by P. K. Lentz
“Then do it.”
Zhi didn’t move. Moving close, Arixa set a hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“Nothing about war is easy,” she whispered, “but once it’s started, it must be finished. Think of the thousands of men, women and children who would have pleaded with the Jirmaken for their lives but were never given the chance. They were just incinerated. Think of the families in the belly of this ship. Think of what we have accomplished this day. Don’t erase it by balking at what comes next.”
Zhi’s head hung. She stayed silent for long moments, staring blankly at the ghostly glyphs of the control displays.
“Our gains this day are tremendous,” Arixa said. “But they are fragile. We need you.”
When Zhi’s fingers began to move over the controls, Arixa ceased speaking.
“Atmospheric exit in two minutes,” Zhi declared coldly.
Twenty-Nine
An alarming sensation gripped Arixa’s legs. It was similar to the one felt in the elevator in the ice-base, but stranger and more intense, nearly causing her knees to buckle.
“What’s happening?” she asked Zhi urgently.
“Artificial gravity has engaged.”
The explanation held scant meaning to a steppe nomad, but if the development didn’t concern Zhi, it couldn’t concern Arixa.
The sensation eased, and Arixa stood normally again just as an image materialized in the air at one end of the chamber. Dak and the others tensed in surprise, but it was something Arixa had seen before.
Suspended in a black void was the blue-white-and-green ball of Earth.
“Be at ease,” she advised her warriors. “That is our world seen from on high, as the gods view it.”
All including Arixa gazed in silent wonder for longer than was probably wise, but they could scarcely help it. Zhi meanwhile continued to manipulate various control displays.
She froze. Arixa set a hand on Zhi’s wrist.
“Show me how,” Arixa offered. “Let it be my hand that does the deed.”
Behind Zhi’s Han eyes and tight lips, Arixa sensed turmoil, even if the woman hid it well. Eventually she gave the barest of nods.
“Swipe from here to here,” Zhi instructed.
“That’s all?”
“I’ve done the rest.”
With no hesitation, Arixa put her hand to the control Zhi had indicated—and swiped.
Some colors changed on the display, but other than that, nothing appeared to happen. Not here, anyway. In the decks where two hundred Jir crew were located, presumably the result was cataclysmic. Arixa hoped so. Though it might bother Zhi to condemn two hundred individuals to death with the swipe of a finger, it was simple necessity to Arixa, a means of sparing her already battered war band the perhaps impossible task of dealing with two hundred more enemy fighters.
“Thank you,” Arixa said solemnly, reassuringly to Zhi, who blinked and returned to her controls showing no outward sign of distress.
Within, perhaps, was another story.
* * *
It took hours to consolidate control of the god-ship.
Using a combination of comms, machines called maintenance drones and Slintt (four more of which were found and enlisted) the surviving members of the Dawn were slowly reunited.
The unliving, too, were located and gathered. It would be some time before a full tally of the dead could be made, but initial indications were not hopeful.
Olkavas had died, along with the comm-equipped Scythian pilot accompanying him. In fact, based on reports from survivors, it appeared that most of the hundred warriors who had followed Olkavas had met their ends, albeit not without taking a significant number of the enemy with them.
Ivar was pleased, as was Arixa, to learn that the Shadow-man, Baako, remained among the living. He had been in Ivar’s party but split from him during the course of battle.
Sporadic Jirmaken resistance erupted. In the largest such instance, nine more of the Dawn were slain when a few dozen Jir attempted to reach and retake the bridge. Arriving belatedly on the scene with Ivar and other reinforcements, Arixa had turned the tide and proceeded to butcher the aliens in a rage triggered by the further casualties inflicted on an already decimated Dawn.
Her beloved Dawn... How could she look upon the faces of those ragged few who remained and not weep as if the heart had been ripped from her chest? She vented that deep anger on the inhuman bodies of the enemy fighters.
Besides these resistors, there remained seventy-five Jir trapped with their landers in the hangar bays along with an untold number of unconscious human captives scooped up from Luoyang. The hangars could not simply be opened, for the crews might simply reboard their ships and fly out.
