Page 61 of Tears of Tungsten
But if we’d been willing to sacrifice those innocents to save Charybdis, we were willing to go even further for Selene. As the wolf emerged more and more from inside me and I felt my mind start to crack, I hoped and prayed that I got to Selene before I forgot who and what I was.
* * *
August
If pressed, I’d have admitted that I hadn’t originally believed that I was an apsid. When Penelope had first mentioned it, I’d thought she was full of shit. All my life, I’d been human, an integral part of Terra’s armies. I’d fought deadly battles against apsids. How could I suddenly accept I was one of them?
It had been Charybdis who’d convinced me there might be something to Penelope’s claims. According to her, she’d always suspected there was something not quite human about me.“It doesn’t have to be a bad thing,”she had said.“It’s a weapon, August, one you can wield against your enemies, to save your broodmate.”
After I’d heard that, it hadn’t taken me long to accept Penelope’s claims. Maybe it was a little crazy and maybe under different circumstances, I’d have seriously freaked out. But like Charybdis had said, the abilities of an apsid could only help us, now that they’d stolen Selene.
Arriving in the quasar proved this theory beyond a shadow of a doubt. The others did very well in handling the energies of the accretion disk, but in the end, chimeras weren’t built to handle this kind of power output. I took the lead and did my best to absorb more, to force us all through.
It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Oh, we emerged on the other side safely enough, but we also ran straight into an army of apsids.
Truth be told, this didn’t surprise me very much. Brendan might have said he wanted to sneak onto the alien home world of our foes, but I suspected he’d always guessed it was a long shot. We all had, and we’d been prepared for what it would mean.
Maybe this had always been a suicidal mission, a way to pay our dues for failing Selene. But just the same, we refused to give up without a fight, and the apsid’s request that we do so only made us all angrier.
Knox lunged at one of the crystallized units and his savagery made me think he might be throwing aside some of his humanity. Pollux mimicked him, Scylla’s tentacles and wolf heads moving around with a speed I knew would not be sustainable. Typhon sacrificed three of his snake heads to distract the units closest to him while he engaged two others in combat.
I could do no less. In fact, I could do more, because once again, being an apsid gave me an edge over the rest of my team.
Despite my lovers’ efforts, the crystallized apsid units surrounded us from every direction. Charybdis’s sensors started screaming, alerting me to imminent attacks. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, lying back down against the piloting seat in a more comfortable position.
This would take everything I had and possibly even kill me. But it might also earn the others the opening they needed to pass through and save Selene.
The neural link between me and Charybdis exploded with power and pain. I jerked against the seat belts, but didn’t try to escape. This was it. This was the moment when I’d have to make a stand.
Every chimera had a unique ability that went beyond their tachyon manipulation skills. For Medusa, it had been her ability to petrify people. For Typhon, it was the toxic fumes. Sphinx appeared to have some kind of mind-reading skill, although I’d yet to figure out exactly how it worked.
Charybdis could create black holes. Granted, hers were small compared to the one we were in, but they worked very well as weapons.
Unfortunately, the skill wasn’t easy to use even when we were in our own galaxy. It required an almost prohibitive degree of concentration and effort. I was far better at tachyon manipulation and technopathy, so I preferred to not use this option.
I didn’t have that luxury now.
Creating a black hole inside a black hole was a paradox, since by its nature, this anomaly we were in exerted a huge amount of force on every single entity inside it. But making our way into a quasar and surviving the crushing force of the event horizon had also seemed an impossibility, so why not break this law too?
“Because it could break you,”Charybdis muttered.
“And yet, we’re going to do it anyway,” I replied. “Just do it, Charybdis, but tell the others to fall back.”
She mentally sighed, but followed my commands. A few seconds later, my lovers stopped their vicious assault on the crystallized units and retreated, granting me the opening I needed. The apsids seemed confused by this approach, and didn’t follow them. Charybdis took advantage of the opportunity to use her skill.
Even with my eyes closed, I could see her opening her massive mouth and starting to suck. A whirlpool of utter nothingness opened in front of us and our reality started to swirl, protesting the addition of the secondary black hole. The quasar itself shook, fighting the assault to its structure.
Naturally, Charybdis’s power wouldn’t be able to unbalance something like a supermassive black hole. She just didn’t have enough juice and even a Grand Chimera had her limits. But we could affect the area closest to us.
I had to be very careful, though. Charybdis’s black holes were localized and she could control the exact amount of suction she used. But in this space, it wasn’t out of the question that she’d lose control of her power. That could have devastating side-effects on the other members of my team.
Because of that apprehension, I was forced to feed more power into the core of the Charybdis. It helped shield us from my risky attack, but it also made my organs feel like they were being pulled out of my body.
Charybdis still pushed, because I forced her too. She pushed until she couldn’t push any longer.“I’m not going to kill you for this, August,”she told me.“You’ve done enough.”
I would have protested, but I tasted blood in my mouth and my skin felt flaky, as if it had been scorched off all over again. Besides, Charybdis’s skill had already done what it was meant to. At least half of the crystallized apsid units had been taken out by the instability in the quasar. That gave us a real chance to break through in a way we hadn’t had before.
As Charybdis closed her mouth, Brendan rallied our whole unit behind him. “Now! Take them out! Don’t let them recover!”
