There were some major issues with the sensor array, which delayed its
activation. Aeterna promised that she had nothing to do with it, but they
weren’t the dome police, so she wouldn’t have owed them an explanation
either way. It was a year later now, and they were back on track. It would
be turned on in a few days, when the team was out of the timestream again.
It was inevitable, though, that the descendants of the Oblivios would start
noticing the giant tower in the middle of their habitat. Well, they wouldn’t
notice it, per se, but their instruments would claim that it was there, and
if the Valerians didn’t want to damage people’s psyches, they would reveal
themselves. They still didn’t know exactly how they were going to explain
it, but now hoped maybe someone on the team had a good idea.
“I don’t know that we have to worry about it,” Leona claimed. They had spent
the rest of yesterday in the penthouse, but now they were getting a look at
the lower floors. She recognized them, and it clicked. “This is Arvazna.”
Mateo winced. “That micronation that you owned in The Third Rail?”
“That I will own,” Leona corrected. “It hasn’t happened yet, from
this building’s perspective.”
“It was 130 years ago,” Marie reminded her. “I know, we’re time travelers,
but if this thing ends up on an alternate Earth, thereby avoiding being
detected here on Doma, it’s going to have to leave soon, and it’s going to
have to go back in time, and then it’s going to have to be shunted to a
parallel reality that doesn’t exist in present day.”
“The whole thing doesn’t have to end up there,” Mateo said. “This thing is,
what, forty times larger than that one?”
“That’s true,” Leona agreed, examining the walls. “Tertius, how is this
thing attached to the dome? Is it buried in the ground, or hanging from the
apex?”
“Both, basically,” he answered. “They’re connected. It’s like a giant pillar
connecting the ground to the top. Or a column? I don’t know, I’m not an
engineer. I just asked Étude to build it, and she used her magicks.”
“I assume you have specifications for it, though,” Ramses said. “We would
like to look at those. If we’re gonna bootstrap this tower to the Third
Rail—or part of it—we will need to know how it works first.”
“Are you being serious? Are you just gonna make the tower disappear for us?”
Tertius pressed.
“I think we’re fated to,” Leona said. The three of them went back upstairs,
along with Aeterna and Marie, who was mostly just curious.
“I don’t know what understanding the engineering of the tower is going to do
for them,” Mateo lamented. “You can’t just move a tower like this. None of
us has that kind of power.”
“It doesn’t have to be one of us,” Olimpia claimed. “We already know someone
who can do it. Well, we don’t know they can do it at scale, but we just met
them. You partied with one of them.”
Mateo considered all the people he had met recently before landing on a
guess. “The Overseers?”
“Yeah,” Olimpia confirmed. “They can just make one of their black hole
portals, and send it through.”
“How’s the building going to move?” Mateo questioned.
“Gravity,” Romana suggested. “They can make the portal on the surface of the
ground, and it will just fall through.”
“Is that even possible?” Mateo asked. “I’m guessing the foundation runs
several kilometers deep. Could they get under it somehow?”
“You’ll have to ask them.”
“You want me to Boyd my way to them,” Mateo presumed.
“We don’t have time to get there and back using the slingdrives,” Angela
reminded him. “It takes too long to recharge.”
“Plus, only you can find them through the dark particles,” Romana added.
A few hours later, Leona chuckled upon seeing Magnolia and Garland. “We were
just gonna suggest that.”
“Great minds,” Romana mused.
“Can you do it?” Ramses asked the dark portal makers. “Can you make a portal
wide enough to fit the tower?”
“The width alone is not really the problem,” Garland began. “Holding it long
enough will be.”
“It’s not really the time either, son,” Magnolia said to him before facing
Leona, “it’s the mass. I can hold a portal open for several minutes if
nothing goes through in that time. But a tower? How long would you need? How
long would it take to fall?”
“If we time it right,” Leona replied, “from the moment we release the
clamps, to the second the roof makes it past the threshold, I would feel
most comfortable with a minute and a half. With Proxima Doma’s gravity, it’s
going to fall fairly fast, and get there in under that time.”
Magnolia’s eyes widened. “Whew, that’s a lot.”
“Together we can, though,” Garland said confidently.
She smiled at him. “Yeah, I’m sure we could do it. It would be a hell of a
lot easier to send it somewhere with lower gravity, though, like outer
space. I don’t know how to get it to another reality in the past anyway, so
this would be just a stop-gap measure.”
“We just gotta get it out of the dome,” Rames said.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, everyone,” Tertius finally
jumped. “I regret asking them to build it in the first place. It was never
necessary, and this isn’t the first headache I’ve gotten from it.”
