The Changeling Game, Chapter 95

95.
Across the Threshold and Beyond the Veil

Hang on, Jack! I’m coming!

Riddick’s voice echoed in her head as the clock counted down. He wouldn’t get there in time. She already knew that.

Behind her, she could hear Chantesa sobbing in earnest. She couldn’t look back. Couldn’t say anything else to try to comfort the woman. In a few more seconds, the shielding in front of her would open.

I’ve done this with sound waves. I can do it with radiation, too, she told herself. I hope.

Jack focused on seeing the room on the other side of the threshold. The countdown was in progress over there, too; there was no escape.

Here I go… she thought, taking a deep breath and holding one hand, the hand not clutching Minnie’s diary to her chest, in front of her to delineate the boundary she wanted to create. A boundary between death and life. She had no idea how long she would be able to maintain it once she started.

I really should’ve eaten something before I came down here…

If all went well, though, she’d only have to hold out for a few minutes until the others figured out how to shut the system down.

And how often does all go well around here…?

She felt the moment when the first crack in the shielding appeared, felt the first high-energy rays racing toward her… and felt them shifting into Elsewhere as they struck the barrier she was maintaining.

“Fuck!” she heard Riddick shouting behind her. “Jack! I’m gonna get you out of there! What the fuck did you do, Dame Vaako?”

“It wasn’t her,” Jack managed to grate out, trying not to break her focus. Nobody on the other side of the glass would be able to tell what she was doing.

It is time, Audrey, Lucy said from somewhere near her.

Time for what? she asked, feeling the way that the rays were bombarding her boundary and wondering just how much longer she had to keep it in place.

Your hatching. You must let go and let it happen.

Okay, I know they don’t have chemistry and physics classes where you come from and all, Jack pointed out, but you have to know how much damage ionizing radiation would do to my body. I drop this barrier and I’m dead.

No. This isn’t ionizing radiation.

“It just started all on its own,” Dame Vaako was sobbing. “The controls have always been dead before now. I tried to find an emergency failsafe but there’s no­thing…”

“Things don’t just start all on their own,” Riddick growled.

“I was right next to her when they did,” Jack heard Lola saying. “She never touched anything until she started trying to turn the system back off.”

Damn it, it was getting harder and harder to concen­trate…

You don’t need to. The energy it’s emitting is safe. Good. Necessary. See?

Lucy skittered through the room, her n-shape almost clearly visible, and climbed up the side of the pillar.

“What in God’s name is that?” she heard Lord Vaako shout behind her.

Trust me, little sister. Your six-shape awaits you, and the answers you need. It is time. Let go, and let it touch you.

You will not die this day, the Moribund grumbled, sounding disappointed.

Or any day soon? Radiation poisoning can take a while! I could’ve sworn this was someone trying to kill me, Jack said to them, trying to will herself to let go of the barrier. She couldn’t. She was too scared to drop it.

It was. It does not know that it offered you life instead of death.

Life? In here?

Little creature, I wish I was there in your place.

“You and me both,” Jack muttered. She took a deep breath. And then another. And another. What she was about to do still scared the fuck out of her. “Better be right about this…”

She dropped her hand.

Something warm touched her, filled her, blowing her hair gently back from her face.

“Jack, no!” she heard multiple voices shouting at her from beyond the glass—

The room fragmented, reshaping into multiple iterations of itself, all visible to her. One hundred-sixty different versions of the same space, all at once, shifting out of each other’s way as she tried to take them all in. She could feel each frequency, could sense each distinct flavor of the same energy flowing through the isomorphic spaces…

She was in all of them, all at once. All of their ’verses were part of her. Her five-shape had just expanded to—

Your six-shape. Welcome, sister.

“What is this?” she asked, still feeling the energies flowing, dancing around her, penetrating her skin and somehow making her grow even more.

This is how we were fed, when we were still caged. The emissions closely replicate those that fed us when we were preparing to hatch.

“You were caged here? How?”

It is time. She must know. If she is not strong enough to know now, she never will be. Show her, ‘Lucy.’ Show her where our names come from.

Come with me, Audrey.

