I dreamed about the gods again as we broke the translation barrier.

The dream was always the same. They were ragged, weak. I saw a cunning fox with bloodied fur—a weary soldier with a broken sword—a debutante—a snake—a farmer—and above them all, a matriarch, august, proud, furious.

I surveyed them all, slowly, a certain sentiment bubbling up within me. The matriarch said—something, I could never remember after waking up. I replied to her, satisfied, and watched her face twist in fury. The satisfaction twisted with that other emotion, but I held it in, not letting it distract me. I said something else, and then the cataclysm struck: a flash of energy, cracking heaven itself, shattering the gods. The apocalypse descended around me, but I felt no fear—only the burning, contemptuous sense of triumph I no longer had to suppress. They blazed and broke, falling to earth like stars.

The gods died and I laughed.

*

I came out of translation with a hungry sneer on my face.

“Damn, Lils, were you getting laid in there?” Markus said, laughing.

“What? No! Shut up!” I shouted over the crackle of ether backlash.

He just laughed at me, punching the diagnostic console on his chair, making sure all of him made it out of the ether. I followed suit, glancing over at Val as he did the same. Val looked content and peaceful despite the jostling as we re-entered realspace. He’d probably been strolling around an art museum or something, boring dweeb that he was. I had a stroke of inspiration.

“Everyone knows Val’s the sex maniac around here,” I added.

“I’ll note your envy in the mission log,” Val replied. My response was lost as a bolt of etheric energy thundered across the hull shielding.

The commander beeped us over the comm.

“Stow the chatter,” she said, voice fuzzing from interference. “Strap in, we’re breaching the planet’s defenses in T minus 15.”

We were already as strapped as we were going to get—heh—but that’s the commander for you. The monitor displayed a wall of etheric energy growing closer. Unlike the turbulence of the realspace horizon, this barrier was divinely crafted.

They knew we were coming. It wouldn’t be enough.

“Here we go!” Markus cheered. “They fall!”

“They die!” Val and I chorused.

The world wrenched as the ethership punched through the defense barrier. I felt myself forced against the straps as we corkscrewed through space. Markus was screaming—in the I’m-on-a-rollercoaster way, not the I’m-about-to-die way. Me, I clenched my jaw and gut muscles and strained against the G-forces. I swore I could feel my skeleton rattling in the ether turbulence. I felt no fear—the Ragnar would carry us through.

The commander got us righted soon enough. The Ragnar plunged through the inner workings of the barrier, shaking us like a dog with a chew toy, until the storm subsided. We were tumbling out of the etheric barrier, free-falling through space toward a sparkling planet of green and blue. Designation: Theria. Civilization level: Pre-Industrial. Pantheon threat level: Moderate. Moderate because they’d built defenses, which meant they’d seen us coming.

Good. I wanted them to see it coming. It was never enough. In the end, they’d realize the truth of the gods, hard-won by the Eifni Organization thousands of years ago:

They fall. And they die.

We hit atmosphere. Atheism came to Theria.

*

Worldjumping is awesome, and I can prove it mathematically. Awesomeness—or call it grandeur, or gravitas, thalas in Velean; the name doesn’t really matter—can be mathematically described as an etheric wave function. It turns out that when you take a matter construct like a ship, turn it into an idea, and then turn it back into the same matter on the other side, you give off a whole lot of awesomeness waves in the process. I think that’s beautiful—which I can also prove.

When I was a young edgelord, I used to go around saying there’s no meaning in the universe. I was wrong. The ether is all around us, carrying meaning from events to observers. A beautiful waterfall really is beautiful: we can detect it, measure it, amplify it. My native Earth never made the jump to paraphysics, but on Veles the Eifni Organization reached into heaven and dragged it down under a microscope.

We’ve answered the old questions. True love does exist, but only under laboratory conditions. There’s no statistical difference between hot and cold revenge. We’ve measured the moral arc of the universe: turns out it doesn’t bend toward justice after all. But that’s okay, because it also turns out that everyone’s a hero once you adjust for confounding variables.

