A red line tore open in space, twenty meters wide with edges flickering like static on a dead screen. The portal held for three seconds before the sphere shot through.
Scarlet metal, smooth and seamless, moving fast enough to leave a trail of red particles hanging in the void behind it before fading slowly.
Inside, suspended in translucent gel, a woman floated unconscious. Her chest rose and fell in weak, uneven movements. The gel had a pink tint now as blood spread through it in thin clouds.
Data streams lit up the sphere's interior with seventeen points on the woman's body glowing red. Ruptured spleen. Three fractured ribs pressing against her left lung. Internal bleeding in her abdomen. Her heart rate was dropping: sixty beats per minute, then fifty-eight, then fifty-five.
Text appeared, projected onto the gel:
MISSION 1: REACH DIMENSION 8712390823-INF
STATUS: FAILED. DIMENSIONAL TRANSIT FUEL EXHAUSTED.
MISSION 2: PROTECT PASSENGER LIFE
STATUS: CRITICAL.
ACTION: LOCATING VIABLE HABITAT FOR EMERGENCY LANDING.
The sphere adjusted course and stars slid past the viewport, white points against black. It had already crossed three systems inside the fissure: gray worlds with dead skies, unstable stars, and gas giants with nowhere to land. None of them met survival parameters.
Now it approached the fourth system.
A yellow sun, stable, with four planets in orbit. The sphere slowed as it entered the system's edge and sensors swept across each planet.
Planet one was too close to the sun with a molten surface.
Planet two was frozen with an atmosphere of methane and ammonia.
Planet three was the same, an ice world.
Planet four... the sensors took six full seconds to process it. Heat signatures across three continents. Liquid water and vast oceans. Oxygen at 18% atmospheric composition. And life, carbon-based with humanoid skeletal structure detected in multiple locations.
But there was something else.
An energy field surrounded the entire planet. The sphere's sensors traced it carefully, finding that the field started at 200 kilometers above the surface and extended outward another fifty kilometers. Thick and layered, the field pulsed in slow waves, each pulse sending ripples of blue-white light across its surface.
Artificial, and the energy signatures didn't match anything natural.
The sphere ran analysis protocols, searching for gaps, weak points, and entry corridors.
Nothing.
The field was seamless. The readings didn't match anything in the sphere's database, unknown energy type, unknown construction method.
More data appeared:
GRAVITY: 1.4 EARTH STANDARD
ATMOSPHERIC ANOMALY: UNKNOWN COMPOUND, 3% CONCENTRATION
AUTHORIZED ENTRY POINTS: 0
The sphere calculated the outcome: if it tried to force through, structural integrity would fail, the gel suspension would rupture, and the woman would die on impact.
Survival probability: 2%.
Inside the sphere, an alarm started beeping softly. The woman's heart rate hit forty-two beats per minute and kept falling.
The sphere's core vibrated through the structure, a deep mechanical tremor that made the gel ripple around her body.
2% was better than 0%.
The sphere accelerated and the hum turned into a roar. Every system routed power to propulsion. The planet's energy field ahead began to glow. Layers of blue light rippled across it, reacting to the incoming sphere.
It locked on target and pushed harder.
Ten kilometers out, then five, then one.
Contact.
The impact lit up the entire field. White light exploded outward in a perfect sphere, expanded for half a second, then collapsed back. The scarlet sphere punched through. Metal screamed as it forced a hole three meters wide through the barrier.
Warning signals flashed across the inner surface.
HULL TEMPERATURE CRITICAL.
STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY DROPPING FAST.
Behind it, the energy field closed. Blue-white light flowed like liquid, sealing the gap. In seconds there was no trace of the breach.
But something had changed.
The barrier pulsed once, then twice, and ripples spread across its entire surface. Then it flickered for just a moment. The blue-white glow dimmed slightly before stabilizing.
-------------------------------------------------------
Damaged.
Below, in a forest that stretched to the horizon, the Giant stood among the trees.
Three hundred ninety feet tall and humanoid shape. The trees around it barely reached its knees.
White skin, the color of paper or bone. The surface appeared smooth until you got close enough to see thousands of cracks covering every inch, like porcelain about to shatter.
The body was too thin for something that tall with arms longer than they should be, hanging past where knees would be on a human and the limbs moved in smooth curves.
It was naked and hairless with smooth white surface where reproductive organs should have been.
The head was featureless except for hundreds of eyes.
They covered the entire head in every size imaginable, from dinner-plate large down to grape small, in shapes ranging from round to oval to nearly rectangular. The colors varied wildly: brown, blue, green, black, red, yellow, orange. Some had pupils and some didn't.
Each eye looked in a different direction, tracking birds, following wind in the leaves, watching ants three hundred feet below, and monitoring the sky, the ground, everything at once.
The forest around it was old with trees that had trunks thirty feet thick and a canopy so dense the ground stayed in permanent shadow.
Massive structures stood among the trees, buildings that must have been five hundred feet tall but were broken now and tilted. Stone walls twenty feet thick, cracked down the middle with trees growing through the gaps. Roads wide enough for six eighteen-wheelers side by side, buckled and split by roots. Columns that could have supported coliseums, lying in pieces among the ferns.
Everything was covered in moss, vines, and mushrooms the size of cars. Whatever civilization had built these things was gone, and the forest had reclaimed it all.
A separate energy field covered the entire forest, different from the planetary barrier above, older and weaker. It formed a dome following the treeline, stretching for miles in every direction and nothing could enter or leave without passing through it. It had kept the forest sealed and isolated.
But the forest wasn't forgotten. The outside world knew it was here and they'd been trying to break in for years.
One of the Giant's eyes moved, a green oval-shaped one on the left side of its head, shifting upward.
