The Gateway to Eternity

Laika had the Sleigh display scan readings from the Lunar shear’s perimeter, then added some legitimate data she collected over her Astral dives and then layered both over a set of false numbers. The false data produced a projection of a fractured line running from the shear on the lunar surface into the dimensional substrate, creating a region of semi-stable resonance in the center of the liminal tree.

A fake gap in the null-space boundary where the Entropy field thinned enough to theoretically allow a gate aperture to exist. Sort of like a hollow in a tree. A hollow that didn’t actually exist.

The math was very pretty, believable, since it was… almost real. The shear did have oscillation patterns. There were regions of variable density along its perimeter.

The dog girl built a lie on a foundation of about 90% truth, the remaining 10% concealed in the margins, the decimal points, the details she was omitting from Noira and the Sleigh’s Avatar.

The lie would survive casual scrutiny. It would pass the Sleigh’s general safety evaluation because the Sleigh was a warship’s avatar, a Syntropic, crystalline being that existed in the linear-physical without the ability to dive into the Astral like her.

It would also survive Noira’s review, as Noira was a Gatekeeper. The Deathmoth was skilled at dimensional analysis and also very arrogant about things. She trusted Laika’s navigational charts.

Laika was soul-bound to serve the Sleigh, wielded exemplary service, held an unblemished record of navigation. Years of accumulated trust that Laika was about to spend on a single transaction.

[I’m… not a good dog,] Laika thought to the fox eyes.

[Merely ‘good’ dawggos don’t save worlds,] Sage replied. [Brave doggos do. And sometimes brave looks an awful lot like mean from a certain angle in the deep.]

Laika nodded mentally and pulled the fabricated data onto the main display.

The holographic view of the moon filled the bridge. The null-space void spill of the shear’s tree spread across the lunar surface in an uncanny, fractal pattern, branches of absence forking into wild geometries that made the projection system flicker with rendering errors. The Sleigh’s holos failed to display an object that didn’t exist in observable dimensionality.

Laika highlighted the false fracture line, a gold thread running from the edge of the entropic tree down into the dimensional substrate. The fake data rendered it as place of opportunity, stillness amid the howling Entropic abyss.

“There we are,” she said. “A resonance channel. Running from the shear’s boundary into the deep substrate. And here’s an invisible hole in the center. The eye of the storm!” She pointed. “The entropy there is zero while magrad sits at 893.27.”

Noira’s antennae wriggled as she evaluated Laika’s fake calculations and charts. “That’s… fookin’ perfect.” She whistled.

“Yes,” Laika said. “Enough mana to bloom all of the Festivus Seeds across the planet. No need to wait for the Gardeners. Don’t have to depend on Admiral Colette’s gate-opening schedule which might take weeks.”

Noira’s mandibles wiggled giddily. She stepped to a secondary console and ran the numbers herself. Laika watched her work.

This was it. If Noira found the flaw, if she spotted the fabricated decimal points, discovered the omitted assumption, the places where the truth bent into lies, everything would collapse. Laika would be exposed as a traitor.

A dead dog on a festive bridge.

Noira slowly processed dimensional resonance frequencies, gate stability projections and various entropic flux tolerances.

“The mana density projections,” she said. “All confirmed during your Astral dives?”

“Yes. On three separate passes,” Laika lied. “The readings were consistent. I cross-referenced them with the Sleigh’s long range Astral spectrometer for independent verification.”

She had done no such thing, of course. She’d spoofed the data logs during the few hours of preparation.

The Deathmoth stared at the data for another minute.

“Great,” she said. “Bring us in.”

Laika flew the Sleigh on manual. She brought the large, boxy ship around on a long, sweeping arc, paws steady on the crystalline helm, brown eyes affixed on the navigational readout. The moon blossomed in the forward viewport, cratered and physical-linear at first and then deeply, fundamentally wrong.

As the Sleigh approached the shear, Laika felt entropy rising from a subliminal hum to a vile pressure behind her eyeballs, vibrating her sinuses, gnawing at the joints of her jaw.

Her Astral senses were screaming at her to turn the ship around, telling her that this was suicidal, dangerous.

On the moon, the null-space tree sprawled across the Sea of Tranquility in fractal majesty. Up close, its branches were staggering in scale, kilometers wide, forking into sub-branches and sub-sub-branches ad nauseum until the filaments became too fine for the instruments to resolve.

Where the tree met the ancient regolith, reality simply stopped. White dust, gray rocks, then a gap shaped like a root. And in the depths of that root, existed the raw underside of the universe’s wallpaper, crawling with undefinability that had no business being observed by anything alive.

The Sleigh’s Avatar started singing nervously, emitting a soft, off-key rendition of “O Tannenbaum” which kept skipping notes as the ship rode the entropy waves pouring from the sheer in reality.

