by AJ Super
Kai lay on the floor next to her.
She rested her head on his bloody chest. Exhaustion washed over her. Malcam collapsed next to Red, a frail old man. Nyx had nearly killed him. Revenge was hers.
White fire pulsing through her, she closed her eyes. She couldn’t save him. She couldn’t save the man she loved, who loved her. Dizzy, Nyx lifted her head and opened her eyes. She moved Kai’s hair from his face, smearing blood across his forehead. Nyx’s vision blurred, and, for a moment, the command deck dissolved into the white room where she had met Erebus. Kai lay on the smooth white floor, and a single white tendril rose from her fingertips to meet the barest kiss of blood-red flame as it extinguished near his heart. Nyx blinked, and the dim yellow light of the Medusa’s deck and its angry crew surrounded her again.
Nyx rested her head back down, universe spinning out, voices tinned. Red had hit her too hard. Something was wrong with her temple. She was going to be sick, and her breathing was too shallow.
Red lights flashed. An alarm clanged.
“North American Union privateer ship, Le Loup, off starboard,” echoed the Communications Officer.
“Do we have control of the weapons and shields yet?” Malcam wheezed.
“Shields, mostly. Weapons, getting there,” the Executive Officer reverberated.
Nyx tossed her head. Space fuzzed, alternating between black and red. She swore she felt Kai’s chest move. Her eyes stung. Tears gathered like prickling crystals in the corners of her eyes. One dripped down the tip of her nose. This was it. She couldn’t save him. She couldn’t save the Thanatos crew. She couldn’t save herself.
A console sparked and smoked. Nyx lifted her head, and one of the hostages grabbed the gun away from the guards behind the kneeling Thanatos crew. He turned and a gunshot rang in the din of the alarm. The guard fell, bleeding.
The hostages began running to the door. Nyx ducked her head as more shots rang after them. Red and Tyco fired into the escapees and panicking crew, trying to aim above heads so they didn’t hit their own people.
Someone knelt next to her, brushed a hand through her short hair. “I’ll take her. You take him.”
Nyx’s eyes fluttered, and she met Captain Leo Matthews’ beaten-faced gaze. He slung her left arm over his shoulder, grunted and stumbled, and hoisted her up. The Medusa’s one-eyed Sia-unit, occupied by Erebus, walked to Kai and scooped him from the floor.
“What happened? What’s happening?” Nyx muttered into Matthews’ neck.
“Jailbreak, my dear,” Matthews said, with a lop-sided smile over the alarm. He looked at the leaking Sia. “Go ahead. Get that shuttle going, if my people already haven’t.” He nodded to the android.
The Sia-unit frowned. “She’s my sister. I didn’t know what to do to help.”
Matthews nodded. “In the end, you did good. Blowing things up is good.”
The Sia-unit scrunched his blue eyes. “That’s not what Kai says. Kai says human life is sacred, and blowing things up can damage human life.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Matthews smothered a giggle. “But you did what you had to. Now stop wasting time and go. I fear Nyx and I are going to be a little slow.”
The Sia-unit nodded to him, and, carrying the limp Kai, trotted easily out of the door and down the dimly lit, conduit-lined hallway.
Matthews sighed and shifted Nyx’s weight closer to him in the smoky chaos of the command deck. He wrapped his arm around her waist tightly. He turned Nyx’s head. “I could have sworn she cracked your skull clean open.”
Nyx moaned.
“I also thought that he shot you in the gut. Swear everyone saw that. And now you’re not…” Matthews shrugged her closer, heaving her weight higher on his shoulder. “Suppose it’s happened then. Just like Nue said it would.”
“My maman? What’s happened?”
“Let’s get to the shuttle first.” He helped her up, and they began to stagger to the door. “They won’t wait in the docking bay forever. Especially with a privateer cruiser sitting with guns pointed every which way.”
“I wouldn’t move any further,” a voice bellowed over the claxon.
Matthews pivoted with Nyx draped over his shoulder.
Red stood behind them, her rifle leveled. “If it were up to me, I’d take you directly to the brig. But Captain Malcam wants you here. So, turn around, or I’ll make sure you die.” The muscular woman spat at Nyx’s feet. She shook her rifle barrel at Nyx, her finger quivering on the trigger.
