Warp World

by Kristene Perron

  His eyes flicked back to his savior’s body: eighty-six centimeters across the shoulders, seven-point-five centimeter rise from shoulder to neck.

  Viren Hult.

  Fismar scrambled to his feet. His pinky cycled him through the various visor-viewpoints of his troops.

  Nine targets remained in the room.

  Thirty-seven seconds.

  “Damn my ancestors, look at him,” one of the Kenda troopers whispered. The others had stopped as Fismar, with Viren close in tow, charged into the last knot of Etiphar resistance.

  Cerd watched, as stunned as the rest, as Fismar suddenly pivoted and fired a snap shot with his pistol, dropping an Etiphar who had just started to rise—behind Fismar’s back, out of sight.

  “How?” Cerd heard himself ask the question aloud.

  Fismar alone had broken the right flank, barely leaving the rest of the Kenda any time to keep up with him. He had charged through, dodged, weaved and—but for one moment when it seemed sure the Etiphar had him, before Viren had come to the rescue—the Etiphars hadn’t laid a hand on him.

  Cerd was open-mouthed as Fismar effortlessly finished the last Etiphar. Even in training, they had never seen their leader move like this. It was inhuman. Of all the things Cerd had seen since he had come to this world, this unnatural speed and precision was the most unsettling.

  Moments later, Fismar’s voice woke up the comm. “Fifty-seven seconds. Finish the survivors, and for Storm’s sake don’t touch the charges until I get a chance to see what the Etis were doing here!”

  Ama traced her finger over the expanding line of Storm icons; with her other hand she pressed a button. She pressed it again but the numbers on the display didn’t change.

  “Less than thirty minutes before it’s on us,” she said. “Anything from Fismar?”

  “Give me a precise time on that,” Shan snapped. “And no, no word from Fis.” Her helmet was lowered into place as she scanned the displays. “Okay, if the boss comes in, we get a continuous comm link and we upload the safe flight path to bring him in without putting him in front of the guns that are still active.”

  “Twenty-seven minutes,” Ama said. She looked up, out the cockpit window. “Nen’s death.”

  In the distance, a black wall was bearing down on the Keep.

  “Easy.” Shan pointed at the control console for the Storm-cell. “At full power, it’ll take about three seconds to activate. As long as he gets his rider here and down, he can get inside the walls, with the rest of your buddies, and finish killing these stinking Etis.”

  Shan froze as Fismar’s signal came through the comm.

  “Air Lead, this is Ground Lead. We’ve got the power room. Moving down to secure the living quarters and the hostages.”

  “Power room is clear!” Shan said to Ama, then she cued her mike. “Air Lead, received, two-six minutes to Stormfall and—” She pounded a fist on the console. “Yes! Signal! Cathind inbound. The boss is on his way home!”

  “Viren is enroute to receive,” Fismar said.

  “Confirm, Viren inbound, Air Lead clear.” Shan turned to Ama. “Boss likes to make the big entrance doesn’t he? Well, let’s just show him the—”

  She frowned as she stabbed the button for the transmitter, then pushed it again.

  “Okay, we had comm link for a second, now it’s gone amber. What the karg?”

  Seg clung to the restraint harness pinning him down in the copilot’s seat as the rider struggled to stay aloft. A burst of lightning had nearly struck them and half the instruments in the cockpit had gone dark. From somewhere down by his feet, a thin stream of smoke curled upward.

  “I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” The pilot swore as he wrestled with the controls. “Fire con, red button there, hit it!”

  Seg slapped the red button and was rewarded only with a loud clunk and whirring. The indicator light by the button flashed amber to show mechanical failure.

  “Okay, we can make it. It’s just a bit farther,” the pilot promised.

  There was a new icon on the Defiant’s display now, a tiny blip against the wall of the Storm. “They’re coming in the wrong way,” Ama said. She watched Seg’s shuttle deviate from the flight path Shan had carefully laid out—the path that would keep them out of range of the Etiphar guns that they hadn’t knocked out. His shuttle was right in the line of fire.

