“An impressive number. The same number of fatalities you’ve incurred, I might add,” sneered the white-haired man sitting farthest away by the window. Despite his white mane, the childlike face and high-pitched voice revealed this Noble’s relative youth. It was what was commonly called a tinny voice. Yet the staff in his hand strangely suited him. “Indeed, you have disposed of over five thousand of the enemy. However, it is your methods that I take issue with. They were effective in recklessly shooting down the OSB airships. But while you were onto the next target before finishing off the first, the OSB crash landed on Earth and massacred humans on the ground. To date, roughly ten thousand Nobles on the Frontier have perished at the hands of the OSB, a third of those fatalities brought about by your slipshod command. No, I shall take command of this counteroffensive.”
“Damn you, Minsky.” Vilzen rose to his feet, his mask refracting the moonlight like sparks.
“That’s enough, both of you,” said another voice, one hoarse like that of a man on his deathbed. The wizened old man had arrived first and had been nodding off in the chair beneath the moonlight when the other generals arrived. One touch—or breath—might rend him in pieces. Yet his eyes, now open, emanated an eerie glint that froze the others. “General Brosius.” He mumbled his name through his gums, not because he was senile or because the other four had forgotten his name. He did so partly in jest and in part to intimidate.
Hopping out of the chair, he tottered forward like a drunkard and approached the large table. “I’m not yet awake. I would have preferred never to wake. Perhaps you will help me.”
He waved his staff.
Another miniaturized figure of an OSB airship appeared in the air. Unlike the blue and white schematic that Nombusol had produced, this one was a full-color, three-dimensional model—an exquisitely rendered miniature.
Crimson rays blasted out of its gun barrels.
Atomic beams. One shot through Old Brosius’s face and flashed a brilliant ball on his right shoulder and fizzled.
Another beam obliterated Brewster’s face from the nose up. A ball of light appeared on the right side of Nombusol’s chest. Another on the left of Minsky’s chest. More beams shot holes through the ceiling and floor.
“Now I’m awake.” There was a gaping hole in the middle of Old Brosius’s face, the view behind him visible through the hole in his face. When he tapped the holographic airship with the staff, the hole disappeared.
“A most rude awakening,” grumbled Nombusol, the hole in his chest already mended.
“Now where is Gaskell?” Old Brosius regarded the men and asked.
“He went to the western outskirts on reconnaissance last night and was shot down. A rescue squadron has been dispatched, but nothing, at present, is known about his whereabouts or safety.” It was Vilzen who answered.
“Safety aside, his whereabouts are something of a concern. Could he have been taken captive?”
“Knowing him, he would rather drive a stake into his own heart before having to endure the shame of capture,” said Minsky. “Simple man that he is.” The general grinned, though not so much out of respect for Gaskell’s sensibilities.
“One less general suits me fine.” Nombusol bared his teeth and smiled. “So there are three candidates. And I shall include myself.”
“And I,” said Brewster, rapping his staff against his left hand.
Smiling, Old Brosius said, “Surely, an election will not do. You will all attempt to eliminate the opposition and then cast a vote for yourselves. In the first place, I find it odd the Privy Council has not yet appointed a commander.”
“Does the Council have a candidate in mind?” Minsky asked, his fangs gnashing.
No doubt the other generals present wanted to do likewise. The Air Chariot Battalion was an elite group chosen from the Nobility’s best warriors. Immortal as the Nobles were, they all varied by disposition. There were brave ones, and then there were cowards. Though the matter of training was left up to the individual, every last Noble with an aggressive disposition recognized himself a warrior and entered the Capital’s Training Center.
It was at the Center that Nobles were sorted and tested on their aptitude as warriors based on three factors: physical ability, self-possession, and belligerence. While this was comparable to humanity’s conscription system, whether these Nobles chose to become warriors and continue more advanced combat training was up to the individual.
Despite the incongruity of immortal beings serving on the battlefield, the Nobility had gained complete knowledge of supernatural phenomena known as the occult even before they gained supremacy over the world.
Phenomena that humanity had disdained as nonsense and child’s play had revealed themselves as unmistakable truths. Among them was the existence of unidentified flying objects—UFOs.
That UFOs, long considered nothing more than optical phenomena, had been aggressively engaged in infiltrating the planet was kept confidential among the world’s governments. The human world established an investigative agency, which concluded the UFOs were not merely engaged in observation but laying the foundation for invasion.
The Nobility had inherited that knowledge.
The enemy from outer space will someday bare its teeth and attack.
The Nobility prepared for this threat and developed weapons that took into account the distinct advantages of their immortality.
They also concentrated their efforts into their defenses so they could protect physical assets such as the Capital.
Thanks to advances in modern weaponry, hand-to-hand combat had been rendered all but obsolete. But the Nobility had resisted modernity tooth and nail.
Despite preserving the nuclear weapons once eschewed by humanity, plus an arsenal of antiproton cannons, dimensional oscillators, and DNA-destroying viruses they’d devised in the course of their war against the OSB, the Nobility deemed these weapons as last-resort methods to be deployed only in the face of wholesale slaughter and defeat. They instead concentrated the bulk of their efforts on antiquated military tactics.