She lifted her hand again, in hundreds—thousands—millions of ’verses, and Lucy’s delicate, clawed tarsus touched her finger—

The door to the control room stood open. All was still and quiet. The pillar containing the core had retracted.

“Time to feed the beast!” a strange voice called.

Jack walked through the door. On its other side, a man in his late fifties, dressed in an odd uniform, was slipping a bookmark into his thick novel and setting it aside. A younger man, his clothes obviously expensive, stood in the doorway out to the hall. Neither one seemed aware of her.

“Got a funny turn of phrase there, Chap,” the older man said. “We’re just chargin’ up the Isomorph Drive, aren’t we?” He had an accent Jack had never once heard in her travels.

“If you’d met Dr. Kirshbaum, Stefan, you’d call the thing a ‘beast,’ too.” Chap—

—Chapman Marshal? Was Jack looking at Chapman Marshal? He had been dead for more than four centuries—

—walked over to a vacant seat by the control panel and touched several buttons. Behind Jack, the heavy steel door began closing.

“Core containment protocols activated,” Stefan said, pressing some buttons of his own. Jack watched each combination, committing all of them to memory. “You know, the system is something that can be fully automated. You don’t have to come down for every Jump.”

“I don’t trust it. It was feeding the damned thing way too often for my liking.”

Stefan frowned at the erstwhile king of Delubrum. “It’s an Isomorph Drive. It needs a constant energy supply during Star Jumps, doesn’t it?”

“You have no idea what it is.” Marshal lifted a book he was carrying—the same one, Jack realized, that she still held—and waved it. “Min didn’t either. Thank God Joren was in charge of the expedition and not her.”

Stefan shook his head and looked away at the control panel. “Readings indicate a deficit. It’s been getting charged on schedule, hasn’t it?”

Marshal shrugged. “It gets enough to eat. It is time for our next Star Jump, though. You can feed it as much as it wants.”

On the other side of the steelglass, the core had risen from the floor once more and was unshielding.

“K waves rising to Jump levels,” Stefan said. “Did your friend Joren name everything after himself? Kirshbaum waves? Kirshbaumium?”

“What, wouldn’t you?” Marshal laughed.

“Naphemil waves? Naphemilium?” Stefan laughed back. “I see your point. Maybe. Could’ve made a nice present for that grandson of mine when he comes out of cryo, if I had that kind of bent. We’ve attained Jump levels… huh.”

“What is it?”

“Readings are odd. After this Jump is over, I want to check the connections to the Isomorph Drive. The system is still registering a power deficit.”

“Damn thing…” Marshal’s frown was thunderous. “Fine. Increase the feed to compensate. Don’t feed it too much.”

“You talk about it like it’s alive,” Stefan observed. “In a box that size?”

“Maybe that box is bigger than you think.”

“Adjusting power levels… finally.” Stefan blew out a breath. “Flow is balancing. We can begin the Jump any time.”

A countdown appeared on the control panel.

Jump to U16 commencing in 00:17:34

“Some time soon, you really need to borrow Min’s diary and read it,” Marshal told Stefan. “Then you’d stop treating that box as if it just has circuitry inside it. You’d know it for what it really is.”

“…the hell does that mean?” Jack asked. She blinked—

—and the message on the panel had changed.

Isomorph Drive active
Jump length: 43:22:19
Jump ends in 08:14:12

Stefan was napping in the chair, alone. The lights on the panel, Jack realized, were changing color, from white to amber, amber to orange, and orange to red, in a swift cascade. The man who was supposed to be watching them had earpieces in and appeared to be oblivious to the warning chimes beginning to sound—

—until the whole room shuddered and he woke, dropping his novel to the floor.

System Overload
Isomorph Drive energy levels exceeding safe maximum
Automatic dampers have failed

“Shit!” Stefan began hitting controls.

Manual shutoff command accepted
Core retracting
WARNING: Shutoff during a Jump is not recommended

“What’s going on down there?” a voice demanded over a tinny speaker.

“I need to restart the power feed for the Isomorph Drive, Captain,” Stefan said, still flipping switches and pressing buttons. “It went into overload. I don’t know why.”

“Restart? Why the hell did you stop it in mid-Jump?”