Arixa cast her voice into the hangar informing them that the Draugan had been seized by a vastly larger force which had killed the entire crew. The seventy-five were to board a single lander, empty of Gorosian captives, and leave the Draugan. If they refused, the entire contents of the hangar would be flash-incinerated.
Apparently this could be done, making the threat a believable one. Yet it was a bluff. They were not about to intentionally kill the captured humans, particularly not Zhi’s cousins, the Han.
“Once free, you are to deliver a message to your rulers,” Arixa added after the ultimatum. “Earth is now free and independent. The Pentarchy will send no more ships.”
Half a minute later, the trapped aliens returned their reply.
The speaker laughed. “We know you are lying,” it said. “We know that your force is weak. We accept your deal and shall deliver your message, but know this: the Pentarchy’s response will be swift and fierce.”
Arixa laughed, but not so the Jir could hear.
When they’d boarded a lander, Zhi opened the hangar. The bridge display showed a lone shuttle exiting the god-ship and moving away. Zhi’s hands worked on glowing controls. Arixa had given Zhi the option of demonstrating how Arixa could complete the final step, as she had done to vent the decks full of Jir earlier.
Zhi declined. She would do this herself. She was ready.
Hesitating only slightly, she made the final motion.
A glowing white bolt, a blazing arrow in the void, sped out from a corner of the display and struck the departing lander. In a brilliant flash, the craft was obliterated.
Arixa had never intended for these Jir to deliver any message. She had only told them so that they might be more inclined to comply with her demands.
The events of this day were message enough.
* * *
With that matter tended to, Zhi programmed the landers containing the ensnared Han for unpiloted flight back to Luoyang. The hatches would open, leaving the captives to be discovered and freed by their countrymen.
Meanwhile, the spherical shuttle piloted by Tomiris set down safely in a separate hangar. Arixa ran out onto the expansive metal floor to meet the occupants as they disembarked.
Leimya ran out first and hugged her half-sister tightly without regard for the layer of blood, both red and black, some of it her own, coating Arixa’s armor. Arixa returned the embrace and watched over Leimya’s shoulder as several warriors of the Dawn emerged with a rather gloomier air about them. Tomiris came, then the Hellenes Memnon and Andromache and four more.
Arixa kissed the cheeks of Tomiris’s mournfully bowed head. She had been informed already via comm of the high cost of the Dawn’s success aboard the god-ship. Tomiris and those who’d accompanied her to the polar base had lost brothers and sisters in great number this day while being denied the honor of killing and bleeding alongside them.
This was valid cause for disappointment, but their absence had been necessary. The mission assigned to the shuttle’s occupants was no less important for being a less deadly one.
The objective of their mission emerged next from the shuttle ahead of Matas and the yellow-robed former street preacher Phoris.
“Welcome, Dr. Fizzbik,” Arixa greeted the dog-faced Gaboon.
“Ha!” he barked.
“Welcome? You savages kidnapped me!”
“He didn’t resist,” Matas said.
Fizzbik protested, “That hardly means it was my choice to throw in with a bad-smelling collection of doomed imbeciles!”
Arixa smiled, feeling genuine relief, if just for a moment, from the unrelenting heaviness of the day
“I believe we’ll deal out more doom before meeting our own,” she said. “That is why I need you.”
“I’m aware,” Fizzbik said. “Your so-called brain is not exactly a puzzle to decipher. You want procedures done on more of your thugs.”
“That, yes. Plus healing of the wounded. And you said the ILA had offensive capabilities. I will need those unlocked. And much more.”
“You need, you need, you need!” the alien grumbled. “What about what I need? Even if I’m willing to help, this ship’s facilities aren’t made for Gorosians. Did you think of that? Of course not.”
“Are you not impressed with what we savages have done?”
Fizzbik barked sharply. “Impressed? Oh, yes, don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed. Maybe that won’t even change when more Pentarchy ships come and wipe your people out. How much weight you can lift or how fast you can run won’t exactly be important then.”
