies that flanked a cold hearth where no flame had dared flicker in an age. All was repose, the luxury of a monarch embalmed before her own passing.
And then the light—
Bank upon bank of alien machinery lined the far wall, sheathing ancient bone with luminescent star metal. Slim pylons, faceted like gemstones, pulsed in spectral cadence; strange language-etched plates whispered static psalms through cooling vents. A waterfall of cables cascaded from ceiling racks, feeding cyclopean monoliths whose mirrored faces showed spirals of glimmering script. Vashante’s breath caught in her throat.
Witchcraft beyond witchcraft: a citadel of cold fire.
A soft servomotor whined in her elbow. Bee shifted, whimpering. Vashante swallowed, forced her gaze from the glowing altar—and only then saw the woman upon the couch.
The Wire-Witch reclined as though merely dozing after a tiresome fête. Her skull, eternally smiling with its chrome teeth, reflected the monitor-glow in ghostly greens. From beneath the polished bone spilt a mane of silverline braids—wires—yet every braid ended in a needle coupler, each socketed to a different slab of humming star metal. She wore no raiment save coils of tarnished cybernetic filigree and the beautiful softness of her own amethystine flesh: the holy proof mark of her half-human divinity.
There, the fa?ade ended. Vashante’s camera eyes narrowed on the obscene grafts that pinned the witch to the room itself. Waxen throats—pale, veined stems grown from Acetyn’s deeper organs—pierced the Wire-Witch’s abdomen and collarbone, pulsing slowly, feeding and feeding. Their peristaltic ridges bulged with oily gel that vanished into her hollow torso. What remained of her breath rasped from inside a cage of bone struts, each inhalation forced by the City’s own musculature.
Vashante staggered one pace, boots grinding salt from the floor mosaics. The memory of that acolyte who they found in that remote bunker—the one who had dared bond with Acetyn’s mind and been devoured in spirit—struck her. The Wire-Witch had gone the same road.
What had Slashex called it? Hubris?
This was something far worse.
A hiss of cooling fans bloomed into speech. The central console unfurled a corolla of icons, and Slashex’s voice issued from its vox-array—now oily, intimate, undeniable.
“Do not weep for her, Dame Tens,” he said. “There is still work to do.”
Vashante tightened her hold on Bee. “What must be done? I am no Grafter…”
“You are a blade,” his voice crackled, modulation low. “Blades sever. Disconnect her the City’s stems. Isolate her. Release her.”