  “Shan?” Ama slapped down her visor and reached for her harness.

  “Crash lift.” Shan’s voice took on a strangely calm quality. “Missiles dry, we’re going to have to gun this one.”

  The Defiant was going up. The only question was how hard would it come back down?

  Even as Julewa hove into view and the pilot struggled to control the craft, Seg drank in the sight. Here he would win or die, and if he won, it would be a start. A start!

  “Home,” he said, as another random buffet slammed him into the harness. He could feel the bruises forming already where the restraints had met the hard edges of his equipment.

  He was in a crippled rider, flying toward a mountain battleground, as the Storm closed in. There was nowhere on the World he would rather be at this moment.

  “Karg, who’s that? Was somebody supposed to meet us?” The pilot jerked his head toward the cockpit window.

  Seg squinted. A rider, his rider, was lurching through the air toward them. Something was wrong—one landing strut was bent and the others had not retracted.

  As he watched, the gunship’s nose-mounted cannon began spitting fire.

  “Karg!” Shan slide-slipped the rider, desperately angling for a shot at the emplacement. “The emplacement’s shielded by the rock!”

  Ama watched with growing horror as Seg’s shuttle moved into the sight line of the Etiphar guns. Without the comm connection, they had no way to warn him.

  “Block it!” Ama said. “Get us between the guns and the shuttle.”

  Shan hesitated for a split second, then nodded as she rammed the throttles home. “I’m going to spin us and hammer that thing as soon as we cross the line.” As the Defiant staggered through the air, she chuckled softly. “Good flying with you, Kalder.”

  “There’s a karging gun emplacement!” the shuttle pilot yelled. “You said there’d be no guns! You said—”

  The shuttle lurched and once more the pilot fought to maintain control. In front of them, the Defiant’s engines flared as it put on a hard thrust and leapt forward. The rider intersected their path just as the Etiphar cannon opened fire. Seg watched tracers fly through the air, stitching the Defiant even as its nose-mounted cannon fired again; a sustained burst sawed through the gun emplacement. The last few rounds from the destroyed enemy gun whipped past the Defiant and smashed into the shuttle. The craft staggered again, fell over on its wing, and threatened to drop from the sky. To his left, Seg saw the Defiant, trailing smoke and parts across the landscape.

  Then only a view of the ground filled his screen.

  “It’s gone! It’s gone!” Shan shouted. “Eject, eject, eject!”

  Ama reached for the ejection lever and tugged. Nothing. The mechanism was frozen, locked in place.

  “Ama, eject!”

  “Broken.” An involuntary smile rose to Ama’s lips. She flipped up her visor for a moment, looked at Shan, then looked away, into the Storm.

  “GO!” Ama shouted.

  There was a loud BANG and Shan was gone, rocketed up and out. Air rushed in the cockpit, the roar of the Storm heightening the din.

  And the voices.

  Ama stared into the blackness and waited.

  As the wounded shuttle spun through the air, the pilot snarled and grappled with the controls, bellowing curses at the sky. The piled trash on the console rained around the cockpit, pelting the two occupants with each gyration. Seg’s head slammed into the
window next to him and was pinned in place by the centrifugal force. As they made another revolution, he saw a pillar of smoke and fire erupt from the cockpit of the Defiant. An ejection-seat launch, it had to be.

  The seats had attached Storm cells. Ama and Shan could get down. They could survive long enough for retrieval later.

  If.

  If they weren’t wounded, incapacitated.

  “Got it!” the pilot said “Got it aimed at the deck. Hang on!”

  The rider plunged toward the Keep’s flight deck. As they reached the point of collision, the pilot slammed the fans down in an effort to bring the descent under some kind of control.

  Even as Nallin choked on the smoke and dust inside the rider, her hand reached blindly for her viscam. I’m probably in shock, she thought. Sane People would check for injuries first. The pain brought on by the resulting laugh told her that she had suffered some damage, perhaps only from the harness—she had slammed hard when the rider crashed—or perhaps more serious. She would worry about that later.