This close to the shear, the Avatar became weakened, confused, blind… half-asleep, the ship’s shield wobbling and struggling to hold back waves of all-decaying Entropy.

“Here we are,” Laika announced. “Holding position.”

The Sleigh hung in the void between the moon and the Earth.

“Lovely.” Noira walked to the gate staging area at the starboard side of the bridge.

She reached the dimensional artifact amp obelisks and snapped her fingers. The obelisks ignited to life, humming ominously and connecting to her skills.

Noria’s wings spread wide, gossamer membranes igniting from within as she channeled her power. Her fluffy antennae swept forward, sampling the dimensional frequencies.

“Starting gate calibration,” she hummed. “Give me the coordinates, Rudy.”

Laika read off the coordinates, uploading the data to the obelisks.

Each number and decimal point, a nail in the coffin she was setting up for them.

The Deathmoth’s wings extended fully, membranes and black and white hair burning bright with small auroras. Red compound eyes were locked on a spot in the air.

“Opening gateway,” she stated. “Hold us steady, Stratonavigator.”

“Steady as the Slayer’s resolve,” Laika answered, watching Noira’s back.

The Deathmoth’s concentration was absolute, focused on the dimensional harmonics, her fractal engine tuning itself to the dimensional frequency of the target’s coordinates. Her wings trembled with the strain of establishing a link between local Linearity and horrific Entropy she was unknowingly targeting.

The Sundergate was born as a single, jet-black point. An infinitesimal hole in the dimensional membrane, a wormhole between two places.

The black film of an aperture bloomed outward from the small black dot, framed by dark flames crackling along its rim. The membrane wobbled, dark and wet-looking like the surface of a soap bubble.

“Here we… go,” Noira said.

The film popped.

Entropy-aligned mana hit the bridge like a firehose.

Raw, wild dimensional energy roared through the pinhole in a torrent of invisible force, making every console on the bridge flicker. Warning runes ignited across Laika’s console in amber and red.

The prad girl’s paws moved across the shield interface akin to a concert pianist mid-cadenza, rerouting the ship’s barrier shields from their external configuration to an internal filter-type pattern, laying membranes across the bridge in an overlapping sheet.

She set the layered shields to strip Entropic alignment from the incoming mana stream.

Entropic decay peeled away from the raw flow roaring through the aperture like oil separating from water, shunted into the ship’s magrad sinks, nullified by the null-obelisks, dissipating harmlessly into outside space via the ventral radiators.

The remaining flow reaching them was clean. Potent. Healthy.

A river of mana pouring through a hole the size of a small coin. Laika was the dam keeper, filtering poison from gold while Noira’s attention remained locked on the aperture itself.

The Deathmoth never looked at the shield readouts.

She had no reason to. Shield management during gate operations was Laika’s job.

“Slayer! The… Mana density readings are…” Noira breathed out, swaying in one spot, antennae burning with brilliant magic flares at the tips. “Eight hundred and some magrad confirmed! Rudy, you were right! The eye is stable!”

“As I calculated,” Laika lied. The mutt’s heart was pummeling against her ribs so hard she was certain the sound would carry across the bridge. “The channel is holding. Zero entropic bleed on my end.”

Zero… Because she was catching it. Every wave of decay streaming through the pinhole was being sieved out by the layered barriers she had positioned between the gate and the rest of the bridge. The clean mana flow would have been impressive… if the Sleigh wasn’t wasting a hundred times more mana to keep it clean.

“Sleigh,” Laika addressed the Avatar. “Confirm capacitor intake rate.”

“Twelve point seven magrad per second and climbing!” The Avatar responded with a warped, bubbly voice, sounding very drunk.

Dasher was trembling visibly.

“The pinhole is stable,” Laika declared. “The channel is holding, we’re practically drowning in free mana! If we widen the aperture to standard personnel nine-feet gauge, we can establish a sustained funnel. Enough to bloom every Seed on the planet once you open other gates to them! Don’t close this gate, we don’t want to lose this sweet spot.”

Noira’s wings pulsed. The compound eyes reflected thousands of tiny apertures into the abyss.

“Nine feet,” Noira repeated, panting. “Are you confident the channel will hold?”

“My calculations say yes.” Laika tapped the shield readout, the one showing clean mana throughput and zero entropic contamination. “Wider aperture means more throughput, same proportional entropy ratio. The math scales linearly.”

The math did no such thing.

Noira processed the data one final time.

“Widening to nine feet,” the gater announced.

Noira spread her wings to their full span. The black membrane of the pinhole gate began to expand, the dark circle growing outward like an iris dilating.

Three feet. Five. Seven.