“Guess we didn’t get that far after all,” Matthews moaned, as he took Nyx by the waist, and the two edged past the trigger-fingered woman back to where they had been.
Acrid black smoke poured from the ExO’s console and the weapons and navigation consoles sparked and flamed while crew members hurriedly doused them with thick, white, fire suppression foam.
“Do we have weapons, yet?” Malcam roared over the din of the alarm, his bent body teetering at the top of the captain’s chair platform.
“We have enough control to get off a single torpedo. But aiming capabilities are still minimal. We won’t be able to hit much,” someone yelled through the noise.
“Jump drive ready?” Malcam yelled.
“Jump drive clean, rebooted, partitioned, and ready! No viruses getting through my firewalls!”
They were going to jump. Erebus must not be actively expanding through the Medusa, and it was allowing the crew to clean out her code from certain systems. Whether their firewalls would hold up to Erebus, would be a question of time. But, for now, expanding to the new cruiser that was aiming its weapons willie-nillie would be her goal, not controlling the spaceship she was already expanded into. And she would likely lose her foothold on the queen’s ship if she pushed her processing capabilities too far. This was just too much even for an AI as advanced as her to do, without more resources at her fingertips. Eventually, La Terre would give her those resources, but until she was ingrained in the systems wholly and completely, Erebus was expanding too fast. She needed time to incorporate these ships, their technology, into her own conscious being, in order to make them a part of her unconscious workings. She couldn’t be thousands of places at once. Her consciousness would be taken up digging through the firewalls and code of the privateer ship the queen sent to bring the two pirates to heel and as a result, Erebus was unknowingly giving up control of the Medusa.
Malcam would get the Medusa back.
The privateer cruiser, Le Loup—The Wolf, hovered on the view-screen in between the Medusa and the Thanatos, and the ore hauler. Nyx’s head sagged. Sending an under-government privateer meant the queen was taking the Thanatos and Erebus seriously.
Malcam pivoted his chair to Matthews and Nyx. “Now I’ll take everything that was taken from me.” His gaunt, weathered face was hard, as the two walked below the captain’s platform, Red at their backs. Malcam turned away from them again. “Give me control of the weapons systems.”
“Control transferred.”
“Zoom in. Make sure that shuttle docks first. I want them to have a fine seat for this little trick.” Malcam sneered. A small, black shuttle docked on the Thanatos.
“They left without us,” Nyx whispered.
Matthews nodded, head bowed. “Had to be done.”
“Torpedo coordinates entered.” Malcam glanced over his shoulder at Nyx. “And torpedo away.” He smashed his bony, liver-spotted fist on the console of his chair arm.
The blazing tail of the sailing weapon sliced through space to Le Loup.
Nyx snorted. The torpedo would never get through the NAU ship’s shields. Malcam had fired a useless toy at the privateer and would only succeed in making them angry.
Malcam raised an eyebrow at her noise. “You think I’m aiming for the NAU branleurs?”
The torpedo raced by the privateer ship, on towards the Thanatos. No, not the Thanatos. The torpedo was heading for the ore hauler Calliope.
The monk had mentioned something about the shields. But he d
idn’t get to finish. Malcam did something to the shields, rigged them somehow.
The Thanatos sat right next to the behemoth.
The torpedo hit the shields of the ore hauler with a brilliant splash. Fire blossomed, engulfing the forward bridge of the ship and slowly mushrooming through the aft. With a puff of yellow flame, the ore hauler turned into a fiery ball, consuming the Thanatos.
Nyx’s heart dropped. “No,” she whispered. The Thanatos was too close on the one side to have her shields up completely. She would have been engulfed in the violent conflagration and reduced to scrap.
The joy in Malcam’s eyes gleamed.
Nyx wanted to tear them out.
“Jump,” he ordered.
21
The metal bunk set in the wall chilled Nyx. She curled into a ball, the dim yellow light of the brig hiding her in shadows. In the lower cubby in the cell beside her, Leo Matthews snored gently. She clasped her thin grey blanket close, the wavy ergonomic form of the bed hugging her body and negating the need for a pillow.
