They step over the wracked corpses, smoke pouring from their mouths, from the gaping holes in their chests. A few are still alive. One, a middle-aged man in a Navy surplus flight jacket, grabs the harness of Danneth’s boot.
“I know what you are,” he croaks.
Danneth crouches down low, sweeping back the half-cape. “Do you think us inhuman?” he asks the man, making no move to disengage the hand on his boot. “In a literal sense, I mean.”
“I know what you are,” the man repeats. These are his last words.
Arric removes the door of the bunker without laying a finger on it and the akropophytes stagger out into the morning sun. Before they can speak, Arric has cast a binding spell around them. The electromagnetic field engulfs the akropophytes. By Arric’s hand they rise through the air.
“You two are pathetic. We give you the power of the akropolia and you hide like children while monkeys shake you in a can.”
Defiant beasts live in the dark caves of Arric’s eyes. Danneth knows he has overridden his second-in-command enough for the day. The next action is his to take alone.
Electricity crackles up through the stream tethering Arric to the field and infects the spherical force surrounding the young men. They begin screaming as it courses through their muscles.
Danneth turns away, leaving the akropophytes to be disciplined.
I know what you are.
“So do I,” Danneth says to no one.
* * *
Danneth is eighteen and he has the power to eat worlds. The government has no choice but to deal with him. At first the akropolia supplement the old forces; they did in the Middle East in two weeks what the president was still stumbling over after twenty years. Traditional police are obsolete. Two akropolia can maintain order in each city. Armies follow. Soldiers, weapons, technology, they all become meaningless. Danneth can render a nuclear reactor inert from halfway around the world. He can boil submarines at the farthest depths of the ocean. He can bring down planes or cast a spell that causes the sky to swallow them.
Their power is as absolute as the protests are inevitable. Congress passes a bill to restrict the akropolia’s authority. The bill is ignored. Danneth learns the United States government is conspiring with three rival nations to develop a technology that will retard the runati’s effect on human brain chemistry.
The akropolia make their first true alliance with the Chinese. Danneth will oversee the construction of a Manchurian Akropolis. The American government considers this an act of war.
The war lasts approximately 18 hours.
* * *
When Danneth and Arric return to the Akropolis, a page is waiting with an official communiqué from the LSoN. Danneth has been invited to a summit in Geneva, hosted by what’s being called The Last Stand of Nations, to negotiate a treaty between the akropolia and the final holdouts of human civilization.
“It was a mistake to let them regroup there,” Arric says. “And I don’t understand this need of yours to negotiate. Imbuing them with power they don’t have. I could pacify the entire continent myself, tonight.”
“ ‘Pacify.’ You mean subjugate.”
“Semantical horse shit. The akropolia rule this planet, Danneth. We don’t govern. We don’t serve. We rule. You can dance around the word, but its meaning dictates our actions. It baffles me how you’ve brought us this far with your attitude.”
A crowd has gathered, akropophytes and akropolia alike, black cassocks and gleaming pauldrons. Arric has sympathizers, admirers, followers. Soon he’ll challenge Danneth for leadership of the akropolia.
“I’ll take the evening to consider it,” he says.
* * *
Danneth is twenty-four and the last vestige of the American government has been swept away. Fort Braddock fell at 6:13 this morning, Akropolis time. Danneth pulled the general’s skeleton through his skin. He orders it to be cast in bronze above the fort’s welcome banner as a memorial. And a warning.
The akropolia now rule unopposed.
* * *
The next morning at breakfast in the main hall, Brya, forever Danneth’s most loyal supporter, publicly accuses Arric of committing a very ugly assault against her. Arric is surprised, but only for a moment. Then he looks to Danneth. Arric is smart. That’s the problem.
Danneth makes the challenge that Brya’s accusation has allowed him to make. The duel is epic. Arric thinks it’s because he and Danneth are so evenly matched. Danneth knows it’s because that’s what they expect, the other akropolia and their citizens. They’ve bought into the myth they’ve become, the myth Danneth helped architect.
In the end he superheats Arric’s blood to a temperature of roughly one thousand degrees. His body does not melt, it explodes. A grand deathblow. It’s a feat beyond Arric’s ability to defend, beyond any of the akropolia’s ability to cast. But that will change. In time, their power will grow. Danneth, however, will always be one level beyond their reach, and that is how he will lead.
That night he dispatches the akropolia to lay waste to Western Europe. The Last Stand of Nations is barely that. The remaining populace surrender unconditionally.
* * *
Danneth is sixty and he is no longer recognizable as human.
* * *
Danneth is one hundred and seventy-four years old and he awaits their arrival.
Many seconds have served under him, but he still remembers Arric well. Arric was right about Geneva. Danneth realized that then. But he was wrong about the akropolia. They were never meant to rule.
They are meant to serve.
Soon there’ll come a night like the one when he was a boy. A night when the sky falls again, and their masters, the true masters of the Akropolis, will come home.
•
Boojum
Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately?—when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by.
The Lavinia Whateley was a Boojum, a deep-space swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.
Where there was light, she could make oxygen. Where there was oxygen, she could make water.
She was an ecosystem unto herself, as the captain was a law unto herself. And down in the bowels of the engineering section, Black Alice Bradley, who was only human and no kind of law at all, loved her.
Black Alice had taken the oath back in ’32, after the Venusian Riots. She hadn’t hidden her reasons, and the captain had looked at her with cold, dark, amused eyes and said, “So long as you carry your weight, cherie, I don’t care. Betray me, though, and you will be going back to Venus the cold way.” But it was probably that—and the fact that Black Alice couldn’t hit the broad side of a space freighter with a ray gun—that had gotten her assigned to Engineering, where ethics were less of a problem. It wasn’t, after all, as if she was going anywhere.
Black Alice was on duty when the Lavinia Whateley spotted prey; she felt the shiver of anticipation that ran through the decks of the ship. It was an odd sensation, a tic Vinnie only exhibited in pursuit. And then they were underway, zooming down the slope of the gravity well toward Sol, and the screens all around Engineering—which Captain Song kept dark, most of the time, on the theory that swabs and deckhands and coal-shovelers didn’t need to know where they were, or what they were doing—flickered bright and live.