And souls are real. They’re complex ether constructs that interface with brains. Very tasty, too, if you’re one of the various parasitic creatures wandering etherspace. Most of them don’t prey on humans directly, instead living off the ambient meaning that human civilization generates. You know that strain of moss they found in Chernobyl that lives on radioactivity? Like that, only instead of uranium it’s stuff like betrayal or humor.

But the apex predators—gods—need a more substantial diet.

They’re the ones that reach out and con people into worshiping them, shaping their souls to resonate with the right ether frequencies. A deceased human soul in a sanitized environment just floats around until it can attach itself to a newborn, but if you’re tuned in to a god’s channel? Lunchtime.

Me, I’m a humanist, and I’ll be damned if I let us be a prey species. That’s why I’m strapped in with an Eifni deicide team, en route to a strange new world.

The Ragnar scythed through Theria’s atmosphere like it wasn’t there—which it wasn’t, not for us. Eifni Org’s engineers had long mastered the exchange between physical and etheric reality. The translator engines conceptualized the gas molecules before they could cause drag, spewing them out as emptiness and breath. The breath we left in our wake, to fade into the background noise of the ether; the emptiness we funnelled into the ship’s cloaking device. Whatever the Therians saw of us, they’d know, on a spiritual level, there was nothing there.

Such as that strange-looking flying beast, which was—oh, shit, it was heading right for us.

“Contact! ” I yelled over the comm network. “Five o’clock!”

(In Velean, the equivalent phrase is “north of the watchtower,” but you don’t have the cultural background to make any sense of that, so we’ll pretend I used the English version.)

“Confirm,” said Abby. “Val, assess. Markus, find me a place to engage.”

“Scanning.” Val began typing into his console.

“I’m reading humans up ahead,” said Markus. “Recommend we make for the ocean.”

“Acknowledged,” said Abby.

“Permission to activate secondary batteries?” I said.

“Negative. Contact is not gaining at this time. We will not engage.”

“Awwwww.”

“Stow it, Lilith.”

“We’re dealing with an oracle,” Val noted.

“Oracles aren’t that good,” said Markus. “They know the region we’re in at best.”

“Could be a scout,” I said hopefully.

You could almost hear Abby considering. “We’ll act out of an abundance of caution. Permission granted, but hold fire. I’m notifying the other teams of our situation.”

“Yes’m,” I said with a grin. I pulled the targeting console down from the ceiling and flicked the switch to activate the starboard guns.

The timbre of the engines shifted and we tilted slightly, avoiding whatever settlement Markus had detected. We accelerated, and I watched the animal behind us. It was built like a gvodim—actually wait, you don’t know what that is. Okay, uh, think like a large eagle, except the head’s a bit more feline, and it’s got this really slick fur instead of feathers, but it can still fly because it’s got these huge leathery membranes on the wings. Got that? Okay, the thing chasing us looked like that, but way bigger, and also it had a serrated beak.

It was also keeping pace with us. I frowned. That shouldn’t be happening.

“Commander, I’m reading a divine blessing,” Val said.

“Acknowledged. We assume an ambush. Markus, you’re on guns with Lilith. Val, scan for more contacts.”

“Drinks on Lilith! Calling it now!” said Markus.

“Land the shot first, then we’ll talk,” I said. The adrenaline was racing through my arms and my neck. Their stupid barrier couldn’t keep us out. Couple of empowered beasties? I wasn’t worried.

“No human life in the ocean,” said Val, which seemed obvious, but you need to check, just in case.

“Confirm,” said the commander. “We’ll hit minimum safe distance from the settlement and engage. If they have additional forces, they’re already en route, so let’s finish this quickly.”

The Ragnar thundered over the ocean, keeping our profile high enough that the ether wash from our passing didn’t pollute the waves too much—if there was a Therian sea god, they’d smell us like a shark smells blood in the water. The gvodim-like creature pursued us, apparently too weak-souled for the cloaking device to convince it we weren’t here. Mistake on its part. I thumbed the controls and took aim.

“Ready to fire,” I said.