  Viscam firmly in hand again, and in one piece, she flipped it on and unlatched her harness.

  A jerky revolution captured the mess inside. Up front, the pilot hung half out the cockpit window to one side—limp and at an unnatural angle. Blood sprayed the cockpit, though that was already coated with grit and looked more black than red.

  A hand reached in and guided her onto the tarmac. Eraranat. How had he made it out already? She barely had time to finish the question in her mind before he was back inside the rider again, helping pull out the wounded.

  Out of the smoke, her head began to clear. She hunched against the rising wind, a torn flap of fabric from her jacket whipping against her back. She could see Eraranat’s bodyguard, Manatu, was injured. His left arm hung slack. The dark-haired caj was scraped and bruised but intact. One of the raiders had dragged out the body of another. Two casualties, so far. Other raiders limped or worked to staunch bloody wounds.

  She backed up to get a wide angle of the rider. It was a miracle they had made it to this small landing area. A bigger miracle that anyone had walked away. The craft was a wreck. One side had been peeled open, by either the Etiphar weapons or the landing, impossible for her to say which. It had all happened in a blur.

  Julewa. Despite Eraranat’s assurances that the Keep would be under his control, she could scarcely believe she was standing on this legendary piece of ground. She turned the viscam to take in the view—the first chronicle of this fortress in over a hundred years. He had done it. The Storm-crazy Theorist had actually taken it.

  With an army of Outers, no less.

  When the World learned of this feat, Eraranat would change from celebrity to legend. The World’s first hero since Lannit’s death and disgrace.

  She took a painful breath and moved closer to Eraranat, who was pulling a Storm cell out from the rider. She had to shout over the howling wind to get his attention.

  “Shouldn’t we get inside?”

  “Help the wounded get in.” Seg looked over her shoulder and she panned the viscam to catch one of the Outer troops running toward him. “Viren! Take charge of this, get these people inside!”

  “I’ve got a more important job right now.” The Outer, Viren, reloaded his chack and wiped the sweat from his face beneath his raised visor. Nallin focused the viscam on the Outer and Seg.

  “Hult, you’re in the Guard now,” Seg said. “If you don’t follow orders, I’ll shoot you where you stand! We’ve got a Storm closing in, you need to get these people inside so I can extract—”

  “Ama and Shan.” Viren raised a hand to the sky and pointed to where the wounded rider had traveled. “I saw. And the good lieutenant will carve me a new orifice if I let you go out there alone. Not that I need his motivation. So, come on, I’ve got our ride down.”

  As they argued, a one-armed Outer rushed past. With his one hand, he hoisted an injured raider across his shoulder and hurried back to the safety of the Keep.

  “Theorist?” Seg’s bodyguard staggered to his feet.

  “Elarn!” Seg said to a waiting medical. “Keep Manatu inside until the Storm’s passed. Viren and I are going to get the rider crew.”

  “That’s insane,” Elarn called to Seg and Viren’s rapidly departing backs.

  Nallin turned her viscam to Seg’s bodyguard.

  “Theorist!” Manatu yelled. “Don’t go out there!” Another raider pulled him away as the group retreated into cover. Around them, small warps began to bubble into sight and she hurried to catch the rarely-seen phenomenon on the viscam as she followed Seg and Viren to the Keep’s wall.

  The two men climbed into a metal basket just barely big enough for both of them. The Outer worked the controls and they descended to the wasteland floor at a dizzying speed.

  She raised the viscam to capture the scene one last time before seeking shelter. The winds ahead of the Storm were picking up speed, swirling dust and debris. The shuttle passengers were headed for the safety of the Keep’s walls. All but Eraranat’s caj. She was also at the wall, both hands gripping the rail as she watched her master’s progress. She wore an expression of worry and longing that did nothing to diminish her beauty.

