A Short Story by A.B. Timothy
The alarms blared as the Kingdom fell. The Confederate Star Traveler, or C.S.T. Kingdom, a dreadnought of next generational proportions, had been entirely crippled by a few small explosions on the captain’s bridge. The other bridges across the continent-sized ship kept her afloat, but she was quickly losing energy and would fall out of slip-space any minute. Bodhi Star, an Anointed One, used four of his 6 gifts in conjunction to escape the blast that leveled the captain’s bridge. He cut the scene, opening a portal away from the bridge; galaxy-hopped, quickening himself until the world was still entering slip-time; melted a piece of shrapnel with his control of fire; and telekinetically threw aside a command console that had threatened to crush him. Even after escaping through his portal, Bodhi was disoriented. Being in slip-time allowed him a moment to think. He decided the best course of action would be to check on the child.
The leg of his captain’s uniform had caught fire, but was now only smoldering threads on the edge. The black of the uniform remained, relatively, unharmed by the explosion. He straightened up and adjusted his coat. Bodhi then sprinted to the child. He remembered, so vividly, his own, ancient eyes staring back at him through the screen on that backwater world. “You swore to keep her safe, you knelt before your empress, and burned in your heart a promise to protect her,” he had heard himself say. “Now you have that chance again. You broke your oath once, but that was as a man. Now you are a king, and kings do not break their oaths.” He was no longer reliving the memory in his mind, but rather now he was actually watching the video again. Running through slip-time while in slip-space always produced strange hallucinations.
The final door into the secret nursery hissed open, and Bodhi saw a man in the middle of removing his coat, revealing a vest of small golf-ball-sized devices, strapped to his chest. Bodhi was near crippling exhaustion because of the amount of energy he had used to stay in slip-time so long. He fell out of slip-time for only a blink and heard the man yell, “No More Chrono!” The man whipped out his hands and rammed something into his chest. Bodhi had no other choice; he pushed past the exhaustion and fell into a deeper slip-time than he had ever managed before, even in his youth. The glass-wave, a growing ball of erasure, was still expanding at a rate that nearly matched Bodhi’s speed. With each heartbeat, the glass-wave expanded five inches. It took Bodhi nearly five heartbeats to retrieve the child from her cradle. He pulled her into slip-time with him, which her body could do naturally due to its deific heritage. This action cost another five heartbeats, and the wave had nearly reached them.
Bodhi recognized this kind of destruction, Glassing it was called. A total annihilation, so complete it was outlawed by the Herrium, the most brutal of all Human-kinds. Of course, the terrorists would use it. The King of the Confederation cut through the scene to his quarters, nearly a mile away, and leaped through without looking. On the other side of the seam, in reality, Bodhi had time to say “Oh” before he was sucked out of the ship and into the free-flow of slip-space. He looked and saw a perfect sphere cut into his Dreadnaught where his chambers should have been as he drifted away at FTL Speeds. He held onto the girl in his arms, not sure if he was hoping she would save them or if he would save her. The C.S.T. Kingdom left them like a speck of floating debris and was gone in the space of four heartbeats.
The white-space around them looked peaceful and pure. Were the machinations of the Abrahamics true? Was this place some kind of paradise? Out of habit, from years of training, Bodhi had expelled all of the air from his lungs to avoid having his lungs rupture in the vacuum. He held himself like that for several heartbeats until he looked down and saw the little girl laughing. The toddler he held was giggling up a storm. He raised an eyebrow at her, and she pointed to his cheeks and mimicked his strained expression.
Bodhi shook his head. He could not believe it. He then sucked in a mouthful of the purest, cleanest air he had ever known. As he breathed out, he looked around and saw the stars around him, the planets and suns of other systems. They all felt like he could reach out and grab them. He looked down and saw Terra. Was that true? Had they been attacked so close to the cradle of humanity? Was this the Creator? Did the Creator want him to see something before he died? Or maybe it was the Creator’s daughter, somehow keeping them alive.
Giggling, the little girl looked down at the planet below them. A great and mighty voice boomed inside Bodhi’s mind and said, “You are not supposed to be here. You threaten the covenant. Go, and fulfill your destiny, child.” Before Bodhi could scream, laugh, cry, shiver, or fall to his knees, a line formed in the space-air beneath the two of them. It sucked them out into its black embrace, and Bodhi felt Terra’s gravity take hold of him, as it began pulling him to its surface with a disconcerting speed.
The soldier breathed out all of the air he had, again, and wrapped himself in a ball around the girl. He felt his coat catch on fire as the friction increased in the atmosphere as they fell. The collision came a fraction of a heartbeat sooner than he’d expected it would. Something crumbled under the weight of his fall, and blood covered his body in an ugly spray. After a few minutes of lying there in the dim light of the early dawn, Bodhi rose and stood tall. He stood in the midst of a back road in the middle of nowhere. There was only corn for miles around. The King looked into his arms and saw the child still giggling. He noticed, when he prodded the child’s swaddling, blood coating his fingers.
Finally, he turned to see what he had been hit by during the fall. There before him, wrapped around his crater as if it were a telephone pole, was a destroyed suburban SUV. There was nothing left of the driver, except crushed legs and pants, and behind him a similarly gruesome sight for the car seat of a toddler. Bodhi had only ever seen a car like this in the museums. Was this an explosion-powered vehicle? As if to answer his question, the fuel tank exploded. He walked, hesitantly, to the back of the scene, ignoring the explosion even as shrapnel bounced off his skin.
He looked at the poor, innocent child that had been… Bodhi, the Mighty King of the Forgotten Worlds, Conqueror of the Seven Suns, Liberator of the Moons of Yam’ki, and Anointed one, found worthy of all six gifts given by the Ancient Bestowers, puked. Everything in his stomach came rocketing out in a barrage of horror, betrayal, sadness, and disgust. There she was, the god Empress of Humankind in all her majesty, dead before she even said her first words, before she had been gifted immortality, before she would defeat… oh no.
After his stomach had nothing left to give, Bodhi wept for the curse of foreknowledge. Wept for what he would become. Wept for what he must do. “Forgive me, my Empress.” He watched in horror as the flames from the explosion consumed Her Majesty’s lifeless body and that of the man who had sired the Empress of his people. Before the flames had totally consumed the driver, however, Bodhi had the foresight to change pants with the man and let his far-flung space attire burn instead. The man cut himself all across the chest to mimic wounds from the glass and metal. His back was already burned nearly to the bone from the entry friction, and the little one had singed ends on her swaddling from that same fall.
Without much more thought, the King let himself collapse to the ground and roll off into the ditch on the side of the road. Whoever found them would be in for quite the evening.
Fin
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