Mistrunner 4 - Chapter 53 - Abandoning Ship (Patreon)

Hope is a strange thing. We cling to it, often when, by all rights, we have no reason to. Yet, even though we know it isn’t real, it remains a comfort. A light amidst the darkness, and one that we hope will light our way to salvation. It will not. Only death and destruction can save us.

Alistaris Kargat

“Do you really think this will work?” I asked, staring at the holographic display meant to represent Earth. The sphere was familiar, but many of the lights surround it were new. They were meant to represent the forces arrayed against us. Some marked the satellites that controlled the blockade, each one as large as a space station and guarded by forces specifically created and equipped to kill mystics. The ships represented by the other lights were a little more vulnerable, but with the blockade in place, they were just as out of reach.

From where I was standing, our situation looked entirely hopeless, and not just because of the enemies represented by those lights. Instead, I was also worried about the Templars that were going to join the battle. Freddy had given me a choice – let them take me into custody or they would join forces with the Gamori Confederation and the Arbiters of Orion they’d hired to enact their will.

I had made my decision plain when I’d ripped him apart.

In a lot of ways, I hated myself for doing that. Until that point, Freddy had been an ally. Not quite a friend, but certainly not an enemy. Clearly, he’d expected that to soften the blow of his threat. It had only made it worse, and I had reacted impulsively.

But as much as I loathed my actions, I didn’t regret them. As far as I was concerned, Freddy had established himself as a traitor to humanity. He was the enemy. And I knew precisely how to deal with enemies.

Alistaris shook his head, “I don’t know, Mira. We’re undermanned, underpowered, and outnumbered. But we also don’t have much of a choice. We go now, or we resign ourselves to a long, slow descent into oblivion.”

“Wow. You’re a ray of sunshine,” I said.

“Optimism would be a misplaced emotion in this scenario.”

“There it is. That’s the positivity I was looking for.”

“Do you want me to spell it out for you?” he asked.

“That’s just how she is,” Patrick said.

“You, too? I’m disappointed, Pick.”

In reality, I knew precisely how desperate our circumstances were. With Earth surrounded and blockaded, it was only a matter of time before we were too late in responding to one incursion or another. Our planet was doomed unless we did something about the people hoping to destroy it.

Of course, what nobody was willing to point out was the fact that even if everything went perfectly, there was nothing to say that the Gamoris or Templars wouldn’t send another fleet to attack us. Or another after that.

They would keep coming until Earth had been reduced to a cloud of space rock waiting to be mined.

And even without that spurring them along, Freddy’s warning rang true. So long as I remained on Earth, everyone else was in danger. Yet, if I fled, the planet would be all but defenseless. After all, if I hadn’t been around since the quarantine had ended, the planet would have already been destroyed.

Which was why Alistaris had spent the past two weeks pleading with the Ark Alliance to provide for the evacuation of Earth.

“These world ships. How big are they?” I asked.

“The largest is about half the size of your moon,” Alistaris answered. “It can house nearly half a billion people. The other three are much smaller. And the fourth is a carrier for all the transports it will take to evacuate everyone.”

“What about the conditions?” was my next question.

“Livable.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I pointed out.

“It isn’t,” he said. “These world ships are old. They’re barely space-worthy. Yet, they are the only chance humanity has of survival. We can house more than half the world’s total population. The fifth ship is for farming and husbandry. This is the best I could do to ensure your people’s survival.”

I sighed and glanced away. It had been a while since I’d thought of Askar the elf I’d killed back before the Pacifician incident, but when Alistaris suggested evacuating Earth via a series of world ships, I’d remembered his story. His people had been exploited, and his planet had been destroyed too. The population had only survived aboard what I now knew were world ships. He’d described it as hellish.

And I took that to heart.

But between that and the population’s annihilation, what choice did we have? Earth was going to be destroyed. Freddy had assured me of that. So, knowing that – and I believed it – the fact was that the world ships offered us the best chance of survival.

Or them.

For my part, I would have to go in a different direction. And I knew the Templars wouldn’t stop hunting me. I was too big of a threat to them. To everyone, apparently.

There was a part of me that wanted to simply take the Templars up on their offer of training. Even if it turned out to be imprisonment, perhaps that was for the best. After all, if I was as dangerous as they seemed to believe, then maybe I needed to be held captive.

But I couldn’t let myself go down that road. Even if I thought it was for the best, I wouldn’t give myself over to their custody. I didn’t have that in me.

So, the plan was for Patrick and me – and Gala, too – to head in the opposite direction. Gala said she had friends who might be able to hide me, at least until my powers developed enough that I wouldn’t need further protection.