  She was only caj but Nallin had witnessed Seg’s strange affection for Outers and guessed he wouldn’t be thrilled to see any of them come to harm.

  “You!” She called to the caj as she lowered the viscam. “Get inside, now!”

  The caj raised her face and something in the eyes made Nallin hesitate. Something altogether too controlled. And then it was gone, the pitiful longing was back in its place, as she nodded and fell in just a step behind Nallin. Better watch my back, Nallin thought, then she smiled at the ridiculousness of the notion. As if a Person, and a seasoned veteran such as herself, had anything to fear from this Outer girl.

  “He did what? And Viren let— Yeah, of course he did, he’s the boss,” Fismar said over the comm.

  He waved a halt to the troops, then kicked over the nearest movable object, a trash receptacle. The square bin bounced off the large steel doors blocking the main access ramp to the residential levels. A Kenda trooper looked up from his position outside the door to the habitation block, irritated until he saw who had caused the disturbance. He turned back without a word and continued to affix demolition charges, purloined from the power room, to the door’s hinges.

  “Un-karging-believable!” Fismar shouted.

  “Viren again?” Cerd asked.

  “Worse, the Theorist. We’ve got a rider down, and his crazy ass is off chasing it in the wastes with a Storm bearing down in seventeen and a half minutes. Viren, of course, is following him.” He turned to address the weary troops. “This is why I don’t like letting the dangly bits intermingle in a unit. Go karg a caj if you need the relief!”

  “Ama?” Cerd asked.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got it for her too.” Fismar groaned. “Listen, they’re out there, we’re in here. Everyone’s got to deal with what’s in front of them. Now let’s go finish our job and save these kargers.”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant.” Cerd double checked the ammo load on his chack. “Good to go.”

  Fismar stepped back out and cued up his comm. “Ground Lead, Wyan?”

  The comm clicked twice, a silent signal that Wyan’s people had moved into position.

  “Get ’em,” Fismar whispered.

  The doors blew inward from their hinges. Wyan’s team swarmed in, leading with blades to clear the surviving guards. Screams of terror and the wails of children echoed through the lower habitation blocks. Fismar darted through, then crouched down and whistled at the scope of the habs stretching out below.

  “This is like a roomier undercity rig down here. You could stack up ten thousand People inside these walls, easy.” He turned to the small cluster of Kenda behind him, wh
o flanked their Etiphar assistant. “Okay, Hephier, your time,” he said in the boy’s tongue.

  The boy stepped forward with slow, pained steps. A reminder that he had barely recovered from his wasteland ordeal.

  “Everyone, it’s Hephier. Hephier Bendure. You’re safe. Come out, you’re safe!” He called out in the antique language of the Etiphars.

  Nothing happened. The hostages remained hidden and were now deathly silent. Fismar nodded for Hephier to continue.

  “This isn’t a trick. These men aren’t our enemies. They’re here to help us. They saved me in the wastes. Please come out and—”

  A single figure appeared. A woman. Her face was gaunt, her brown hair streaked with gray, but her eyes were sharp as they moved from Hephier to the Kenda. Her dress looked as if it had come from a museum—rough cloth, which was not huchack fiber, woven with patterns that had not been seen on the World for centuries. Slowly, she raised her hands and reached toward the boy. They moved as one.

  “Mama.” Hephier fell forward into waiting arms.

  Fismar and the Kenda remained quiet as Hephier’s mother stroked his hair and face.

  “They lied to us. They all lied to us!” He broke down in sobs as the woman wrapped him tighter.

  She didn’t let him go as she looked directly at Fismar. “Thank you, for bringing him back. Are the rest dead?”

  After a surprised pause, Fismar answered. “A few aren’t.” For a moment, he thought he had been looking at House Marshal Devian Bendure, so striking was the resemblance. “A few wounded, some still sneaking around the ventilation shafts. The rest—” He nodded at the blood stains on his arms. “Lieutenant Fismar Korth of the Eraranat House Guard. Julewa Keep is now the property of Segkel Eraranat.”