Their plan was to destroy the OSB’s defenses, breach the lunar base, and then annihilate the enemy in hand-to-hand combat.
Imprinted in the Nobility’s DNA was a deep nostalgia for the past, as a bird’s-eye view of the Noble world so plainly made evident. That they insisted on adhering to the ways of antiquity even on the battlefield might best be attributed to their psyche.
If winning victory by plunging a sword, an arrow, a spear into the enemy was the measure of valor, then the Air Chariot Battalion was rightly the Nobility’s most elite group, and its commanders had earned universal respect as the best of the best warriors.
Thus the prospect of a newcomer taking over the reins of command was hardly news generals would welcome.
“Perhaps an errant shot of the antiproton cannon might encourage the Privy Council to reconsider,” said Nombusol, echoing what was surely on the minds of the others. Yet his suggestion was only met with silence.
Even dauntless generals of the likes of Brewster and Old Brosius glanced up at the sky as if fearing someone had heard.
“Hold your tongue, Nombusol!” said Old Brosius, making certain to utter the blasphemer’s name clearly. “The high chancellor of the Privy Council—he is the Sacred Ancestor.”
The face of the brazen general turned ashen.
CHAPTER 4:
CRIMSON SONG
1
“Then…” Minsky pressed his hands against his twitching cheeks. “The commander was handpicked by the Sacred Ancestor himself? No, could it be…”
No…
No…
No…
Could it be…
Could it be…
Could it be…
A red wind gusted into the generals’ hearts.
Blowing away sand and rock, the wind surfaced a rumor they’d forcibly kept hidden and dared not contemplate.
The Sacred Ancestor has a son.
It existed in a
realm of consciousness beyond the reach of thought. Only rumor, which none were allowed to touch, dwelled there.
Suddenly, the bronze door opened, putting an end to the intractable chaos.
The men blinked at the shadow at the door and cried out at once.
Greylancer!
The self-righteousness swelling inside the generals turned to dust and vanished.
It was the moment they acknowledged the presence of the one warrior that eclipsed them all.
“The Six Demon Generals—it has been a long time,” said Greylancer, his voice dripping with disdain rather than nostalgia. The Nobility’s vaunted generals were little more than callow recruits in his eyes. Looking down at the paralyzed men, he said dispassionately, “Gaskell is not here—perished, has he?” and continued, “By order of the Privy Council, I will take command of tomorrow’s attack on the OSB moon base. I expect nothing less than your full efforts.” Giving them not a moment to object, Greylancer ran a hand across the air. “Here is the plan.”
An image of the moon ten meters in diameter appeared before him.
†
“We proceed as planned. Go,” said Greylancer as his chariot picked up speed. Was this some kind of fantasy or fairy tale?
The Greater Noble’s vehicle, racing through space toward Earth’s moon, was none other than a wheeled chariot from human antiquity.
Flying close behind was a fleet of aircraft, all with wings arched like those of bats.
The Nobility had previously attempted several attacks against the OSB frontline base on the far side of the moon three hundred thousand kilometers from Earth but had only managed to delay the OSB infiltration of Earth, a fact that made the temples of the Privy Council members pulse with rage.
None of the allied aircraft’s propulsion nozzles were lit; an antigravitational propulsion field surrounding each of the craft propelled them forward instead.
Perhaps having foreknowledge of the imminent invasion, the OSB commenced their attack. Soon golden laser beams crisscrossed this way and that around the fleet.
“Atomic cannons. If you go down, wait on the lunar surface for the rescue vessel,” Greylancer ordered.
A beam shot at Greylancer’s chariot—and was refracted away as if skipping off an invisible spherical surface.
When the fleet came within three thousand kilometers of the moon, a swarm of OSB aircraft rose up from the surface.
“Move to single combat maneuvers. When you’ve destroyed your target, after me.”
A human field general typically directed operations from the rear. But a Noble of any mettle led his men into battle.
The attack order was not “Forward,” but “After me.” These were Greylancer’s chosen words.
Noblesse oblige—the obligation borne by humans of high birth, royalty and nobility, in return for their high ranking. Driven by this obligation, the Nobility always stood at the vanguard of their fleet. Cowards were they that shouted “Forward!” from a position of safety. Noble warriors simply said, “After me,” and were the first to draw weapons fire.
And so too did the Nobility’s greatest warrior. But were not Nobles immortal? No, the enemy’s primary weapon was not the atomic cannon but what followed.
The OSB fired a spread of graviton spheres. When they came into contact with Noble aircraft, they neutralized the antigravitational propulsion field. One after the next, the ion engines of the bat-shaped aircraft flamed on.
The atomic cannon followed, destroying the aircraft. Then, as the jettisoned pilots plummeted through space, a barrage of stakes and steel arrows rained down to impale them.
Greylancer threaded his chariot past the spheres, destroyed them as he passed, and closed in on the moon base.
The feeling of movement was imperceptible in gravitational field propulsion. No matter how fast he spun, aside from the visual change, Greylancer was incapable of perceiving three-dimensional movement from within his chariot.