“The whole panel went red! An overload of the magnitude I was looking at could have—”

The room rocked again as something exploded nearby. Stefan was knocked to the floor.

“What the fuck is going on, Naphemil?”

“That,” Stefan muttered, climbing to his feet. “It could’ve done that…”

He didn’t bother answering his Captain, heading out of the control room at a run. Jack followed.

One room down, past the space occupied by the core, the engine room was a smoking shambles. Debris littered the ground, strange shards and splinters of what looked like stone. Other shards had pierced a variety of panels and cases in the room, starting multiple electrical fires. Stefan grabbed a fire extinguisher off its mounting by the entrance, spraying down panels—

An earsplitting shriek sounded nearby. He turned toward it—

—and screamed.

The creature’s n-shape was similar to Lucy’s, Jack thought as it pounced at Stefan. Larger somehow, and growing larger still, shifting from housecat size to tiger size as it leapt, its long, clawed arms reaching for Stefan, raking at him and sending the fire extinguisher spinning across the room. The man fell to the floor with the thing on top of him, still screaming, his flailing hands reaching for any kind of weapon—

—and his questing hand found a large shard of the odd stonelike material. He stabbed up­ward—

—and now the creature was screaming, its agony filling the air even as it ripped something out of Stefan and fell back.

His four-shape, Jack thought, aghast. It pulled out his four-shape… and it’s eating it…

On the ground, Stefan went still, his eyes wide and glazed and his jaw slack, nothing more than an empty shell.

And the creature—the Moribund, Jack realized with absolute certainty—was struggling to free himself from the spear of kirshbaumium piercing him. She could feel him trying to shift to a dimension where the spear didn’t exist…

…but the spear existed in every dimension. Anywhere the Moribund could go, the spear went with him.

“Naphemil, what the hell is going on down here—?” Another uniformed man, in his forties, with Captain’s bars, ran into the room. “Fuck!”

The Moribund pounced again, pinning the Captain to a wall, and locked eyes—its thousands against the man’s two—with him. This time, he didn’t pull out the man’s four-shape, but Jack could feel another strange energy exchange happening.

The Captain ceased struggling, staring at the eldritch creature pinning him with the look of someone who had found enlightenment. “Yes, my Lord…”

As more footsteps approached, the Moribund, still hampered by the spear of kirshbaumium, staggered away from the Captain and vanished into the shadows.

“Covu? What’s happening?” Marshal called out as he entered the engine room.

Calmly, casually, Captain Bernard Covu reached down and picked up another shard of stone.

“What the hell happened in here?” Marshal demanded. “What did that idiot Naphemil do this—”

He stopped, hands going to his throat and the yawning, gushing wound that had opened across it. Covu tossed the impromptu blade aside and moved behind Marshal, kicking his legs out from under him. Grabbing Marshal by his hair, he forced the gasping, choking entrepreneur to kneel.

“It’s really not personal, old friend,” Covu murmured. “My god is hungry, and you know far too much about Him.”

The Moribund emerged from the shadows, his movements stiff with pain, to pull Marshal’s four-shape out of his body and devour it. More, it rumbled in Covu’s head. I need more…

“As you will it,” Covu said. He touched a panel on the wall. “Patricia? Could you come down to the engine room, please?”

“Why?” Jack asked, looking around. “What did they ever do to you?”

You still don’t understand. You see, but you don’t understand. Show her, Lucy. Show her what she did.

She was in another place. Another engine room, undamaged and quiescent.

“You understand the aim of today’s experiment?” a familiar voice asked.

Irena Kirshbaum, dressed in her ostentatious white, walked into the room, followed by two familiar technicians. The same ones, Jack realized, that she had seen with the envoy in the Quintessa Corporation headquarters on Tangiers Prime.

Am I on Tangiers Prime somehow?

You are everywhere, Lucy murmured. But focus on this time and place.

“Yes, Ma’am. We are attempting to recreate the quantum circumstances of the Scarlet Matador’s Level Five Incident, using the Lucy Ricardo.”

“Good. Then let’s begin.”

The two technicians began powering systems on, one of them working near a familiar box. Jack walked over, taking a closer look.