The mana torrent intensified proportionally, the clean flow pouring through Laika’s filters and into the ship’s capacitors with a roar of energy that made the bridge hum like a struck tuning fork.

Eight feet.Nine.

The gate locked at full personnel aperture, framed by thrumming black flames, suspended between the obelisks.

Through it, the raw fury of the shear’s heart howled soundlessly, a pressure wave of pure potential energy pummeling against the ship’s shields like an ocean grinding against a seawall.

Noira stood directly in front of the gate, wings extended, body silhouetted against the gate, a living anchor holding the aperture stable through sheer force of will and Omnid moth skills.

Her back was to Laika. Her attention was forward. The gater’s eyes were locked on the gate’s stability metrics, monitoring oscillation patterns, adjusting frequency resonance in real-time to keep the aperture from collapsing.

Laika pressed the shield and gravity hex override switches, unlocked all interior doors and gripped the yoke.

The shields between the gate and the bridge dropped.

The full unfiltered torrent of deadly, pure Entropy blasted through the gate into the open bridge like a dam bursting, slamming into the gater.

At the same time, Laika threw the helm hard to port, physically shoving the yoke with both hands, careening the massive ship in a violent lateral translation that sent everything and everyone on the bridge sliding toward starboard. Consoles sparked. Loose equipment crashed against bulkheads. The gravity heave pulled everything toward the black aperture.

A cocoon of barrier energy wrapped around the Navigator’s chair which was bolted to the deck by hull-grade mounting immovable steel clamps. Laika became pressed into the seat by the protective field and belts while the gravity push howled past her, pulling everything else toward the gate in a horizontal avalanche.

Noira screamed, igniting from the entropy wave, falling towards her own gate. Her claws scrabbled against the deck plating, scoring bright lines in the metal, finding no purchase against the dire pull.

“RUDY!” Noira screamed. “RUDY, WHA—”

The gravity pull ate the rest of the sentence. The Deathmoth tumbled through the gate to oblivion, wings trailing behind her like broken pennants, comprehension arriving far too late.

The gate destabilized the instant its creator crossed its threshold.

The black membrane convulsed. Flaring energy arced wildly between the obelisks. The aperture, designed to be held stable by a gater standing at its mouth and actively managing its resonance, lost its anchor. The dimensional frequencies spiraled into cacophony.

The membrane bulged inward, then outward, then collapsed in on itself in a detonation of unfiltered Entropy waves that blew the staging obelisks apart like glass and sent a shockwave of null-space energy racing across the bridge.

Laika’s personal shield caught the blast.

The cocoon around her station flickered, cracked along one edge and thankfully… held.

The shockwave passed over her, through her, around her, and slammed into the forward viewport with enough force to spiderweb the crystalline hexaglass.

And then silence and darkness reigned.

Every console, every display, every holographic projection, every blinking rune and scrolling readout and cheerful festive indicator winked away. The Sleigh’s Avatar, mid-note in her warped festive song, died with a twinkle-hiss akin to a music box being stepped on.

The deep subsonic hum of engines that Laika had felt through the deck plating for countless years, the heartbeat of the ship she guided across dimensions, stuttered and then went silent and dead.

Laila knew exactly what happened, because she had planned it all.

The middle of the ship crossed through the shear’s widest branch and every instrument and artifact and rune experienced Entropic overload cascading across the wards.

The dead ship drifted through space.

The emergency lighting failed to activate. Laika waited.

The backup systems, the tertiary power grid, the independent battery arrays designed to sustain life support during catastrophic power loss, all of them were dead now.

The entropy shockwave from the detonating gate and the ship’s passage through the central shear terminated and corrupted the ship’s avatar. The Sleigh was no longer a functional warship, turned into a dead hull.

A very large, very dark, very cold hull tumbling slowly through the void between Earth and Moon, falling away from the dimensional shear.

The personal shield was gone too. The darkness closed in, complete and absolute, broken only by the faint starlight leaking through the cracked forward viewport. She could see the Earth through the damaged hexaglass, hanging in the black, incredibly distant and out of reach.

Laika breathed out.

The Sleigh was a large Omnithornian freighter. It had dozens of decks, thousands of compartments filled with presents.

With no other crew and one pradavarian’s lung capacity, the ambient oxygen in a ship of this size would last for a long time. Laika had manually opened all of the ship’s interior doors and vents just as Dasher opened the gate to her doom.

The gravity runes were dead. Laika felt herself lifting from the chair in zero gravity.

The bridge was an utter wreck.

The gate-reinforcing obelisks turned into twisted metal husks, scorched black and torn apart by the gate’s implosion. Debris from damaged consoles drifted lazily in the air, fragments of metal, crystal and festive decorative trim glittering against the distant starlight. An ornamental wreath floated past Laika’s face, trailing tinsel like the tail of a very sad comet.