“We will learn how to fight the war that must be fought,” Arixa countered confidently. “Our numbers will grow. You might be flattered that I sent some of my most prized warriors just to recruit you.”
“Oh, yes!” the Gaboon mockingly agreed. “And I suppose I should be flattered that you breathe in my general direction! By Goom, you think highly of yourself!”
Arixa shrugged. “It’s what my enemies think of me that matters. Are you with us?”
“Oh, it’s a choice?” Fizzbik growled. “Your thugs might have made that clear before whisking me away to the scene of whatever transpired here!”
“A victory to shake the cosmos,” Arixa asserted. “You don’t fool me, dog-man. You are proud of your paw in this. Play at reluctance if you wish. I’ll play along and pretend we’re forcing you. My thugs will show you to the bridge, where you will be of great help.”
He waved a fuzzy hand in dismissal. “I know nothing of the operation of a Jirmaken vessel.”
“More than we do.”
“That applies to just about any sentient being, on any subject,” he scoffed. “Fine, show me!”
Arixa smiled. “It’s good to have you with us, Doctor.”
Fizzbik stalked away and was joined by Ivar, who put an arm around the Doctor only to have it swatted off.
To her warriors, among which she now presumably could count Phoris, Arixa said, “Come. We need every hand we can muster in making this ship secure.”
The remaining Scythians fell in behind Ivar and the alien to cross the hangar.
“What was Vax’s reaction?” Arixa inquired of any of them
Matas answered. “We restrained and confined him immediately, per your instructions. He didn’t say much after that.”
“You freed him before you left?”
“More or less. Let’s say he’ll have freed himself by now. We couldn’t risk him preventing our departure.”
Arixa couldn’t be certain that Vax would have tried to foil the abduction of Dr. Fizzbik. Maybe he would have stood aside. But Vax had admitted to being unsure of his own actions, and so the chance could not be taken, the choice could not left to him. Having Fizzbik among the Dawn was too important.
If Vax were less conflicted, his presence would have been welcome, too. It might still be one day, were he to figure out where he stood.
Falling behind her comrades in the walk to the exit, Arixa shut her eyes and drew a steadying breath against her own sudden pang of self-doubt.
What she was about to do, the order she was about to give, would change everything. She had often experienced an attack of nerves before a battle, mostly in the Dawn’s early years. But this...
This felt like charging a cliff’s edge in the pitch blackness of midnight. Quite literally, there would be no going back.
“Arixa, what’s wrong?” Tomiris asked, causing most of the party to turn their heads.
Arixa looked upon their expectant faces until she no longer could.
“In winning, we have lost a great deal today,” she said, averting her eyes. She triggered her comms and said heavily, “Zhi, begin the countdown.”
Thirty
“Acknowledged.”
A low, humming vibration filled the deck of the god-ship, felt through the boots, not unlike the faint thunder of distant hooves on a plain. With the exception of Dr. Fizzbik, the others with Arixa looked about them in wary confusion and then to their leader for explanation.
“Follow me,” was Arixa’s cryptic answer.
Fizzbik gave a gruff, knowing bark.
Arixa led the group out of the hangar and a short way down a corridor to an iris with a certain red, circular symbol on it the meaning of which Arixa had learned. There were many of them throughout the vessel.
Arixa led the way through the iris and into the chamber beyond. The corners of this room were gentle curves, and the wall and floor were subtly softer than those throughout the ship, feeling rather like ultra-smooth leather. Set into the walls were cushioned nooks that were clearly meant to accommodate a Jir form but would do fine for a human.
“Stow your weapons here,” Arixa instructed, placing her war-pick and vazer into a compartment near the entrance.
Even though they surely found the instruction strange, none of the Dawn hesitated significantly in complying, so fully did they trust their Captain.
Arixa knew she was shortly to push that trust to its breaking point and perhaps beyond into the realm of betrayal.