Not that I was certain I needed it now. I’d ripped Freddy apart without difficulty, and I expected I could do the same to any other mystics who came after me. But according to everything I’d learned, they wouldn’t just send one person. Nor would they limit it to a few. They’d send whole battalions of mystics and Adjudicators after me. Eventually, they would wear me down.

I only had a vague idea of what sort of threat I posed, but Freddy had been insistent that it was enough to bring the weight of the Templars down on me. And something told me that if they couldn’t possess me, they would ally with other mystics like those associated with the Arbiters of Orion. With that as context, it was only a matter of time before they killed me.

Unless I had allies and time to realize the potential they seemed so sure I would one day reach.

Thus, fleeing was my only option.

Before we could get to that part, though, there were a few steps we needed to take. First, we had to do something about the blockade. That entailed attacking and destroying the satellites. Second, we would have to destroy the fleet of ships. Looking at the holographic display, every single light represented a target we had to destroy.

And there were hundreds of them.

And in the interim, we had to contact Earth’s population and convince them to flee the planet. Some were already in the know, but many had no clue that Earth was even behind a blockade. Certainly, the unavailability of the Bazaar – which I had destroyed – would have clued them into something being wrong, but I did not envy whoever was tasked with wrangling a bunch of people with different agendas.

Hopefully, self-preservation would win out, and people would get in line. Otherwise, the casualties would be massive.

“I don’t like the idea of jumping ship,” I admitted.

“Neither do I,” Patrick agreed. “But it’s the only way humanity is going to survive. It’s only temporary.”

“It’s the best we can do for them,” I said. The bottom line was that, while I wanted to ensure humanity’s survival, I wasn’t one of them. I would be fine, one way or the other. So would Patrick and everyone else I cared about. As a result, I felt secure that I was doing everything I could. My issues were more rooted in the fact that I was admitting defeat. That did not sit well with me. “Whatever the case, this is how it has to be. Now, we need to get down to the business of figuring out the details.”

After that, Alistaris took over. The plan of attack was three-fold. First, I was tasked with infiltrating the Infinite Jest, which, based on all the intel Alistaris had gathered, was at the center of everything. Because of that, once I managed to get into their systems, I would have unfettered access to the satellites that governed the blockade. And that meant I could shut them down.

Then, whatever forces humanity could muster would attack the fleet of ships poised around the planet. It would be a brutal and bloody battle, but Alistaris thought we had a decent chance of breaking them – especially if I kept the flagship out of the fight. Our chances would go up if I could take control as I had with other ships.

Once we’d defeated them, the third and final phase – which we’d dubbed The Exodus – would begin. Hopefully, humanity could board the world ships and escape before the Gamoris recovered and sent more ships to block them.

It was simultaneously complex and incredibly simple, but one thing was certain: it all hinged on me. If I failed, then Earth was doomed. That was more than a little pressure, but if I was honest, it really wasn’t any different from the life I’d been living for the past few months.

Or that’s what I told myself, at least.

In any case, after we’d established the basic structure of the plan, everyone went to work. And for the next month, I engaged in damage control as I bounced from one attempt to destroy the earth to the next. In the meantime, Alistaris and his people established a routine of convincing humanity to abandon their home.

And he came up with an ingenious lie to ease the process.

“I can’t believe all those people think they’ve won a lottery,” I muttered as I sat next to Patrick in the cockpit of the Leviathan. It had been entirely repaired, and in many ways, it was better than it had ever been before. “Are they stupid?”

“They just want to believe they have a chance at a better life,” he said.

Indeed, the lie was just as simple as any other part of the plan. The leaders of humanity – or at least the ones Alistaris had chosen to contact – had told their people that a selection of the population would be given the opportunity to start anew on a paradisical planet on the other side of the universe. The way everything was described, it was the opportunity of a lifetime, and everyone should have known it was too good to be true – especially in our world – but they ate it up.

And they’d signed up in droves. There were more applicants than the world ships could accommodate, which meant that the lie of the lottery had become something approaching a truth. However, instead of simple chance, the applicants were subjected to grueling selection criteria with an emphasis on bringing people with valuable skills.

In the meantime, Patrick and I had prepared our ship, which was how we were getting to the Infinite Conquest. He and Alistaris’ people had given it every stealth measure they could, and I’d been practicing enhancing those with my abilities in Mist control. But more importantly, I spent most of my time training to overcome the blockade.

The first stage would require me to open a passage so that we could escape the atmosphere and assault the Infinite Jest. I was reasonably confident in that. But the second part meant that I needed to find the control terminal – Alistaris assured me there was one – in the Infinite Jest, infiltrate it, then either destroy or shut down the framework of satellites that enabled the blockade.

