The second or so that he arced over the water seemed to stretch toward forever, even without the Zen. The storm above the Nymphs had spun up to a tornado that spouted snow up into the atmosphere and whipped the fogs across his visual layer. The sky blossomed yellow-green as rays cut down from above the atmosphere to trace the fleeing hawks. He still had a grenade in his starboard tube and sixty-three slugs in the tank: not much, but he could have finished off Nine. If he wasn’t so tired. His Egg finally bounced off the surface of the lake, skipping and tumbling once before it plunged in.
The water wrapped around him and crowned before it pulled him down. From beneath the surface, the lake was crystal clear, not dark and murky as it had seemed from above. It was silent and peaceful. Roger’s open shell rocked slowly only a few meters away. Red Eggs squirmed between the rocks near the shore. Through the wavery blue haze, the Silver’s porthole windows glowed. At the center of the lake, a vortex swirled at the center of the Nymphs’ dance in reflection of the storm above. Strangely enough, as far away as they were, and as hard as the water roiled there, Cormick could see that the bare heels of the Nymphs were tattooed. The floor was littered with the corpses of Squishies, and somewhere among them, the body of Byrie.
Then, above the lake, above the storm, the heavens opened and a pillar of white fire burned down toward the valley. He knew what it was: the same plasma lance he’d seen destroy Red’s battleship. It was meters wide – enough to turn the entire valley to dust, to boil away the lake and the Goddesses dancing on it, to bake the Eggs to a fine powder. But it didn’t. The storm above the lake swallowed the beam and focused it like a lens, drew it in like a funnel to pierce down through the circle described by the Nymphs’ dance, down through the swirling water in pencil-thin, blindingly bright ray, and into the valley floor. The Nymphs’ song swelled in climax. Cormick’s sensors burned white and washed through his brain, but not before he saw a tongue of orange flame erupt back up and out of the valley floor.
The white light and final note of the Nymphs’ song hummed with an intensity that washed over Cormick and became a still calm.
Through the warmth of the amniotic fluid around him, he felt the tickle of icy cold.
Gaya’s disembodied face appeared behind his closed eyes. “That’s enough, Man,” she sang, with a voice sweet and melodious. Her smile soothed his soul. “You’ve done enough. It’s time to go home.”