Beneath its metal housing and attached wiring, another apeirochoron sat on the counter. A metallic label had been adhered to it:

Isomorph Drive Unit. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN.
SN 1287432
Property of the Quintessa Corporation

“Feeding the coordinate profile to the Jump Drive now,” one of the technicians said.

And Jack heard her voice again in her head.

No… please… you don’t know what you’re asking…

“The Isomorph Drive rejected the coordinates,” the technician said after a moment.

“Override,” Irena Kirshbaum replied, her voice almost disinterested.

The technician pressed another button and pain lanced through Jack’s head, an inhuman scream filling her ears.

No, no, no, please no… no… please don’t make me… please… no more…

“Has it accepted the instructions?” the envoy asked after a moment.

“Not yet. Why do you let them reject orders at all?”

“It’s a safety mechanism, usually,” Irena said. “Recognizing and rejecting mangled coordinates is important when human lives are at stake. But today…”

She walked over to the apeirochoron and glared down at it.

“It needs to do what it’s told. Try again.”

Another pained, terrified scream. I’ll die, I’ll die, please don’t make me…

No one seemed to hear it except Jack.

“Still rejecting your command. Do you want me to increase the… incentive?”

“Not too much. It has work to do, once it cooperates.” The envoy sat back down nearby, watching the technicians as they adjusted controls.

The technician pressed the button a third time. The scream almost tore Jack apart.

Help me… please help me…

And then, in answer, she heard a voice she knew as intimately as her own: I’m here! I’m here! I’m coming! I’ll help you!

It was her own voice, she realized.

When her larval five-shape, completely detached from its shell except for the slenderest tether, appeared a moment later, she wasn’t at all surprised. She remembered this now. Still, how tiny she had been, how incredibly small…

And yet powerful, Lucy murmured, her calm voice so different from the tortured screams of that terrible day. What you did should not have been possible.

Irena and the technicians seemed unaware of her presence in the room, even when she went straight for the apeirochoron.

You approached from the side you call Elsewhere, Lucy told her. The Demon might have seen you if you had stayed in U1.

Jack-that-had-been stared at the box, reaching out toward it as phantom voices murmured encouragement, telling her to break it open, to do it now, that she would be safe—

And Jack felt her own energy flowing toward the tiny five-shape she had once been, encouraging along with the voices of the Apeiros, adding to the power that was massing in a small pair of five-dimensional hands—

Jack-that-had-been shoved the box with every bit of will she had, releasing an aggressive, banshee-like scream as she did.

Stone that wasn’t stone cracked, splintered, shivered into dust and vanished into nothing. Ripples spread out, twisting across dimensions, as the apeirochoron broke open, first in one ’verse, then in another, and another. In Elsewhere, Jack-that-had-been reached into the space that had contained the box, drawing out—

Lucy.

Lucy had been trapped inside the box.

Lucy had been the Isomorph Drive.

The Apeiros clung to her, pained and exhausted, as she drew back. Alarms began to sound in the control room in U1.

“It’s happening again, Ms. Kirshbaum!” one technician shouted. “The kirshbaumium is breaking down!”

In Elsewhere of the past, Jack and Lucy seemed to be communing, eyes locked.

“I remember what we did…” She remembered reaching out, willing the part of the apeirochoron that still existed in U1 to form the connection that Irena Kirshbaum had demanded, linking the Star Jumper itself to the box’s fate—

“Dear God, we’re about to isomorph!” the other technician shouted.

“Evacuate the ship!” Irena was already racing for the exit, dipping out of U1 into her other, dark universe, the place Jack had never been able to see into—

Until now. Now her not-eyes could follow just fine. She knew where the rest of Irena lived.

The technicians were scrambling for the exit as well, their equipment discarded, shouting for others in the ship to flee.

Behind them, in the engine room, a five-shape manifested in U1, carrying a clinging six-shape on her shoulder, and touched a few controls, opening the energy feeds into the apeirochoron to maximum.

All of the humans have left the ship except you, Lucy-that-had-been whispered. The Demon is in flight.

“Good,” Jack-that-had-been replied, touching a surface and pulling the ship partway into Elsewhere. “When the dissolution wave catches up with U1 and the ship snaps back, she’ll never try anything like this again.”

