The battle had devolved quickly after that, as K’hzan’s demonic forces flooded the bay. The suppression shields had dropped soon after they arrived, silencing her shoulder guns before she even got a chance to use them, and the work had gotten close and bloody. The crash and clang of heavy swords on graceful polearms had echoed through the chamber, a glittering counterpoint to the shouts, screams, and moans of the fighters. But even this chaos was to be expected. The only dissonant note in the battle had been Justin, whose barely-contained nervous laughter had surged to prominent, puzzling life several times since they had jumped onto the deck.
In the noise and violence of the moment, she had been unable to ask him what he found so amusing, but she assumed it had something to do with the war cries of the Ntja, as the laughter would invariably slip his control each time a particularly loud sample erupted from their foes. She had never seen the large, snub-nosed fighters in action before, but she saw nothing particularly funny about their howling, barking challenges.
Justin, apparently, found it hilarious.
Once again the dark-skinned Human had been enjoying the efficacy of his small handgun, saving his shots for pivotal moments in the fighting while hovering around just behind her for most of the battle. She knew he had saved her life at least twice. The Ntja had threated to overrun her forward position, only to be blasted off their feet by the small Earth weapon wielded by the cackling Human.
“How close are we to the control center?” It was taking some getting used to, seeing Justin without the implants that had leached the color from his eyes. She was finding that she preferred their dark, natural color.
She shook her head. What business did she have with any kind of preference? And for a Human?
But there was too much to do, and not so much time she could waste any examining her own confusing feelings.
“Very close, only a few moments’ walk.” She put one hand up to temper his growing smile. “But there will be many Ntja between here and there.” She nodded up to the mezzanine, nearly empty now as the Council forces fell back to defend the control center. “We’ve still got quite a bit of fighting left to go before we can get you through those doors.”
She did not want to think about what might happen if they made it to the control center and found the blast door closed. They needed the Skorahn more than ever, without Marcus. Justin had shown no affinity for the medallion at all, and only the defenses of Penumbra, under their control, were going to save them when the Council fleet came back around.
“Commander.” The guttural voice caused Justin to jump, but it was just another piece of information to her mind, as she tried to maintain some semblance of control around herself. She turned and nodded to the Variyar warrior standing behind her.
She was not sure when they had started calling her ‘commander’, but she could appreciate their confusion. She was not entirely sure what she should be called, either. She certainly was not acting as a very good bodyguard for Marcus, anyway.
A moment of despair threatened to crack her battle focus, and she shook it off. Right now it did not matter what her place here was, only that she was defending the city that had provided her a home when nowhere else would.
Commander had a pretty nice ring to it, though.
“The administrator’s shuttle has reported in.” It was hard to read a Variyar’s expression; the hard, flat planes of their face barely moving from the snarling sneer nature had given them. But whether it was something in his eyes, or his tone, or maybe she was just getting better at understanding her stoic allies, she thought this one seemed uneasy.
His words came back to her and a cold knot in her stomach she had been doing the best to ignore loosened just a little bit. “Are they safe? How are they? Where are they?”
The Variyar’s black eyes widened in an expression she really wished she could understand, and he looked away. “The administrator’s transport failed before they could reach their destination. It was forced into an improvised landing some distance away.”
“Improvised landing?” Justin pushed his way between her and the towering warrior. “What the hell does that mean? They crashed?”
The flat black stare failed to subdue the Human, and the Variyar blinked once before replying. “Yes.” He said, his gravelly voice low. “They crashed.”
The look Justin gave her as he turned away was haunted. But there was no comfort she could give at the moment, and she only touched him lightly on the shoulder while turning back to the warrior.
“Was there any report after the landing?”
“Nothing, Commander.”
That meant, for all they knew, Justin was their only hope now. They needed to fight their way through to the control center as quickly as possible and get that medallion around his neck. With luck, he might be able to get the defensive array to turn on the Council’s forces yet.
She felt her stomach drop. It wasn’t much of a hope, she knew.
*****
There was no air left in the transport. There had been a moment of horrific, cyclonic winds as they crashed, everything had gone dark, and then the smoke had been whisked away, along with the last remnants of atmosphere. Something snapped over Marcus’s face, wreaking havoc again on his night vision, and then everything came into stark relief as a bright, sharp light flooded into the tumbled passenger compartment through several rents in the hull of their downed ship.
There were no internal lights, none of the viewing fields were active, and without windows, there would have been no light at all. He heard the coughing and the shuffling of bodies nearby, but the sounds came to him muffled as if heard from a great distance. He turned and saw many of the Variyar warriors rising, shaking off the effects of the crash and reaching for their stored weapons. Many more remained scattered across the cabin, unmoving.
Turning back to the nose of the craft he was shocked to see the pilot’s chair empty, an enormous slumped shadow collapsed in the angle of the floor and the bulkhead. Marcus stared at the shape in confused silence and then made to rise, but his body would not obey him. As he looked down at his restraints in mild confusion, a shape maneuvered past him and bent down to the check on As’vhikudu. Sihn Ve’Yan’s dark robes created an odd effect as she moved through the slashes of hard light, sliding in and out of shadow.