Everybody filed into the elevator, and went down to the surface. The
Overseers and the smart people began to survey the tower, and the
surrounding area, rapidly developing their plan to make a gigantic building
disappear. It was not a good plan, it was just the only one they had. Any
number of things could go wrong. The Valerians could make the inhabitants
forget they saw something unexplainable, but if the calculations were off by
a single decimal point, memory would be the least of their problems. The
apocalyptic explosion from the falling tower would send shockwaves across
the surface...literally. It would decimate the dome, at best, and certainly
kill everyone in it. As they were standing there, trying to consider every
contingency, a tremor came through to remind them what started all this. It
was a small one, but a herald of times far worse. They could see the nearest
city shake in the distance. Nothing serious broke apart, but they could see
some from here, and tons of dust, and it might have been more destructive in
other regions.
“We better do this now,” Magnolia decided. “If the ground begins to shake
during the attempt, we could lose our balance.”
“That tremor means the big one is coming,” Leona tried to explain, “not that
we won’t have another for a while.”
“Then let’s get on with it,” Aeterna contended.
“It could be minutes,” Leona warned, “and it’s not your call.”
“No, it’s ours,” Garland argued. “I say we do it, and we do it now. Ninety
seconds is all we have available to us anyway.”
Just in case they needed a couple of extra hands, Angela teleported up to
the control room in the penthouse with Tertius and Ramses, so they could
release the clamps connecting the tower to the dome. They were coordinating
on comms, relayed to Magnolia by Leona on one side of the cylinder, and
Marie on the other with Garland. They were still in the middle of the
process when another tremor began. “Guys, we need to abort,” Leona urged.
No, she begged.
It was pretty much too late, though. Declamping the tower links wasn’t a
single step. For clamps that large, it happened in stages, and they had
already opened the first two stages, which placed them at more risk if they
didn’t just move forward, full steam ahead.
“On my mark,” the team could hear Ramses say through comms. As he
counted down, Leona and Marie’s voices synced with his, “eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one,
mark!” They slammed their fists down in the air, and pointed to the Overseers.
Magnolia and Garland opened a joint dark portal, slicing through the bottom
floor like a hot knife through butter. The tower started to fall through. It
was a magnificent sight to behold. The people in the control room appeared
back down on the ground next to Mateo, Olimpia, and Romana.
“We can’t hold it anymore!” Leona cried, just about immediately,
repeating what Magnolia was saying.
Marie reported a similar sentiment from Garland. “It’s worse than we thought! Best we can do is collapse the portal
uncleanly, and generate an annihilating vortex!”
“I’ve never done that before!” Magnolia argued.
“Do it now!” Garland urged. There was absolutely no time to argue.
After only about ten or eleven seconds, the portal fell apart, but it didn’t
just evaporate into nothing. It exploded from the ground, and ate up part of
the tower like a Lucius bomb. Unlike an L-bomb, though, it didn’t travel
very far. Almost all of the tower was now falling towards them, preparing to
crash on the surface. Leona teleported Magnolia out of the dome while Marie
took Garland. Ramses hugged both Valerians, and spirited them away to
safety.
Mateo was about to teleport too when he saw his wife, Olimpia take her
Sangster Canopy out of her bag. She didn’t even give him the chance to
protest before she jumped only a couple hundred meters away, directly
underneath the falling tower. She opened it, and aimed it at the
annihilator. She sent pockets of new space out of the tip. It wasn’t holding
up the tower, but perpetually making the ground farther and farther away
from it. She couldn’t hold on forever, though, and in fact, not for any
meaningful amount of time. The Oblivios could not evacuate before she lost
control. The first to escape would probably still be in the tunnel when it
happened, and still be caught in the destruction. This was a desperate
attempt doomed to fail.
But maybe Mateo could help instead. Both he and Romana jumped over to her,
and took hold of the umbrella. “No!” he argued. “Just me! You two get out of
here!”
“I know what you’re planning, dad! I can help!”
“You don’t have dark particles anymore!”
“Oh, yes, I do! Get out of here, mom!”
“Mom?” Olimpia echoed. “You’ve never called me mom before.”
“Go!” Olimpia reiterated.
“I love you!” Olimpia disappeared.
“Is this gonna work?” Mateo asked his daughter.
“Hell, yeah, it will!”
They both screamed their heads off. A massive swarm of dark particles
erupted from them, through the umbrella. They were still adding space
between them and the tower, but they were experiencing diminishing returns.
It and the swarm met in the middle, but it was taking time for the dark
particles to cover the entire thing. Meanwhile, it continued to fall, closer
and closer to the surface. It might have appeared to be going rather slow
from the outside, but it was actually accelerating, and would strike the
planet with an even greater force than it would have had they done nothing
but save themselves. The particles were nearly at full coverage and the
tower was nearly upon them when the rest of the team appeared next to them.
One by one, they took hold of the handle or the shaft, wherever they could
find purchase.
“There’s nothing you can do to help!” Mateo shouted at them.
“We can die together!” Leona reasoned.
“That’s freaking stupid!” Romana volleyed.
“Don’t talk to your mother like that!” Olimpia scolded.
They continued to scream into the wind, as a team, and as they struggled to
hold on, they started to float in the air a little. With one final push of
their might, the dark particles turned all sorts of colors, and disappeared,
as did the tower, and the whole team with them.