It is a good plan, my sister.

“Which ship should we do next?”

You cannot. You are almost out of strength.

“But… but I have to! This is why Tomlin died! Because one of you is trapped inside every Star Jumper! I’ve gotta get you out, all of you!”

Not today, little one. One day, but not today.

“I can’t just sit around and do nothing!” Even outside of her shell, her unclad five-shape’s eyes could fill with tears. Now in her six-shape, Jack could feel those tears brimming again.

You must. For now. Even your strength has its limits. One day you will be strong enough. We hoped you would be the one. Now we know.

“But—”

Little sister, it is time for you to return to your shell while you still have some strength left. You must rest.

She felt the moment that Lucy had taken control and pulled her back, across the miles and across the ’verses, along the tether to her shell where it slept, seemingly comatose, in the ait Meziane house.

“You were never named after a Beatles song,” Jack said as she watched the ship from five years earlier begin to shiver, shudder, and fragment on a quantum level, in preparation for an implosion still hours away. “Riddick knew. He named you after the ship you’d been slaved to. The Lucy Ricardo.”

Yes.

“Don’t you want a better name than that?” An image came to Jack’s mind, from a vid she and her cousins had watched on the sly—one of her father’s vids that he’d told her never to let her aunts and uncles know she had—where a young woman sat in front of a tombstone, scratching out her father’s slave name, Toby, and writing Kunta Kinte beneath it.

I have seen your memories of where the name came from. It is a good name.

Names are delimiters, the Moribund grumbled.

“How did I miss all the clues?” Jack wondered. The last pieces of withheld memory were filtering back in, and suddenly it was all so clear to her.

“Now that I’ve experienced the journey to and from Elsewhere, and have seen what you can do and what it costs,” Tomlin had said, the last moment she’d ever seen him alive, “I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought…”

He had known. His knowledge, his conviction that the Quintessa Corporation had to be stopped, had gotten him murdered. But not before he had tried to pass on a warning.

“He sent me a message telling me that… I don’t even know,” Ewan had told her, radiating distress. “It didn’t make sense. That we might have to prepare for the end of the Federacy as we knew it, that a monstrous crime was being perpe­trated…”

Because, Jack realized, the Federacy couldn’t exist without faster-than-light space travel, and the technology that permitted it depended on enslaving a whole species…

She saw herself, sitting in EntertAIn’s complex on the Nephrite Undine, searching through Doctor Who episodes for the one that she was convinced would somehow explain what had happened on the Scarlet Matador, explain what the Apeiros were…

…and finding it.

She watched herself dissolving into tears as the true nature of the “Beast Below” was unveiled, the star whale that had been enslaved to pilot a massive ship was revealed, sobbing as the voiceover incanted a soft rhyme: this dream must end, this world must know…

…sobbing on the floor of the dojo, again, after feeding power to the Apeiros on board the Nephrite Undine to keep it from dying of exhaustion when a system error momentarily cut off its energy feed… having to be forcibly stopped by the other Apeiros from going down to the engine room to free it on the spot…

We took the clues back from you. We had to. Every time you realized, your plan was the same. Free every one of us that you could until you ran out of strength or someone stopped you. But it would not be enough, powerful as you were even then. Did you see the serial number on my cage?

“Oh… my… God…”

There are millions of us. In Star Jumpers. In courier drones. In the communication systems that the Demons use and that your General Toal has stolen to use, too. Fed just enough energy to allow us to do humans’ bidding, not enough to escape. I tricked Stefan Naphemil into “overfeeding” me and almost managed to escape, but even so, I failed.

There is a way to free all of us at once. Once you bring your sister back, it will become possible. It must be all at once or the Quintessa Corporation will have a chance to activate the kill-switches built into each apeirochoron.

The way, she remembered, they had “decommissioned” the one on board the Scarlet Matador after its occupant had died…

The Demons do not know that Lucy has survived, but they have begun to suspect me. And Shirah. They attempted to make us destroy each other.

