Capítulo 13 La furia del trueno #5

It hurt. He was honest about this. At the frequency level, at the divine expression level.

It hurt taking a significant hit from a significant power.

The thing that happened when you absorbed more than your system ran at ambient.

He took it. He had taken worse. He stepped into it and he kept moving.

The hammer's second arc connected at the relic’s frequency.

Not at the command source. At the relic.

The artifact that was doing the amplification, the artifact whose frequency he could feel because it was from his world and he knew its signature.

The relic's response to Mjolnir at contact frequency was significant.

The amplification loop broke at the connection point.

A structural failure of an amplification system when the amplifying frequency is disrupted at its source.

The sixty percent accumulated charge lost its direction.

The power was still there, it was still in the command source's system, but the direction function was severed, the ability to project and apply the accumulated power broken at the relic's amplification circuit.

The command source made a sound. Not the prelinguistic frequency of its communication.

A sound that he filed under first time he heard something of this age expresses anything he could identify as pain.

He hit it again. Full output. The Aesir fire at the maximum, Mjolnir at the resonance destruction frequency, the sustained output that required everything he had and was, at this moment, everything he had.

The root note changed. It had been the constant ambient presence since he'd entered the formation.

The permeating quality of the oldest frequency in the environment, the thing that everything else in the stronghold derived from.

It changed, not ending, not silenced, but fractured, the frequency that has lost its central coherence, which is still present but no longer unified.

The command source retreated. Not destroyed. Not ended. Retreated into the geological formation with the retreat something that is at the limit of what it can sustain in direct engagement and has the intelligence to know the difference between push further and withdraw to preserve what remains.

He let it go. Not because he couldn't follow it.

He could follow it, could pursue it through the rock with the divine capacity for following things that retreated into environments that were hostile to human approach.

He let it go because the stronghold above him contained forty preserved people and extraction personnel and the ongoing fight in the upper sections that needed resolution and Elara against the chamber wall with a fractured arm managing the extraction.

He let it go and he took the relic. The physical act of taking the relic from the command source's retreat had left it.

The withdrawal had separated the relic from the command source's direct hold.

It was there in the deep section, the artifact that had been running this operation for seven decades.

He took it in his hand and the feeling of it was the feel of something from his world that had been somewhere else for a very long time.

That had the feel a thing that has been misused and that is now, finally, back in the right hands.

He stood in the deep section of the stronghold with the relic in his hand and Mjolnir in the other and the fractured root note all around him and the distant sounds of the engagement in the upper sections coming through the rock.

He looked toward the preservation chamber.

He went back. The extraction team had reached the chamber.

Erik’s eight hunters in the professional mode of people doing an extraction.

Moving with the grim focused efficiency that the task required.

Aroha was there, her South Island knowledge translating to the extraction logistics in the way that local knowledge always translated.

And Elara was in the center of it, directing.

One arm, fractured on the right. The left ankle was taking weight but carefully.

Her ribs doing whatever they were doing.

And she was directing the extraction with the operational voice he knew.

The flat, precise, complete voice that brooked no ambiguity and required no repetition and got things done and the eight hunters were doing what she was directing because she was clearly the most competent person in the room, which was true regardless of the fractured arm.

He stood in the chamber entry, and he watched for a moment.

She looked up and saw him. She read the situation in the same instant she saw him, his face, the relic in his hand and she did the accounting in real time the way she did everything in real time. "The command source," she said.

"Retreated," he said. "Not destroyed. Retreated."

"The relic," she said.

"We have it," he said.

She held his gaze for a moment. The full weight of what that meant was the amplification circuit was broken. The network coordination severed, the charge cycle stopped was present in the look.

"Good," she said. The single word with all the weight of the forty people in the pods and the six hours of engagement and the fractured arm and the reconnaissance in the predawn dark and the whole of it. "Help me get them out."

He crossed the chamber to her, and he put the relic in his belt, and he put his hands to the work, and they got the people out.