“Sit,” Arixa told them next, and she did so herself, fastening the nook’s loose Jir-fitting harness.
Since starting minutes ago, the resonant hum in the deck had slowly increased in pitch and volume. It began to grow mildly uncomfortable to the ears.
“What’s happening?” Ivar asked. “What’s that sound?”
Arixa leaned her head back in the cushioned nook and pointedly ignored the man who had stood unwaveringly by her side for six years.
Would he stand with her still, when this thing was done?
“Is this ship moving?” he asked. “Are we returning to Scythia?”
“We have another destination first,” Arixa said. Nerves made her voice a bare whisper. She could barely breathe.
Fizzbik chuckled, a rough sound. “You haven’t told them.”
Some of the humans in the nooks pressed palms to ears against the hum, which had swelled to a whine that felt something like a needle boring into the skull.
Arixa saw mouths moving among her warriors, but couldn’t make out words over the whine. A pale blue haze filled her vision, as if a strange fog had instantaneously fallen. She blinked rapidly and found it was not a haze at all. She could see just as clearly. The hue of the world itself had changed.
Her body began to experience one of the many strange new sensations it had felt since meeting the star-folk. This particular sensation she had felt previously when Vax had first taken her into the void above Earth. Where the harness around her had been slack, it now became taut, preventing her body from drifting out of the nook. She had become weightless.
The long hair of Ivar and Tomoris and others rose from the shoulders of its owners and turned into tall crowns. Arixa’s hair waved, but it had not grown in enough to make its drifting a nuisance.
The Dawn might have to shed a lot of hair.
The whine and vibration faded to silence but the blue veil over Arixa’s eyes, and all eyes, remained in place.
“What’s happening?” “I feel strange!” “Have we died?” “Is this the otherworld?” the men and women around Arixa wondered aloud all at once.
Over their voices, a chime sounded in Arixa’s ear, then Zhi: “Success.”
“Arixa, tell us!” “What’s happened?” “Why is everything
blue?” “Arixa? Arixa! Arixa!” the Dawn asked in half a dozen voices.
Her poor, sweet, beloved, betrayed, ignorant, decimated, doomed Dawn. What had she done to them?
She choked back tears which could not be witnessed. Only later, in private, could she let them flow and scream until her throat bled.
“Arixa?”
Ivar’s voice came into focus. He struggled to bind up his wildly floating hair. “Tell us!”
Fizzbik chuckled. “Yes, tell them, Arixa.”
“I will,” she pledged. “Soon.” She unbuckled her harness. “First, there is something on this ship that I wish to see with my own eyes. You all may come.”
She failed to exit the nook gracefully but rather wound up gently rotating. Her attempts to halt the spin only made it worse.
“This will take some practice,” she said to the rest, who were unbuckling themselves.
Only Fizzbik had no difficulty. The humans reacted well to the new experience, managing to forget secrets and death long enough to laugh at themselves and each other.
After a short while, they clumsily retrieved their sharp, deadly weapons—much to Fizzbik’s justifiable horror—and left the soft-walled chamber for the corridors beyond.
Almost immediately as they exited, a dark blue shadow flew at them. Shapeless and filling the corridor, it appeared as if from the metal walls themselves, prompting shouts of alarm and instinctive efforts to dodge. With their feet planted on no floor, the fright sent men and women tumbling into each other and hard surfaces.
As quickly as it had appeared, the amorphous shadow proceeded past the party to melt into other walls.
“What was that?” asked Andromache, one of the first few to stabilize herself.
Though Arixa knew more than they did, she had no answer to that question.
“Evil spirits!” Fizzbik exclaimed. He hadn’t been startled by the shadow, and his laughter mocked the human savages as he sailed on ahead with practiced ease.
“Doctor,” Arixa commed the alien. “Don’t get too far ahead. There may yet be armed resistance aboard.”
If Jir attacked during a time of weightlessness, they would hold a tremendous advantage, Arixa realized. The sheer volume of problems to be recognized and dealt with in this new world made the mind whirl.