by Jacob Holo
Two archangels veered towards him, raising their single-edged blades.
Chaos swords, modeled after the Grendeni originals, had changed the face of seraph combat. Now even the weakest pilots carried weapons that could fell the mightiest. A seraph’s chaos barrier was nearly impervious to conventional weapons, but a chaos sword would cut through that same barrier like a hot knife through butter.
Many Aktenai pilots preferred short, one-sided blades for extra cutting power. The shorter length and single edge allowed pilots to focus their hardened barrier on a smaller surface area. A few exceptional pilots could actually cut through an archangel’s sword with this technique.
Seth swung one of his massive double-edged swords and cleaved straight through the archangel’s attack. The archangel’s sword exploded into glistening blue shards, and Seth severed the archangel at the waist. The two halves floated apart, hot fluid pulsing from exposed mechanical entrails.
The archangel’s suicide charge engaged, obliterating it in a white flash of light. Shrapnel pattered harmlessly off Seth’s barrier.
The second archangel sped in. Seth dodged hard to the side and swung both swords down, lopping its hands off at the wrists. With a quick diagonal swing, he cleaved the archangel in two.
Knight Squadron’s lead seraphs slammed into the archangels.
Another archangel closed on Seth from his left, but he saw something the archangel’s pilot did not. An unseen seraph sped in behind the archangel, visible to Seth thanks to a hypercast data link.
Tesset dropped her stealth field and materialized behind the archangel. She raised her rail-carbine, its long underslung bayonet flaring to life with snaps of green energy. With a vicious chop, she cut into the archangel’s back, blue fluid spraying from the wound.
Tesset kicked it away and vanished moments before the archangel suicided.
Knight Squadron quickly eliminated the remaining archangels, formed up, and dove towards the negator and its escorts. Waves of tactical seekers, defensive lasers, and fusion beams salvoed at the seraphs, proving woefully ineffective against their chaos barriers.
Seth docked his swords against his wing clusters.
“Tesset, are you ready?” Seth selected the enemy negator and forwarded its coordinates to her.
“Leave it to me.” Tesset pulled in beside him, still invisible to the enemy.
“Knight Squadron, cover our approach,” Seth said.
“Confirmed, sir,” Jared said. “We’ll keep you safe.”
Twelve seraphs formed a defensive ring around Seth and Tesset, laying down a constant curtain of fire.
The negator loomed ahead, a stubby cylindrical ship with typical Outcast features: reflective armor plating and a diagonal swirl of black and orange that proclaimed its nation of origin. Long gravity drive blades protruded from the rear. The negator belched thick defensive fire into space.
Lasers and railgun bolts ricocheted off his barrier. Seth flew straight in, shoulder first, and collided amidships. The negator’s armor plating buckled under the impact. He ignited a chaos dagger from the shunts in his forearm. It wasn’t as effective as his swords, but he needed his hands free.
The energy blade extended from his wrist, and Seth sunk it into the enemy ship. Droplets of liquefied armor scattered off into space.
Seth extinguished the dagger. He reached into the molten slag with both hands and peeled the armor back. Dynamic keels within the vessel fought to seal the wound.
“Now!” he shouted.
Tesset materialized next to the negator. She unclipped a tapered cylinder from her seraph’s waist, an innocuous thing that fit neatly in her hand, and tossed it into the negator’s interior.
Seth released the armor and kicked off. He spread his wings and engaged his drives at full. Seraphs scattered from the negator as the seconds ticked down from ten. At zero, the antimatter grenade released containment, introducing its deadly payload to an equal quantity of matter.
The weapon exploded with a force of five thousand megatons of TNT, made worse by the insulating effect of the negator’s armor layers. White fury slashed outward through every crack in the negator’s carapace before it blew apart completely.
One Outcast containment field crashed. A minute later, the second field went down. Seth found his fold engines coming back online.
“Leave the remaining ships to fleet elements,” the Choir said to Seth. “We need all of our forces at the Wise Counsel.”