“Sleigh?” Laika uttered. “Avatar? Are you there?”

Nothing.

Lovely silence, broken only by the faint creak of cooling metal and the sound of her breath.

Laika unbuckled herself from the Navigator’s chair and pushed off it, floating across the ruined bridge in zero G. She pulled off her festive, ghastly See-mass sweater, skirt, tights and antlers, caught a bulkhead handhold and oriented herself upside down relative to the deck, looking through the cracked viewport at the Earth.

Her trembling paw reached to her chest and touched the ghostly star floating there.

Colorful fox eyes flickered back into existence one by one, stark against the darkness.

“Heya,” Sage said.

“Hey,” Laika replied.

They floated together in the dark for a moment. The Earth turned slowly in the viewport. The stars burned cold and distant.

“She screamed my name,” Laika said.

“I heard, ye.”

“She trusted me. Completely. And I killed her.”

“Eh, nobody dies for realsies. ‘Specially not Omnids,” Sage commented. “You simply sent her onto her… next great adventure. She’ll follow one of the branches carved out by the souls of the humans freed from the Frontenachii capital ship’s walls, then wait in line for a few eternities and get reincarnated on Arx. Start fresh. Maybe find new love worth fighting for… one who won’t convince her that it’s a great idea to depopulate worlds with the concept of bloody See-Mass.”

“Maybe.” Laika’s ears pressed flat. “Maybe she will… remember and hate me forever. Maybe… she’ll come back and want revenge.”

“Also possible,” Sage admitted. “You can’t control what she does with her second life and Arx-body, hon. You can howeva’ control what you do with yours.”

“The other Heralds and the Saint will find out what I did. When Dasher fails to respond to the v-casts… doesn’t gate them to the next location, when they notice that she and the Sleigh aren’t answering, they’ll know something went tits up.”

“Uh-huh and… be stuck on Earth.”

“Nikky’s not on Earth, she’s in the new capital ship of the Sixth Fleet Admiral… She has friends inside the Frontenachii ship, I think. They might help her retake, repair the Sleigh.”

“Not if we have anything to say about that,” Sage rebutted.

“I betrayed my Saint, murdered her partner, crippled her warship, and stranded my sisters on a planet I was supposed to help destroy.” Laika let out. “And I feel… so much lighter. Is that wrong?”

“Lighter how?”

“My entire life as the Herald of Festivus I’ve been working on unmaking narratives of others. Now… I finally unmade mine. I am floating naked… in nothing and there is nothing pulling me down. No gravity well of fury. No black hole of vengeance. Only… lovely starlight,” Laika looked at the eyes in the abyss. “I feel like a stray again. Alone in the cold. Lost. And I am… okay with it.”

“‘Cause you chose it, bruh,” Sage said. “Every other time you were alone, someone put you there. Vladimir put you in the effin’ capsule. Nikky put you in the Sleigh, bound you to her ‘ungeon hierarchy. Today, ya put yourself here. You chose the cold and the dark ‘cus it meant the Earth gets to keep spinning and eight billion people get to keep being gloriously, stupidly, bootifully alive.”

Laika nodded, smiling softly at the drifting eyes, paws digging into the ghostly plushie.

“You’re a berrrrry brave dawggo, Laika,” Sage purred, “‘nd brave dawgs deserve rescuing. So here’s wat we’re gonn’ do.”

“Yeah?”

“Step one: no floating around like a sad, forgotten space cookie. We didn’t forget you. Locate the emergency supply lockers. Your ship has nommable emergency rations, I bet.”

“It… does,” Laika agreed.

“Step two: think of good things and wait.”

“For?”

“For Ash. He’s going to come rescue you, obviously.”

“Oh.”

“Yass. He and the rest of our pack have been watching your heroics, rooting for you. And his exact words, relayed through me with zero editorial embellishment, are: ‘Tell her we’re coming. Tell her to find the granola bars or whatever. Tell her she’s our pack… From now onto forever!’”

The tears came again.

They were… Gentler. Happier. Wiping her face Laika made them float away, drifting upward in little spheres, each one a tiny, wobbling spherical mirror reflecting the Earth.

“Pack,” Laika repeated, tail wagging. “I have… a pack.”

“Damn right ya do,” Sage agreed. “The skulk shan’t forsake its newest kit!”

The prad mutt pushed off from the bulkhead, and floated into the dark corridor beyond the bridge. The emergency supply lockers weren’t that far. She would find them by touch and smell and the memory of a Stratonavigator who charted this vessel’s interior a thousand times before.

The colorful fox eyes followed, glowing warmly amidst the floating debris and the silent halls of the Sleigh, like little lanterns carried by a friend through the longest night Laika had ever chosen for herself.