“Do not fail me, rear squadron.”
A peculiarly shaped spherical building encircled by rings came into view ahead.
The antiproton cannons affixed on either side of the chariot poured hot beams into the barrier shielding the building.
The antiproton beam was capable of vaporizing protons and all matter in existence.
Yet the beams glanced off the barrier wall and only vaporized the unlucky OSB craft in the vicinity.
It was a deadly gamble. Would the Military Bureau’s dimensional cutter on Earth be able to disrupt the enemy’s barrier from three hundred thousand kilometers away?
If the cutter failed, Greylancer would fly into the barrier and be reduced to dust. And if the cutter were even a thousandth of a second off, Greylancer would be banished to another dimension.
The Greater Noble did not flinch and pointed the chariot toward the barrier.
Was it his split-second evasive skills he trusted? The Military Bureau’s invention? Or his own luck?
The barrier tore open.
As the chariot plunged into the white one-by-three-kilometer tear in the dimension, the antiproton stream reversed direction and the vortex dragged Greylancer’s craft down onto the lunar surface, right into the OSB’s base.
†
Inside the oddly shaped building there existed silver-colored automatons. Having no natural shape of their own, the OSB had created organic beings by forming and discarding body parts, then stitching the disparate anatomies together. The patchwork beings were designed to carry out simple tasks. In parallel, the OSBs developed new and upgraded incarnations of robots until finally, combining the two offspring populations, they perfected organisms that might best be called cybernetic beings.
Then the protean OSBs adopted the form of their own cybernetic creations and gave rise to a unique civilization.
The OSB appeared to possess a curiosity rivaling that of any other intelligent beings in the universe.
It was only a matter of time before they ventured into the ocean of constellations. In fact, the imminent destruction of their mother planet had made the endeavor all but imperative. As their sun began to expand due to an abnormal nuclear fusion and threatened to engulf the mother planet, the OSB devoted five thousand years to the construction of a massive space fleet. Resting their fates in the stars, they set out for another realm. Tens of thousands of years later, their wandering journey ended with the capture of a lone space probe.
After thoroughly researching its mechanism, the OSB decided to set course for the star system that produced this probe. Their intent was not peaceful coexistence but invasion and conquest. Domination. Uncharted was just another word for wild. Civilizing the wild in their own image—such was the mission their god had appointed them. They were forgiven any means to carry it out.
However, this would take another millennium. Although the OSB had developed a form of lightspeed technology, they discovered a habitable planet en route to the probe’s birthplace and settled there.
They required no longer than a hundred years to make this planet their new home. The OSB slaughtered every extant species, and a strange civilization—one that began as amorphous creatures and later took the form of cyborgs—was born.
The OSB seemed fated to solitude. Scientists concluded that, despite enjoying a period of great prosperity, their civilization would become more isolated and eventually perish. The neighboring star systems were devoid of intelligent life. There were no species left to conquer.
Plagued by pangs of existentialism, the OSBs redirected their attention to the now-legendary probe and the distant stars.
Thus, with a hundred billion stars reflecting in the bodies of their aircraft, they embarked on a millennium-long journey of conquest.
By the time they entered Earth’s solar system, however, the Nobility were already aware of their existence. Anticipating an invasion from outer space, the Nobility had spread an elaborate surveillance network of satellites and planetoid bases throughout the star system.
The first
skirmish broke out somewhere near Pluto.
Though the Nobility’s fleet was crushed by the awesome firepower of the OSB, the existence of the Nobility struck fear in the invaders.
Why? Blown into space, the Noble warriors neither froze nor suffocated, but vanished into the void. After entering Pluto’s orbit, five hundred or so Nobles had drifted around the planet until being rescued.
The second battle unfolded in Saturn’s orbit, but despite an eventual retreat, the Nobility had dealt a great blow to the OSB.
Made to reckon with an uncommon foe, the OSB deployed an advance detachment to Earth.
By possessing the humans they encountered, the OSB obtained intelligence on their vampire enemies. They were astounded to learn of the Noble gift of immortality.
Meanwhile, the vampires captured an unfortunate OSB that had stolen the identity of a Noble.
Predicting an even fight in a battle of brute force, the OSB built a permanent base on the far side of the moon in anticipation of a war of attrition. Because they subsisted by altering their form to absorb any nearby energy sources, they required nothing more than solar energy while in their lunar bivouac.
Thus began the war between the OSB and Nobility that would span three thousand years.
2
The moon base was wrapped in silence. No audible alarm was necessary to alert an army of robots, nor was there air to carry any sound to a Noble’s ears.
Robots on combat vehicles sped down the corridors, and fighters swooped down from above.
Gravitational field spheres flew about in every direction. The enemy intended to neutralize Greylancer’s antigravitational field before unleashing an attack.
“I’m going in. Anyone who is able, after me!” Greylancer shouted. He moved to switch off the chariot’s field.
“Commander, you mustn’t do anything rash!” a voice said from the image of the console floating next to his ear. The two-dimensional grid contained all of the ship’s controls within easy reach. “You will be cannon fodder if you lower your ship’s field.”
Noble V: Greylancer Page 6