“You need to get up now, my friend.” Marcus looked dumbly to the side, mildly alarmed at how slowly his head seemed to be responding, to find the bright little form of Khet Nhan bending over him. The little alien’s face looked worried, his big eyes reflecting vermillion light back from the bright bars hanging in the air around them.
He felt the restraints across his lap and chest give way. He slumped forward, almost falling onto his face, but the little mystic caught him with strong, wiry arms and coaxed him up into a standing position. “We need to leave here, I think. You mentioned the Sanctuary, to As’vhikudu?”
Marcus looked down at the furry features, then over to where the robed and hooded figure of the little creature’s neophyte was rising like the Grim Reaper over the body of the pilot.
He had mentioned Sanctum, hadn’t he? But why? He couldn’t remember. In fact, he couldn’t remember much. He wrinkled his face up in thought, trying to batter at his memory, to dredge any little detail up that might explain his current situation. It felt like something sticky was stretched across his face.
Suddenly, Marcus felt like there was a plastic bag stretched over his head. He stopped breathing, convincing himself that he couldn’t, and his body dropped into a terrified crouch. He panicked, hands rising to claw the thing off before it could suffocate him.
“No!” Nhan said, slapping his hands away and then grabbing his wrists. “It’s just the emergency rebreather membrane!”
Marcus stared at the creature in uncomprehending dismay. He grunted with the effort, trying to raise his hands to his face. Why was Khet Nhan trying to kill him?
The slap rocked him back on his heels and he staggered, looking up
in shocked pain to see Ve’Yan standing before him. Her mouth twitched as if she was having a very hard time fending off a smile.
“It’s a field generated by your collar.” She said the words slowly, and that helped. It didn’t help that she said them as if she was talking to an idiot child. “It’s the reason you’re not dead right now.” She gestured to the hull breaches, and the true horror of his situation came crashing down on him.
He should be dead. They should all be dead. They were exposed to vacuum, to the unforgiving void that surrounded the city beyond the safety of its towers and the Concourse.
“No one told you about the emergency systems built into almost all clothing worn in Penumbra?” The genuine curiosity in Nhan’s voice did nothing for the Human’s self-esteem.
And as he stood there, being held up by the diminutive but terrifying little mystic, the sting of the girl’s slap still tingling across his cheek, he remembered. Remembered the briefings, one of the first conversations he had, in fact, with …
His heart skipped a beat. Iphini Bha had told him about these emergency precautions. He had been impressed with a technology that would have seemed like magic on Earth, but was so simple to the Galactics that they sewed them into the collars and cuffs of their everyday clothing.
He looked down and now he could see the faintest shimmer of a field surrounding his hands as well.
He was safe from the vacuum.
“Administrator, we cannot stay here.” One of the Variyar had approached while he was suffering his minor breakdown. The surviving warriors, about ten in all, were gathering at the rear of the transport, around the main access hatch. He tried to see some rank insignia or some other way to tell the demon-faced fighter from his friends, but there wasn’t anything Marcus could see.
“Where did we land? Are we close to Sanctum?” It was coming back to him now, although he still couldn’t tell why, exactly, he had suddenly decided the ancient ship in the middle of the city was where he should be headed. Something was pulling him toward that silent, slick black wall.
“We have landed midway between the Red Tower and the Ring Wall. We have a long walk ahead of us if you wish to reach Sanctum.”
“And the Ntja will not be cooperative.” Another Variyar called out from the group, his angry-looking face looming from the shadows.
“They will come, and soon.” Nhan nodded with a quick, jerking motion, rubbing his hands together. “Ambassador Taurani will want confirmation of your death. Time has never been our ally in this endeavor, but our situation is far bleaker now than it was before we were forced to alter our course.”
“If we are going to run,” Ve’Yan looked sour as she spoke. “We have to run now. But why Sanctum? An ancient ship, with no defenses, and countless vulnerabilities? What possible significance can it have for us now?”
Marcus stared at her, his mouth open. In this harsh light she looked far less Human than she normally did. Her skin, milk-pale, was too smooth, and the black designs that traced down the sides of her nose and across her cheeks looked far more like scales or plates than tattoos, this close. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Her eyes flared at his honesty, and then narrowed, but as she leaned forward to respond, one of the Variyar shouted.
“Here they are!” The words echoed dully through their tactical communications net, and the Variyar warriors hefted their weapons, using the tears in the ship’s body to peer out into the harsh light. Several detonations rocked the wrecked hulk that surrounded them, and the tall demons pushed the muzzles of their weapons through the cracks to return fire, their black eyes flaring with eager light.
“We need to leave now.” Nhan pulled him toward a large gap where the entrance hatch had been twisted partly away. “Plenty of time to discuss contingency plans once we survive the current crisis.”
More impacts rocked the dead transport, and the bolts sizzling from the Variyar rifles was a near constant hiss in the background.
Marcus was staring at the Variyar weapons in confused fear. “Why are the guns working? Why isn’t the city suppressing them?”
