Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Something was definitely there, in the darkness.
I flexed. My talent rolled outward, trying to measure the distance to the gloom, and falling short.
Woof.
Another stone bridge ran below us, leading to the right. It was a twenty-foot drop. If we got down there, I could use my rope to climb back up.
Woof.
“Okay. We’ll go check it out. Up!”
Bear leaped into my arms. I held her the same way I carried Mellow, my cream cat, and jumped down. We landed on the lower stone bridge. The impact punched through the soles of my feet into my legs. I stuck the landing like an Olympic gymnast. Maybe once I got out of here, I would go for a career change. Not many forty-year-old acrobats debuting out there. I’d be a sensation.
I let Bear down, and we headed toward the shadows.
What the hell would I do once I got out? First, I’d need to make sure Cold Chaos didn’t have a chance to unalive me, as Tia would put it. I was living proof of their fuckup. A huge liability. A week ago, or however long it had been since we entered, I would have said that a major guild, especially Cold Chaos, wouldn’t stoop that low. The risks were too great. But now I didn’t just expect the worst, I counted on it.
Assuming that we made it out alive and jumped the Cold Chaos hurdle, the DDC would want the full account of what happened. I had two choices. First, I could demonstrate my newfound powers and come clean. Second, I could hide.
The first option meant … the end of my life as I knew it. Possibly in more ways than one. I had encountered sentient, sapient lifeforms. I communicated with them, I traded with them, and I witnessed irrefutable evidence of other civilizations. Not just one vague amorphous enemy, but an entire constellation of different sophont species. Not beasts, not monsters. Thinking, feeling beings.
And some of them, like the spider herders, were not overtly hostile. They would defend themselves if we gave them no choice, but that brief flash of knowledge from my gem assured me that they just wanted to be left alone.
The spider herders didn’t seem surprised to see me. Looking back at their calm reactions, they had to have seen humans before, and they instantly knew I was sadrin. I didn’t understand what sadrin was, but they did, and they treated me with respect.
The breaches had been active for nearly a decade. Thousands of gates, maybe a hundred thousand gate divers worldwide. Someone had to have seen what I’d seen, and yet there was no mention of non-hostile sophonts anywhere in the DDC archives.
Which meant that somewhere, very high up, a decision was made to keep their existence suppressed.
It made sense. When I was in college, I read a science fiction novel about space marines fighting against insectoid aliens. Bugs. Big horrific bugs. The space marines slaughtered them by thousands and never felt bad about it, because in real life we designated bugs as something that could be killed without guilt. We had exterminators and pesticides, and we never questioned the ethics of it.
Reducing your enemy to the level of a bug or a mindless monster eliminated the guilt of taking their life. When faced with war, humans always dehumanized their opponents. You only had to look at the WWII era cartoons to see it.
Right now, the breaches were filled with monsters. The gate divers fought them, and the rest of us supported them and thanked them for their service. We unified to repel the invasion, and we did not question the morality of that fight. It was okay to hate the enemy, because it was a mindless horde of bioweapons who sought to wipe us from existence.
If I came out and told everyone that I encountered sapient beings, had a chat with some of them, and met a human who spoke to me and put something into my head that was actively changing who I was, I would explode that social construct.
The united front would fracture. Some people would immediately argue for scouring the breach in an effort to bargain and communicate; some people would panic; others would attempt to defect. The major religions would have to undergo yet another series of contortions to try to explain away the multitude of civilizations just like they had to twist themselves into a pretzel a decade ago to explain the gates to their worshippers. Humanity would stew in its own instability and navel gazing, and we couldn’t afford to do that. We had to continue to destroy the anchors, or we would be overrun.
If I opened that door, the government, my employers, would disappear me before I was able to make a difference. They probably wouldn’t kill me right away. First, they would confine me. I would be interrogated, studied, and analyzed, and either quietly disposed of or made into a weapon. I was ridiculously easy to control. As long as the DDC held Tia and Noah hostage, I would do whatever they wanted. The lives of my children would be hanging in the balance.