“Commander,” Val said sharply. “There’s an island with a divine aura, dead ahead. It was cloaked.”

“Taking evasive maneuvers. Hold fire.”

The Ragnar swerved immediately. This was definitely an ambush.

“Multiple contacts to port!” said Markus. “Shit, it’s some kind of swarm!”

I looked at the port monitor and swore. A dark cloud of something was rising into the air, seemingly out of a random spot on the ocean, and spreading across our field of view.

“Multiple contacts above. Blessings likely,” said Val. “Permission to engage primary batteries?”

“The fuck is this? Where did they come from? The clouds?” I said.

“Granted,” said the commander. “Weapons free, everyone.”

When in doubt, attack. She hadn’t finished the sentence before a vicious grin swept my face and I squeezed the trigger. In an instant, etheric energies carved a magnetic tunnel to our flying friend, guiding a coruscating blast of unstable plasma that blew a hole straight through it and dropped its flaming corpse into the waves. Anyone watching would be blinded from the light and radiation as the plasma decayed, assuming they weren’t close enough to get flash-fried by the air temperature. Inside the Ragnar, I suffered none of those consequences.

“First blood!” I cheered. “Drinks on Markus!”

“Bullshit! You fired early!”

The ship lurched left in a barrel roll and I saw a dark shape plummet through where we’d been. We were moving too fast for me to make out details, but I popped off a desperate shot as we rolled. I missed the creature and hit the ocean. It was close enough to the impact that the steam cooked it alive.

Markus was firing frantically, pulling the trigger as fast as his guns could recharge, slashing holes in the swarm of what appeared to be ravens at this distance. Their claws and beaks glowed in my display, probably indicating some kind of blessing for sharpness. Every shot vaporized several of them and burned dozens more around the beam, but we were dealing with thousands. And we were being herded by the things that dropped out of the clouds, so we couldn’t increase our distance from the swarm.

If the oracle had deployed those birds against us, it was a safe bet that those claws could cut the Ragnar open. And they were closing on us.

“New contacts are angels,” said Val.

“Shit,” said Markus, while I said something much less tame.

“Does nothing phase you?” I yelled at Val.

“I’m going to see if I can pick up their god,” Val said, ignoring me. “Can you stall?”

“Negative, Val, we’re too hot. Do what you can while we disengage.”

I swore as a sodden, black-cloaked figure blasted out of the ocean towards us. The one I’d steamed. It didn’t look much worse for wear, and the spear it was carrying was causing all sorts of warning lights on my console. My adrenaline surged. I snapped all three of my plasma lances on it and fired. Even with flash dampening, my screen went white for a half-second that lasted an eternity. In retrospect, probably a little overkill, but you never knew. I held my breath.

The screen cleared. I didn’t see the angel, target tracking didn’t show it anywhere, but was it actually dead? Had it just dematerialized? Angels are bullshit, man.

“Switch to disruptors and take out the angels,” ordered the commander. “We can outrun the birds.”

“Yes’m,” I said, sighing internally. I could have taken them with the lances. Besides, you can’t set anything on fire with an ether disruptor.

Commander Abby continued making evasive maneuvers as the flight of angels almost hacked us open. Those weapons were godtouched for sure. We were about a thousand times bigger than an angel, and they had numbers on us, but we were faster, and that was enough for Commander Abby to keep them from carving through the sanctuary field. I cycled the weapons on my battery and took aim with the disruptor.

“Bye bye!”

I pulled the trigger. The disruptor probably made a cool hum or something, but I couldn’t hear it in here. All the feedback I got was a green, smokelike effect as the sensors picked up the disruptor fire. An angel-slaying fart, if you will. In etherspace, I’d just caused a burst of B-phase noise that would degrade any etheric structures it hit, kinda like how cosmic radiation corrupts hard drives in outer space. The angel I’d targeted dropped dead from instant soul cancer, tumbling into the waves. The one next to him got caught in the disrupter corona and started twitching erratically. So it was effective, but it just didn’t look as cool, you know?

I sighed, took aim, and prepared to kill more angels.

That was about when the sea monster hit us.