The little creature continued to pull him toward the hatch. “I imagine, outside of the city’s halls and walls, there is nothing Penumbra can do. A suppression field takes a great deal of energy, and usually requires a massive array to project. The city must use the materials of the towers and corridors to project its internal fields.” He waved a paw vaguely around them. “Out here there’s not enough of the substance of the city around us to suppress the weapons.”
He didn’t know why, but hearing about limitations of the city always bothered Marcus. He paused, but Nhan pulled him more forcefully, and Ve’Yan gave him an ungracious push from behind.
“Where are we going?!” Marcus shouted, adrenaline pumping furiously through his veins despite the sounds of battle being nearly muted in the vacuum. “We can’t run all the way to Sanctum!”
The hatch crashed open, again with far less sound that he felt it should have, and they rushed out, moving behind the ship where its bulk would provide cover from the incoming fire. Marcus glanced back at the track the transport had made as it crashed, and he paused in awe at the devastation. The scar on the roof of the Concourse beneath them stretched back for more than a hundred yards, and passed through the corner of a tower, strewing wreckage in a wide fan stretching out from the point of impact.
It was a miracle the pilot had managed to save as many of them as she had.
Marcus looked around, but nothing he could see was familiar. When he had worn the medallion, knowledge of the city had seemed second nature to him. Once he had gained some familiarity with the Skorahn, he had only needed to wonder about something and he knew immediately where it was and how to get there. Here, wandering the outside of the city, he felt hopelessly disconnected from any kind of help or safety. And this far from the control center, moving farther away with each step, he wasn’t likely to regain access to the medallion anytime soon, either.
An expanse stretched all around him, towers rising from it, reminding him of the streets of a city back home, but only in the vaguest sense. There was no regular grid pattern, no long thoroughfares or boulevards. The towers rose up all around, and the flat spaces in between, if he thought of them as streets, were zig-zagging, random affairs.
Above them stretched the towers, and then the empty blackness of space. Marcus’s mind spun as the sensation crashed down upon him. For months he had been surrounded by the materials of the city. A faint crawling sensation along his spine made him wonder if he hadn’t developed the beginnings of agoraphobia in his time in Penumbra.
The light around them had a harsh quality, with no air or dust to defuse it. Shadows were harsh and razor-sharp, giving the whole scene a more alien aspect than anything he had seen since Angara had forced him from Earth.
Several towering warriors kept to the edges of the crumpled ship, snapping shots off into the bright, hard-lined distance. The rest of the Variyar formed up around Marcus and the mystics, looking to him with their flat black eyes for guidance. Nhan looked hopeful and curious, Ve’Yan’s lip was curled in disdain.
More impacts struck the far side of the transport; it was only a matter of time before they found themselves flanked, taking fire from either side. He closed his eyes, trying to cudgel useful information out of his brain. He didn’t have the medallion anymore, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the city wanted to help him, if he could only find the right way to ask.
His head jerked back up. “We need to get down into the Concourse.” He pointed to the building they had struck as they augured in, its interior blasted open to the void. “Through there, and then down.” He turned to Nhan. “The rail line looked pretty extensive. We should be able to catch a car nearby. How close does it come to Sanctum?”
Nhan shook his head, his hands raised as if fending off an attack. “We have not been here long, Administrator. We know less about the city than you do.”
One of t
he Variyar stepped forward. “The rail lines do not stretch out into the bronze plains. They end at the reservoir ring, at the Ring Wall.”
Marcus nodded. “Well, if we get that far, we’ll worry about the next step.” He pointed at the blasted hole in the tower again. “Get us there, first.”
*****
Angara wedged herself into the corner at the latest jog in the long hallway leading to the control center. The red-tinged shadows provided only the illusion of safety, however. They had been able to force the Ntja back, but they had paid for each step. She checked her knives, her lip curling in anger as she saw that one of the monomolecular blades was chipped, probably from the metal bubble she had forced it through to brain her latest victim.
Justin was panting heavily beside her. He had run out of his last reserve of ammunition for his primitive firearm some time before, and had picked up one of the heavy falchions carried by the Council troopers. She smiled at that. He had chosen one of the massive weapons in an attempt to impress her; she was almost certain. And ever since, he had been dragging the clumsy chunk of metal, completely incapable of wielding it effectively, but too embarrassed to leave it behind in favor of a more realistic blade.
“We’re almost there.” He was trying very hard not to appear winded, but his eyes were weary, and his dark skin had taken on a grayish pallor.
Around the corner they could hear the Ntja working themselves up into another countercharge. Justin seemed to find no further amusement in their harsh, barking shouts.
This time, when they came, there would be no Variyar with them to help blunt the attack. K’hzan’s warriors were forming up several jogs behind them, not yet ready to make the next attempt against the enemy. She had moved up to check on the Ntja, and Justin had followed her.
“I think we should go back.” She turned to him, jerking her head back the way they had come. “We will be of no use here alone if they attack now.”
Justin tried to give her a reassuring grin and hefted the slab-like sword in what he probably thought was a jaunty manner. “You don’t think we can take one for the team, give the big boys a rest?”
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