Then, the battle would begin.

And hopefully, we would win. After that, half of Earth’s population would escape. The other half…

I didn’t want to think about them.

Because no matter how it went, I had to focus on the ones I could help. The ones I could save. Otherwise, I’d never get off the ground.

In any case, when the time came, Patrick and I – along with a dozen of Alistaris’ best fighters as well as Gala – had loaded into the Leviathan. We had our mission, and all of humanity depended on it.

Or at least half.

Which was more than enough to spur me along. So, once everyone was ready, I turned to Patrick and said, “Let’s go.”

He took a deep breath, then nodded before igniting the ship’s Mist engine. It fired instantly. As it did, I initiated a Secure Connection with Alistaris and said told him we were going ahead.

He said, “We’re ready when you are. The moment the blockade goes down, ten thousand of Earth’s best ships will be in the air.”

“Will it be enough?”

“Theoretically?” he answered. “Yes. But it will be close.”

“So, the same as the rest of the plan.”

“Indeed,” he stated. “But it’s –”

“The only way. I know,” I responded. “But it doesn’t feel like the right way.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that, so I cut the Secure Connection as Patrick guided the ship into the air. We accelerated, whipping across the world with all the speed the Leviathan could muster. As we did, a bout of melancholy washed over my mind. If everything went right, I would never see Earth’s surface again. No more trees. No more swamps. No wildlings.

I would never revisit Mobile. Nor would I ever spend another night on any of our favorite beaches. I could never return to New Cairo and see their pyramids. Or any of the hundreds of other places I’d visited.

“What are you thinking?” Patrick asked, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Wishing I had done a lot of things differently,” I admitted. “I know that without me and what I can do, Earth would have already been destroyed. But at the same time, I also know that the Templar fleet that’s on its way is after me.”

They had yet to arrive, which was why we’d timed our attack the way we had. Once they joined the other ships already surrounding Earth, our fate would be sealed.

That seemed like a theme. Humanity’s back was against the wall, and it felt like we had no choice but to throw ourselves at our opponents and hope we came out on top.

“I don’t know how they can so callously destroy an entire planet,” Patrick remarked. “Just for a few resources.”

“Because they don’t see us as people, Pick,” I said. “The universe is infinite, right? There are thousands – maybe even millions – of other populated planets out there. What does the loss of one mean to these people? Nothing. They could strip a thousand of them, and nobody would bat an eyelash. Because we’re not unique. Not to them, at least. So, destroying Earth isn’t any different to them than cutting down a tree. Or digging a mine. Or whatever.”

He just shook his head.

For my part, I continued to watch the passing landscape as I lamented what was coming. Eventually, though, we reached our designated location and Patrick set the Leviathan down. Once he did, he started activating the various countermeasures meant to keep us hidden. For my part, I focused my senses outward, wrapping the ship in my own Mist. Then, I inverted it all.

The whispers once again became screams, but I’d practiced the technique often enough that I could easily ignore them. Instead, I concentrated wholly on the task at hand. The idea was to use my powers to create a Mist mirror that would reflect our surroundings back on any sensors that might detect us.

It was the same way my Stealth ability had always worked, though I hadn’t realized it until recently. Once I had discovered that fact, I’d endeavored to extend it to the ship. And it worked, though it was incredibly difficult to keep it in place over something so large.

I managed, though.

Barely.

Gritting my teeth, I said, “I’m ready.”

And just like that, Patrick lifted off, guiding the ship toward the upper atmosphere where the blockade loomed. Soon enough, we reached the shimmering wall of Mist. Reaching out with a hundred Mist tendrils, I deactivated the nanites in the immediate area. At the same time, I kept the flow of other nanites out of the resulting hole just long enough for the Leviathan to escape into space.

Without my [Multi-Mind], I never would have managed so many threads of thought at once. But with it, I accomplished the task at hand.

And just like that, we had broken through the blockade.

Briefly, I considered telling Patrick to leave Earth behind. We had enough supplies to last for a few weeks, and we had access to all of Alistaris’ star maps. We could escape and find a life somewhere else.

But those thoughts only lasted a split second before I discarded them. I didn’t think I owed Earth anything. They’d never really given me anything but grief. But there were individual people down there I wanted to save. And besides, I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to run away in defeat.

So, I said, “Well, that’s one obstacle clear. Now, we just have to get through that without alerting anyone.”

The that in question was a fleet of a thousand norcite coated drones between the Leviathan and the looming form of the Infinite Conquest.

I turned to Patrick and said, “You’re up.”