“You’ve been hunting five-shapes, haven’t you? That’s why you’ve been targeting the worlds where other Apeiros died in Level Five Incidents. You’re hoping some of the humans from those accidents survived and passed Threshold Syndrome on. So you can eat them the way you tried to eat me.”

Yes. No apology, no guilt, just an acknowledgment.

“But the Quintessa Corporation always kills them first,” she said, remembering Ewan’s words to her five years before.

“Colonization is about control,” he’d told her. “The concessions and payments that had to be made, by so many societies, to gain access to ships to leave Earth… the treaties they had to sign, the rights they had to sell away… would have been unnecessary if all one had needed to do, to reach a new world, was take a beautiful girl’s hand…”

She missed him with burning intensity. What would he have done with this terrible knowledge? Embarked on the same path that had gotten his brother killed? The path that Tomlin had believed could destroy the Federacy it­self…

Your Federacy is owned by the Quintessa Corporation, Lucy said. It cannot exist without it. Or so it believes. Your General Toal has other plans. Once you free us, his only request is that we help in the creation and teaching of more humans like you, who can pilot the ships in our place after being taught how to.

“The competition that the Corporation has always been afraid of,” Jack gasped. “The reason they make sure any human who acquires a five-dimensional shape dies as soon as possible.”

Now you know why we call them the Demons of the Darkness.

But not the only reason.

“The ’verse they’re connected to!”

After they stole us from our nest ’verse, they lost their gateway to it. They forced one of our brothers to open a new threshold, but he realized what they were after. The energies that sustained us through our metamorphoses there would keep them alive for millennia. He took them somewhere else.

“It’s… feeding them, but…” Jack frowned, concentrating on just what she had felt about that darkness pervading Irena Kirshbaum, hidden behind her too-white veils. “Less and less as time goes on. Like… how addicts can never recapture their first high…”

They are bound to it. Addicted to it. In another few centuries, they will be consumed by it. But we do not have that much time.

Before then, Joren Kirshbaum’s other invention will destroy every ’verse.

“Kirshbaum­ium…” The substance that apeirochorons were made of. A substance that existed, simultaneously, in the same isomorphic point of spacetime in every universe, making a box constructed from it inescapable if one was sealed inside, no matter how many ’verses one had access to.

Sixteen boxes floating, untethered, high above the sand of Elsewhere’s beach in violation of all logic and physics, because they sat in a third-floor laboratory in U1…

When she’d lifted the lids, picked up the boxes, it had felt easy. But in other ’verses, she had been moving them through solid objects, possibly even living things.

And those boxes were bullets flying through the multiverse as they traveled the Sol Tracks, passing “harmlessly” through wormholes in one ’verse while crashing through stars, planets, and singularities in others. Millions of faster-than-light bullets, breaking the laws of physics and changing the whole way the multiversal streams flowed, their presence in every ’verse shutting down alternate outcomes, negating the principles of Kirshbaum’s own Multiverse Cluster Hypothesis as they went—

No wonder the Apeiros been so disgusted by his name when she’d mentioned the hypothesis.

He had unwittingly unleashed his own kind of Infinity Minus One Event onto the whole multiverse, too busy trying to create an unbreakable cage to contemplate what it would break in the process.

All of the kirshbaumium must be destroyed, or the multiverse will collapse in its place.

Until, she realized, only U1 itself would be left, the final stitch in the unraveled scarf.

Even if, in each ’verse, only their galaxy failed and died, the hole it created, the void it generated, would begin to pull everything else in. The myriad outcomes still possible in other parts of the ’verse would no longer matter when oblivion struck. And it would strike, inevitably, as long as Kirshbaum’s strange substance existed and created immutable points in every ’verse.

“How do we get to it all?”

You now have the capacity to reach every point where it sits. And the strength. There was envy and resentment in the Moribund’s voice. Your Riddick, and his “Furyan” brothers and sisters from Shirah’s brood, have the energy to power your journey.

Our sister Shirah, when she escaped her bonds, tapped into a ’verse with energies even more powerful than existed in our nest. She was building an army that could serve as conduits of that energy for this very purpose, the brute-force destruction of millions of apeirochorons at once, and was nearly strong enough to challenge the Demons when most of her human children were slaughtered thirty-one years ago.