“Understood. Knight Squadron, let’s go!”
As one, they folded space to the Wise Counsel.
***
Tesset emerged two thousand kilometers from the Wise Counsel. She fell into formation with Seth and the rest of Knight Squadron, maintaining her active stealth field.
She always equipped her seraph with four evasion pods: devices that dipped into her barrier for power and generated the electromagnetic distortion. The new models even isolated her chaos influx signature from other pilots, making her seraph completely undetectable.
Few pilots could use the devices, given the tremendous mental strain required to operate them. Any slip in concentration or errant thought could interrupt power to the pods and crash the stealth field.
But not Tesset.
She had a knack for the technique no other pilot could match, and she could maintain her barrier even while in full stealth mode. This allowed her to use the pods far more aggressively than other pilots.
How to use the pods seemed so obvious, and Tesset failed to understand why other pilots struggled with them. Perhaps it had something to do with her sense, which the seraph greatly magnified. When piloting, she could see through the seraph’s scanners like any normal pilot; her mind easily absorbed data from every direction at once. In combat, her situational awareness was without peer.
Tesset opened a pocket of thought and checked the status of her weaponry. Like many Aktenai pilots, she customized her equipment loadout. Her rail-carbine was a shorter version of the rail-rifles Earth Nation pilots favored, with slightly reduced accuracy and hitting power. The carbine’s bayonet extended back along the weapon’s underside, providing short-ranged attack power without the need to switch weapons. It had proven to be both powerful and versatile.
With four of the seraph’s conformal pods generating her active stealth field, only the forearm pods remained for conventional weapons. Tesset almost always chose two pods with thirty fusion torpedoes each. Nothing surprised an enemy like that kind of firepower delivered a point-blank range. Finally, she had five antimatter grenades left, which she could throw manually or attach to the end of her carbine and launch.
“Knight Squadron, we’re going in,” Seth said. “Breach their defenses and hit the depot hard with antimatter.”
“Confirmed, sir,” Jared said.
Alliance and Outcast forces engaged each other all around the Wise Counsel. Tesset spotted a swarm of Grendeni archangels flood over an isolated formation of their Outcast counterparts. Lacking the mnemonic skin of a true seraph, the Grendeni archangels looked like winged copper skeletons with their internal systems naked to space. Weaker, frailer, and poorly armed, the Grendeni archangels used sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm opposition.
Directly ahead, a group of ten Outcast warships and forty archangels shifted their defensive formations and began targeting Knight Squadron. Long distance beam fire shot by, and Alliance seraphs charged in. Tesset moved outside the main formation, not wanting to get hit by a lucky shot.
The archangels split into two groups of twenty, one holding back and opening fire with their own seekers and rail-rifles, while the other closed with chaos swords lit. Knight Squadron returned fire. Seth pulled out his swords and ignited them.
Tesset accelerated past the archangel close-combat specialists, leaving them in the capable hands of her comrades. She slowed once clear of them and pulled over the second group: the archangel gun-line.
She lined up her shot, dropped her stealth field, and fired. The carbine’s
accelerated bolt hit one of the enemy rail-rifles in the barrel and ruined the weapon. She fired at a second archangel before engaging her stealth field.
Beam and rail-rifle fire passed through her last location. Seekers flushed out of archangel weapon pods and exploded in staggered hunting patterns. It was idiotic and in vain. She was already beneath them.
Tesset dropped her stealth field, fed the extra power into her rail-carbine, and fired three shots into the closest archangel. The first two hits ricocheted off the enemy’s barrier in flashes of blue, but the third ripped through its stomach. The kinetic shock pulverized its internal systems and, presumably, the pilot.
She vanished again. The gutted archangel engaged its suicide charges while others wasted munitions sweeping space for her.
“We’re almost through the first group,” Jared said. “Tesset, keep stinging them.”
“On it.”
An archangel flew out from the pack, hunting. It disengaged a sword from its back and lit it.