Tracking something in the sky.
Then the ruins hummed.
The sound was low and barely audible. The Giant's head tilted. Hundreds of eyes focused in different directions. On the stone structures, on the roads, on the broken pillars.
Blue light flickered in the carvings, dim and irregular like a power surge. The light pulsed once, then twice, then went dark again.
The Giant stood motionless for three seconds.
It moved fast, faster than something that size should be able to move, crossing fifty feet in two strides before stopping next to a collapsed archway. One hand pressed against the stone.
The carving underneath flickered again, and the light pulsed and weakened. The pattern was inconsistent.
The Giant's voice came from somewhere inside its body. It vibrated through the ground.
"Breach detected."
More eyes focused upward, scanning the dome above the forest. The barrier was still there and still active, but thinner. The Giant could see it now, the shimmer in the air that was usually invisible, but now visible because it was weakening.
The ruins hummed again, louder this time, then the sound cut off abruptly. Lights embedded in the stone structures went dark, all of them simultaneously.
Then they flickered back on, dimmer than before.
The Giant's hand remained pressed against the archway where it could feel the flow of energy moving through channels carved into the stone and branching through the entire forest network. The flow was stuttering as sections went dark, came back online, then failed again.
The planetary barrier breach had created a cascade.
The Giant lifted its right hand and reached for its face. Fingers touched the green eye gently.
Then it gripped and pulled.
The eye came out cleanly and the socket sealed immediately. White surface underneath, smooth and unmarked.
The Giant held the eye in its palm. The eye was still moving, its pupil contracting and expanding.
Then it grew.
The eye swelled and stretched, the round shape elongating and forming a torso. Arms sprouted from the sides and legs from the bottom. In thirty seconds there was a humanoid standing in the Giant's palm.
It had white skin with the same texture as the Giant, stood five and a half feet tall with human proportions, and had one eye in the center of its face, the same green oval eye. Below it was a mouth with thin lips, closed.
The Giant lowered its hand to the ground and the clone stepped off, bare feet touching moss and stone.
"The system is failing," the Giant said. Its voice was calm but the words came faster than before. "The breach damaged the primary conduit. The dome will collapse within minutes."
The clone looked up and its single eye found the streak in the sky, red fire cutting through the atmosphere and getting brighter.
"Is it a weapon? From the countries breaking through the barrier?"
"No. They don't have space travel yet." The Giant's eyes blinked in sequence, a wave starting from the left side of its head and rolling to the right with hundreds of eyelids closing and opening like dominos.
"But they'll be here soon. Multiple factions."
The ruins hummed again but the sound was weaker, dying. Another section of lights went dark and this time they didn't come back on.
The Giant looked down at the clone. "When the dome falls, they'll come. All of them. The core must be preserved. The trial protocols must activate."
The clone hesitated but just for a moment, and then it nodded.
The Giant reached up with both hands. Gripped its own head. The hands wrapped around the neck. Fingers interlacing.
A section of ruins fifty meters away went dark. The blue light in the carvings died and the hum stopped.
Then the Giant pulled.
The head tore free. Blue blood poured from the neck, thick and luminous, splashing onto the ground below. The Giant lowered the head carefully and set it down among the roots of a massive tree. Blue liquid dripped from the severed neck, pooling in the moss.
The eyes on the head were still moving. Still watching everything.
The massive body swayed, then fell. The impact shook the ground, making trees tremble and ancient stones shift. The body lay motionless among the ruins. White skin already beginning to dull.
From the neck opening, blue-white light spilled out, pulsing slowly.
Then eyes started emerging from the head.
One crawled out of the opening and dropped to the ground. It landed, bounced once, then began transforming. Another followed, then three more, then ten at once. They started growing, reshaping, forming arms and legs and bodies.
The process took seconds. When it stopped, hundreds of clones stood in the ruins. All white and with single eyes in different colors and all watching in different directions.
They scattered without words, some climbing the trees while others moved toward the ruins in the north or headed south. In ten seconds the area was empty except for the original clone.
It approached the Giant's headless body. The neck opening was five feet across and inside, the light pulsed brighter.
The clone climbed up, gripped the smooth surface, reached the neck, and looked inside.
The core sat in the center of the chest cavity, suspended by thin strands of white tissue. It was a sphere of energy glowing blue and white, bright enough that looking directly at it hurt.
The clone reached in with both hands and gripped the core. The tissue strands stretched and snapped. The clone pulled the core free and climbed back down.
The moment the core left the body, everything changed.
The ruins stopped humming, cut off instantly.
Lights that had been embedded in the stone flickered once. Dim blue glows appeared in carvings, doorways, and the centers of broken columns. They pulsed.
Then they went dark.
The energy field above, invisible from the ground, weakened but didn't disappear. The shimmer became visible now, a faint blue wall following the forest's edge.
The clone held the core in both hands and looked up.
The red streak was very close and making sound now, a roar that grew louder every second.
----------------------------------
The sphere fought to slow down.
Engines fired in reverse, struggling as power drained rapidly. The sphere couldn't stop, only reduce speed. It dropped from six thousand meters per second to four thousand, then three thousand.
It was still too fast.
The hull burned as it cut through the atmosphere. Flames wrapped around the metal in orange and white, trailing behind in a long tail. The outer layer cracked and peeled. Pieces of scarlet metal broke off and disintegrated. The sphere shook. Inside, the gel sloshed. The woman's body shifted with each violent tremor.
Two thousand meters per second, then fifteen hundred.
The forest rushed up to meet it.
Inside the gel, her fingers twitched. Not conscious, not awake, just a reflex. For a moment her eyes moved under her eyelids, like she was trying to wake up from something.
Then the sphere hit.