The Black Gate (The Messenger #11) - J.N. Chaney Page 0,43
can’t ask you to leave everything behind, but I must. The Deepers are not like the Golden. They’re not like us. Nothing about them tracks as the kind of life we understand, but they have one purpose, one gift—killing life—and that’s why I’m taking us through to the gate. We’re going to fight them as far from here as we can, and when we kick them in the teeth, we’re going to push forward even more, until there are none of them left. I don’t care where it happens, and I don’t care how it happens, but it’s written in the stars that we, the Cygnus Realm, are going to defend life where we can.” Dash sighed, and for a moment, he looked tired and older. Worn.
But resigned.
“Follow me again, and I’ll do everything I can to see to it that we live. But if we stay here, our friends on the other side will die, and we will never be safe. We’re a free society, and the choice is yours. I ask you to make your decision knowing that if you stay you do so with my thanks. You’ve all done enough,” Dash said.
The murmur rose, faces turning to each other, then to Dash, and then there was a mix of grim determination among the crowd.
“We fight. We go and close that gate, and we kick ass on the other side of it, far away from our homes.” Amy turned to Bercale. “I know you guys suffered a terrible loss, but if we can head off this war before it starts and just leave it all to play out on the other side of the galaxy, then don’t we go?”
Bercale gave a slow nod, remembering the loss of his people. “I haven’t forgotten, and I’ll never forgive.” He turned to Dash. “But if we can stop any more of our people from getting hurt or killed—yeah, we should. No hesitation. Like Amy said, we go.”
“We talked about this on the other side of the Gate,” Benzel put in. “Trouble is, we’re not even sure how the Deepers are generating it—”
“Or, for that matter, even if they are,” Leira said. “Who knows, it could be natural phenomenon and the Deepers just took advantage of it.”
“Bottom line,” Benzel said, “is that we don’t know how it works, so we don’t know how to close it.”
“Custodian and the other AIs might be able to come up with an answer,” Conover said. “We gather data on it, study it—”
“And we close it, then the Deepers just open another one,” Dash said. “And a hundred years from now, our grandchildren are faced with the very thing we could have crushed. That’s the reality we’re looking at.”
“There are also whole races on the other side of that Gate that have pretty much no defense against the Deepers,” Leira said. “At least one of them is human.”
“All due respect to them,” Al’Bijea replied, “but there are many races throughout the galaxy. It isn’t feasible for us to even begin to presume we can save them all.”
Dash stepped forward a pace, looking at Al’Bijea in particular. “You’ve got nothing to prove here. You’ve fought with honor and bravery, even when it wasn’t really your fight.”
“But?” Ragsdale said. “I can tell there’s a but coming.”
Harolyn spoke first. “Gates make the universe smaller, and not in a good way. If these Deepers have them, they’re going to clean out the Sagittarius arm and then come for us. No question. From a military standpoint, the choice is easy. We can fight them now, before they’re established—and help out some other races while we do. Or we can wait, let them get settled in, then we—or, like Dash says, our children, or grandchildren—can face them later, when they’ve built a network of bases.” She turned back to Dash. “I’m ready to do this, Dash. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to—but I will, because it needs to be done.”
“You have already heard my declaration, Messenger,” Kai said. “The Order of the Unseen stands with you.”
“I’m going wherever he does,” Leira said. “And frankly, it’s the right thing to do.”
One by one, the rest of them announced that although they weren’t happy to be going back to war, they would. Finally, only Al’Bijea remained.
“The Aquarian Collective participated fully in the war against the Golden,” Al’Bijea said. “We lost hundreds of people. I am not anxious to call upon the Aquarians to do that again.”