Tesset disengaged her stealth field and fired. The bolt knocked the archangel’s sword out of its hands. Weaponless, the archangel charged her, and she chopped into the base of its neck. Blue ichor gushed from the wound, and Tesset drove the blade down and out the archangel’s side.
It suicided immediately, and all its fusion torpedoes exploded with it. The shockwave rang through Tesset’s whole body and sent her tumbling back. She spread her wings and struggled to right herself. Two archangels dove at her. She couldn’t pull back in time.
“Seth!” she shouted.
“I’m here.”
Seth swooped across, his path intersecting with the archangels. In a flash of arcing swords, he sped past, leaving bleeding fragments in his wake. Knight Squadron charged into the archangel gun-line with swords drawn and slaughtered the opposition in short order.
“We need to keep moving. Follow me!” Seth said.
Tesset reactivated her stealth field and slipped in behind him. The depot loomed ahead like some two-headed, zero-gravity mushroom. Outcast warships and archangels moved in from all sides in an attempt to push Knight Squadron back. Beams lanced through the seraph formation, catching some of the pilots and knocking them momentarily out of formation.
Seth pushed forward, the edges of his wings almost white with haste. They approached the Wise Counsel along the edge of the closest saucer. Ships sprouted from the circumference, resembling a mirrored forest. Seth sent out a target list, and the Knight Squadron broke into pairs. Tesset followed him towards the center of the supply depot.
They skimmed along the underside of the saucer, then turned downward and flew parallel to the thick column that spanned the station. More ships berthed along the column, all of them inert. Desperate Outcast fire rained down on the station, occasionally hitting a seraph, but doing more damage to friend than foe.
Tesset sensed several archangel squadrons breaking away from other engagements and heading towards the Wise Counsel at maximum speed.
“We’re going to get swarmed in a minute,” she said.
“I see them,” Seth said.
Near the center of the column was the Wise Counsel’s primary power plant, bulging outward like a grotesque, bloated cancer, its pipelines and conduits as thick as whole warships. That was her target. Six Knight Squadron seraphs passed them, heading for the saucer at the far end.
Tesset checked the approaching archangels. Knight Squadron was spread too thin to respond.
“We don’t have much time, Seth!”
“It’ll be enough,” Seth said with all the confidence in the universe. “We’re going in.”
Seth and Tesset skimmed along the power plant’s surface, weaving their way through the docked ships before coming to a halt at the center of the Wise Counsel. A dense thicket of interwoven pipelines stretched out beneath them.
Tesset received targeting information from Seth and synchronized. She dropped her stealth field and flushed her conformal pods. Together, they launched ninety fusion torpedoes. Outcast laser and flechette defenses shot down only a handful before short-lived suns birthed on the Wise Counsel’s surface.
Heavy plating liquefied into a glowing pit. Seth dove down, splashing waist-deep into the pool of molten armor. He expanded his barrier, scattering the glowing sludge into space.
“There!” Tesset said. “I see a breach past the next layer!”
She reached for her antimatter grenades, currently affixed to a mnemonic bandolier across her seraph’s chest. The band released its hold on her seraph, and all five remaining grenades came with it. Tesset flew down. She balled up the grenades, engaged their timers, and tossed them in.
Seth lifted off, and they sped away under full power.
The timers reached zero and detonated. The result was somewhat more spectacular than Tesset had expected. A twenty-five gigaton star exploded within the Wise Counsel’s main reactor. The hole punched into the station allowed some energy to escape, but the main reactor was still an effective energy delivery system.
Focused channels of heat and kinetic energy sped through the station’s power conduits, following paths of least resistance along the column and onboard docked ships using the station for power. Streamers of hot plasma burst from seams and weak sections of the pipeline, scything through the station and docked ships alike.
The column fragmented. The end saucers cracked. Ships exploded all across its gigantic length. By comparison, the charges placed by Knight Squadron provided only mild entertainment.
“YEAH!!!” Tesset shouted, raising her rail-carbine high.