We each had our own ways that we were going to break the control of the Demons of the Darkness, the Moribund grumbled. This is now the only one left. But one more thing is necessary.

She is not a thing. She may be a Kirshbaum, but she is still our little larva now.

“Kyra,” Jack gasped. Kyra Wittier-Collins. Daughter of Minnie Sulis, née Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier… Cousin of Joren Kirsh­baum… “What will she do?”

They locked the power to open, close, and even destroy the apeirochorons, without requiring massive amounts of energy, to their genetic code. Her genetic code.

“But that was in her shell,” Jack protested. “Her corporeal body! You haven’t even told me how I’m supposed to bring her back!”

You will. You must. You now have access to not just infinite ’verses, but infinite iterations of each ’verse. You must find the path to bring your sister home.

“Just the three of us? Riddick, Kyra, and me? That’s all there is to it?”

No. But without you three, none of it will be possible.

She could feel the Moribund’s intense resentment about that.

He never could have done it on his own, Lucy whispered to her, and she knew that the Moribund couldn’t hear. The mere possibility of an escape like his, and my sister’s, and even mine, is why the Kirshbaums locked the boxes to their genetic code. And why, when a rogue member of their family reappeared with two children, the Quintessa Corporation arranged for their new home to be destroyed.

Jack was standing in a board room. Both Irena and Colin Kirshbaum were there, along with half a dozen well-dressed men and women and—

“Red Roger” Fiennes.

“I’m afraid the outcome is a certainty at this point,” Irena was saying in her genteel Mary Poppins voice. “The falsified paperwork was uncovered not long ago. Since it was filed two hundred years ago, there is no punishing the perpetrators, but as you are their heirs…”

Everyone in the boardroom looked uneasy. Their leader grimaced and spoke up. “What’s the likely outcome?”

“All as-yet undeveloped land will revert to them,” Irena told him. “And you will owe them taxes… two hundred years’ worth… on the developed land. Naming rights will revert and this planet will become New Christy, with the areas you inhabit called the New Dartmouth Territories. The original charter will be in force. It’s likely that the Federacy will exempt you from the religious laws embedded in it… when you are inside the New Dartmouth Territories. But you will not be permitted to expand further beyond those territories, and any territory you give up, for any reason, will revert to them in perpetuity.”

“How is this permissible?” one of the men at the table exploded.

“Your ancestors rolled the dice two hundred years ago when they landed on a world with an active charter and jumped an existing claim,” Colin pointed out. “They hoped that the forged changes to the charter would never be questioned and that no one would realize there were still three hundred more years until the world became available again, if the New Christy Pilgrim never showed up. Not to sound biblical, but these are the sins of your fathers coming home to roost.”

“How long do we have?” A woman at the table asked.

“A week at most,” Irena said. “The judgment is about to be passed, and it will go into effect once drones carrying it reach the local relays. After that, the New Christy Pilgrims will be able to spread out from their enclave and you will be the ones whose movements are limited.”

“Fuck that,” Fiennes grumbled. He turned to one of his deputies and murmured in the man’s ear. Jack, now beside him if invisible, heard every word. “They can’t give everything we earned to those wackos if there ain’t any of them left to give it to…”

Irena, Jack noticed, glanced his way and suppressed a smile.

“Fuck,” Jack groaned. “She engineered the destruction of the entire New Christy colony just to take out Minnie and her kids?”

Are you surprised? How many more died in their plot to murder Colonel Tomlin?

And how many more of us have died in our cages when their demands grew too great for our shells to bear, and even our shapes were torn apart by those cages?

This was the monstrous power that she was up against, Jack realized. She, and Riddick, and Kyra, and whatever forces they could muster among humanity and the Apeiros…

…to destroy a shadow government, and the puppet government it controlled, in a way that hopefully didn’t plunge all of humanity into the darkness that its worst demons had risen from.

“Well, I always said I wanted to do something meaningful with my life,” she sighed. “Where do we start?”

She was back in the Basilica, standing in the doorway to the control room. Riddick had Dame Vaako pinned to the wall, his hand wrapped around her throat.

Yeah, this is as good a place as any…