The brig was a wide room with two small, side-by-side cells separated by a wall of bars on one side. A narrow walk separated two identical cells on the opposite side. The solid metal walls of the four cells each had two cubby bunks and a tiny toilet cubicle inset on one side and sink on the other. A bench squatted on either side of the dividing wall of bars.
A padded chair on wheels next to a small desk-tray sat at the end of the walk between the cells, and Tyco leaned back, head lolling as he rested his eyes in the gloom.
The litany of Nyx’s failures echoed in her head.
The Thanatos was gone. Kai was gone. Erebus was gone.
Everyone was gone. Her crew, her family.
Malcam had killed them all; he had disintegrated them in a fiery storm when he blew up the ore hauler Calliope.
She clutched the blanket tighter. Now she was stuck in this barred prison on her father’s ship, stolen by a usurper with no way off and no way to gain her freedom unless she could connect with Erebus’ emerald code in the system. She closed her eyes. She could only wonder when Malcam was going to kill her and Matthews.
Tears gathered.
If he could kill her at all. Her hands splayed over the hole in the fabric of her black jumper. The nano-medics had repaired her gut-wound perfectly. She hadn’t felt much pain, except the initial burning of being shot. And the head-crushing blow that had disoriented her so badly had been healed as well.
She really was immortal. Erebus had ruined her humanity, had turned her into something else. Now, her blood burned.
She put a hand to her head and buried her face, tears pouring down the bridge of her nose.
There was nothing she could do about the Thanatos and its crew—a group of people she had started to believe could be a part of her newly forming family. She was out of options. She was better off dying than being without her freedom, and hoped Malcam would find a way to put her out of her misery.
She sniffed, her back tense, her chest heaving. Warm tears ran down her nose, puddling on the cold bed beneath her. There was nothing left.
The door slid open.
The hawk-nosed Tyco’s boot heels clicked as he stood and saluted whoever walked in.
Heavy shuffling stopped at the bars. A weighty, rasping breath resounded through the quiet prison.
“Putain, qu’est ce que tu m’as fait?” Malcam asked.
Nyx rolled over. “What did I do to you?”
The man on the other side of the bars wasn’t the monstrous, thick bull of a man he had been. In his place loomed a stooped, white-haired man eaten by age. The only things which appeared the same were his cerulean eyes set in a deep brow, slicked widows’ peak, and the hard edge to his voice.
“Je n’ai rien fait. Je ne t’ai rien fait, Malcam.” Nyx rubbed the tears from her face with the corner of her sleeve, then swung her legs out of the cubby, ducking her head. She jumped down softly, careful not to disturb the unmoving Matthews in the next cell. She walked to Malcam and wrapped her hands around the bars, leaning her head on the cold metal.
“Lying salope. You did something. How did I end up like this, then?” he spat, stepping out of her reach.
“I don’t know.” Nyx pushed off the bars. “I really don’t know.” A soft hum flew through her body, fleeting. The wisps of white curled off her fingertips, then vanished. She tried to grab the feeling, but it fluttered away like a butterfly to a lily.
“I know you did this. And you’re going to reverse it. If it kills you,” Malcam growled.
Nyx crossed her arms. “Va te faire foutre. I don’t know what you think I can do. But if I don’t know how I did this, how am I supposed to reverse ces conneries?”
Malcam sneered. “Somewhere in that brain of yours, you know exactly what’s going on. You’ll remember this and so much more.”
“You can’t dig out what isn’t there. Besides, torture doesn’t work. I mean, look at him. You got nothing from him.”
“Who said anything about torture?”
Nyx was careful not to show her alarm. If he actually meant that he was going to dig it out…“You can’t.”
“I’ll do what I have to.” He paused and added under his breath, “I have promises to keep.”
She gripped the bars, her knuckles white. He was going to mind-strip her. Where was he going to find the funds to do that when he could barely keep the lights on? He was clearly going to find a way.
Malcam narrowed his eyes. “Once this is done, you’ll see things from my perspective. You’ll know how to reverse this. I’ll get the Star. And I’ll control her.”