“Knight Squadron, form up on me,” Seth said. “Those archangels are still coming in, and we need to…”
He trailed off.
“What is it?” Tesset asked.
“New orders from the Choir,” Seth said. “Stand by.”
Knight Squadron finished forming up. Several archangel squadrons continued their approach, but they were no longer in a mad rush to engage.
“What are they waiting for?” Tesset asked.
“We’re no longer a priority,” Jared said. “With the Wise Counsel destroyed, they’ll probably swing around and start hitting our negators.”
After a minute of dithering, the archangel squadrons turned around and headed for negator three.
“See?” Jared said.
“Okay, listen up,” Seth said. “We’re being diverted to assist the Renseki. Sending coordinates.”
Tesset fed the coordinates into her fold engine. It would take Knight Squadron a full hour to reach their targets.
“What’s the situation, sir?” Jared asked.
“The Renseki are pursuing a group of Outcast flyers,” Seth said. “Our orders are to destroy them.”
“We’re being diverted from the offensive to destroy flyers?” Yonu asked.
“The Choir believes thrones have been dispatched to rendezvous with them.”
“Thrones, sir?” Jared asked.
“That’s right. We are to assist the Renseki and destroy the flyers while they’re still vulnerable. Squadron, synchronize fold coordinates. Stand by to fold.”
“Confirmed, sir,” Jared said, his voice firm but his aura betraying palpable fear. Concern radiated from the other seraphs as well.
Thrones… Tesset thought. Her wings twitched nervously.
“I’m sending everyone imagery of our targets,” Seth said. “They’re lightly armed and armored, but they have impressive speed.”
Tesset opened the image file in a subset of her mind. It showed large formations of delta-wing Outcast flyers that certainly looked fast.
She switched to a private channel with Seth.
“Any idea what they’re carrying? It has to be important if the Renseki are involved. And the Eleven sent thrones? That’s got to be some cargo.”
“I had the same question,” Seth said. “The Choir was not forthcoming.”
“Typical.”
Fourteen seraphs engaged their fold engines, leaving only rings of r
efracted light behind.
Chapter 6
Rewards of Service?
Quennin hugged her knees to her chest as she waited within the Outcast flyer’s cramped interior. She had nothing better to do, and sitting like this helped keep her warm.
Besides kidnapping her, Plaerion and the other Outcast warriors had treated her courteously. When she’d asked for food and drink, Plaerion had provided filling and nutritious fare that tasted bland but not disgusting. When she’d asked for her knife back, Plaerion had only laughed.
Through her neural link, Quennin monitored the flyer’s progress. The swift, flighty vessel and its decoys continued to make fold after fold, sometimes scattering or joining up with other groups. Their Aktenai pursuers remained dogged and relentless.
No matter how many maneuvers the Outcasts made or false trails they planted, the Renseki continued to pick the right target, forcing the Outcasts into lopsided battles.
Quennin watched through her neural link as the six Renseki tore through yet another wave of Outcast warships. Their speed astonished her. Always before, she’d witnessed seraph combat either artificially slowed for ease of viewing or from within the time-dilated effect of high chaos influx. Time slowed and reflexes quickened within the confines of a seraph cockpit, but here, in the flyer, the Renseki seemed to move with inhuman speed and agility.
She felt pathetic watching the world she had once belonged to, no longer able to participate.
Plaerion ducked underneath the cockpit’s doorjamb and entered the rear hold.
“Quennin S’Kev,” he said.
“What do you want?” Quennin spat, feeling no need to be polite.
If Quennin’s tone irritated Plaerion, he didn’t show it. He opened one of the equipment lockers and retrieved a thick handheld disc Quennin recognized as a hologram emitter, perhaps used by the warriors to generate visual decoys.
The locker slammed shut when Plaerion released it. No mechanism secured it in place, but it required an Outcast warrior’s freakish strength to open. Quennin knew. She’d tried. Plaerion hadn’t bothered to stop her. He’d chuckled when she failed to even budge it.