Nyx loosened her grip on the bars, shoulders sagging. She turned and slogged to the bed cubby. “You destroyed her when you killed the Thanatos. She doesn’t exist anymore. You screwed up, connard.”
He slammed the bars with his shriveled hands. “I don’t believe you.”
Nyx hopped back into the bunk, ducking her head. “Believe what you want. But there is no more Star of Erebus.” She leaned back down and pulled the blanket over her shoulder. “Do what you need to with me, but Matthews is useless now. Sell him, let him go, whatever. Just don’t strip him.”
Malcam shook his head. “Can’t be. No way. It’s a computer program. Someone kept a copy somewhere. Must have.”
Nyx turned away from him. “That’s wishful thinking.”
“I want to know where Matthews got the damn thing in the first place,” he yowled. “He has more information. I know it. You’re protecting him for a reason.”
“Have it your way. Waste your money. On both of us.” Nyx gripped the blanket, willing herself to breathe normally.
Malcam kicked the bars with a clank. “Once this is done…” He set his jaw.
Nyx stared at the blank metal wall. She would get her wish. Malcam would kill her. She wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of killing the new Thanatos crew. Not to mention everyone on board the Kokou. Her body shuddered with a barely suppressed sob. So much for a family.
The door slid open, and Malcam’s heavy, shuffling footfalls retreated out into the dark passageway.
Fabric rustled in the bunk of the next cell, and Matthews cleared his throat.
Nyx groaned and rolled to her back. “You heard what he’s going to do?”
“Surprised he hadn’t done it already.” Matthews’ voice was muffled through the bunk.
“Have you been faking being insane? You don’t have time dilation sickness.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Matthews chuckled. “I can’t really tell what’s real and what’s not. I just decided to go along for the ride. Seems to be the easiest way. Keeps the weird at bay. For all I know, I’m talking to a figment of my imagination again.” He poked his head out of the cubicle bunk. “Tyco, is there another prisoner here, or am I talking to myself again?”
Nyx shifted and watched Tyco as he stared down his nose.
“Another prisoner, yes,” the Black man muttered. He eyed Nyx suspiciously. “Sho
uld float her. Bad luck that one. Demon-spawn.” He spat on the deck.
“Not only another prisoner, but bad luck demon-spawn. Aren’t you special?”
Nyx hung her head upside-down over the edge of the bed and glared at him. She leaned back into the bunk and stared at the wall. “What am I?” she whispered.
“You’re what you’ve always been.” Matthews kicked the cubicle, making the metal ring. “Quit wallowing.”
“Hey!” Tyco snapped.
“What have I always been, then? I don’t understand.” Nyx swallowed back tears. Bad luck. Demon-spawn. She was something that brought misfortune to those she cared about. The Thanatos was proof of that. The Kokou was proof of that.
“Human. You’re human,” Matthews said softly. “That hasn’t changed. And it never will change.”
“But I’m more than that. I feel—” Nyx paused, white energy fluttering through her body and then dissipating as she reached for it. “I can feel something more.”
Matthews grunted. “I suppose you should. You are a Star. It’s in your blood.”
“What do you mean? It’s in my blood?” She propped herself up. She couldn’t be a Star. Erebus was a Star. The queen was a Star. They were AI, tech and algorithms. She was relatively sure that they were both a collection of nanobots with specific program capabilities.
Erebus had the capability to generate an infinite expansion of her consciousness and shut down the universe’s technologies, keeping food and necessary supplies out of trade-lanes, as well as having the ability to control individual under-governments through fear of technological terrorism, strangling economies, starving billions, living up to her moniker as the God of Darkness and the personification of famine.
Queen Phoebe, God of War, while not able to replicate herself as Erebus, could use her algorithm to predict the movement of even the most mundane of people in the Protectorate, if she chose, making the idea of freedom of choice nearly moot. The queen could pinpoint the actions of a whole government, a coup, a ship, a captain, an individual. She only needed a few data points and evading her would be impossible. She could direct any form of conflict. Her personification of intellect and prophecy was unmatched.