This Bloody Game

by Dan Schiro

  “Holy hell,” Vanlith gasped when they fell into the standard gravity of the gym. “Where did you learn to play like that?”

  Orion leaned over and propped his hands on his knees, his sweat-drenched blond hair plastered to his forehead. “Would you believe Khanpara Guha?”

  Vanlith laced her fingers atop her head and fixed him with a quizzical look. “Khanpara…? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s not important.” Orion straightened up. “Listen, Commander Vanlith… Katherine?”

  “Commander Vanlith,” she said, raising a finely drawn eyebrow.

  “Commander, I think we could be friends.” Orion took a small, confident step toward her, inexorably drawn to the rosy glow of exertion in her high cheeks. “I think we could really connect, and I think you feel it too.” He reached up and touched his fingertips to her flushed cheek, clearing away a curl of wet black hair.

  The punch came so hard and fast that even Orion’s keen instinct for danger didn’t anticipate it. He stumbled back, then conceded to gravity’s renewed interest and found himself on his backside, blood dripping from his nostrils.

  “You presumptuous mercenary loser,” Vanlith spat at him, her fist raised and ready for more. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m sorry.” Orion winced and dabbed at his nose. “Fortune favors the bold?”

  “I’m going to boot you off my ship, and I don’t care what kind of legal nonsen—”

  “Hold that thought,” Orion cried as he felt the datacube in his pocket vibrate. Aurelia was calling.

  “Tell me I’m wonderful,” said Aurelia’s voice when he activated the datacube.

  “You’re wonderful,” Orion said, his voice nasal as he pinched closed his bleeding nose.

  “I am wonderful,” Aurelia said crisply. “And you know why? Because I found the Kalifa of Light for you. Suit up and get over to Ray Runner 12.”

  “On our way.” Orion snapped the datacube shut and smiled up at Vanlith through the oozing blood. “What do you say, Commander?” Her rage mixed with confusion before his eyes. “You want to put a big, shiny gold star on that career of yours?”

  Chapter 17

  Orion gazed down on the sandy clouds of a small planet, nothing more than the warmech’s diamond-glass faceplate between him and the vacuum of space. Shaking his head, he reviewed how he had arrived in this terrifying position.

  Just a few hours ago, Aurelia had called him to the incense-fogged bridge of Ray Runner 12 and showed him a wavering, aqua-tinted rip floating in the empty air. The tear couldn’t be crossed; the fabric of space-time had knit together too much for that. But they could see a planet’s cloudy visage, and Orion’s datacube quickly identified it as a virtually lifeless orb called Jutera-4. Orion took the information back to Commander Vanlith expecting an awkward encounter, but to his relief, the icy Union officer remained strictly professional in front of her command center crew. Vanlith barked a few terse orders to requisition long-range telemetry from a Union base in the same sector of space, and soon they got a real-time look at an unregistered compound deep in the wastelands of Jutera-4. Then, as the Star Sentry entered the ether routes, Orion drew up his plan of attack.

  So the spot in which Orion now found himself — strapped to the belly of his ExAstra in the cockpit of a huge warmech, ready to planet-dive at speeds exceeding 18,000 miles an hour — was really all his own fault. Next to him in her own weaponized armor, Aurelia seemed to sense his anxiety.

  “What do you say, Orion?” she asked across the audio link. “Want to bet a thousand credits on who can pull up the lowest?” She hid a teasing grin in her words.

  “Yeah, I’m going with ‘no way’ on that one,” Orion said, his voice tight. “Maybe on my second planet-dive.”

  “Have faith, little friend,” Kangor said from the warmech on his other side. “I’ll never forget my first planet-dive.” He chuckled with three growling notes. “With 50 war-brothers I descended from the sky, full of laughing rage. We smashed a smugglers’ outpost foolish enough to operate in vycart space.”

  “Back when there was such a thing as vycart space,” Aurelia added.

  “The empire of the Crimson Claw.” Kangor’s gruff voice grew wistful. “Some two and a half centuries gone now, thanks to the plague.”

  A fourth voice broke into their conversation. “Star Sentry to alpha team,” said Commander Vanlith, her burly Monitor-class ship hidden behind the planet’s lone ashy moon. “Your rotational window is open, and you are cleared to jump.”

  “Message received, Commander,” Orion said, banishing the fear from his voice now that he knew she was listening. “Stand by for our signal to deploy beta team. Get the brig ready for a special guest. Oh, and make sure you have plenty of champagne on hand.”

  Orion thought he heard her scoff. “Bring me the Kalifa of Light, Mr. Grimslade, and maybe that spot in the brig won’t be for you.”

  Her end of the link closed with a click, and Orion turned his attention back to the beige clouds of Jutera-4. “De-mag on three,” he told Aurelia and Kangor. “One, two…”

  Orion used his eye-movement activated control interface to demagnetize them from the bottom of his ExAstra. When they were clear, the steely stingray flipped into auto-pilot to circle the moon and dock with the Star Sentry. Orion and his companions floated toward the fourth planet in the Jutera system, their weapon-studded warmechs catching a dull gray gleam in the light of the sickly yellow star.

  “Activate flight rigs,” Orion said. “And remember, stay on your display entry path. We can’t risk being detected, not yet.”

  “Aurelia,” Kangor said as thin wings snapped out of his suit’s back. “I’ll take your bet.” Grabbing the rig’s steering handles with his suit’s tremendous mechanical hands, Kangor fell into a sharp dive. He rocketed toward the planet on the steam of a powerful, compact ion engine mounted to the back of his warmech.

  “Easy money, furball.” Laughing, Aurelia snapped out her wings, fired her mini ion engine and blasted after him on a trail of white fire.

  Orion took a deep breath and followed. He went slowly at first, testing the sensitivity of the steering and thrust while Kangor and Aurelia became specks on Jutera-4’s churning backdrop. Once he had a feel for the warmech, he veered onto the dotted red course superimposed on his faceplate and brought the engine up to speed. The cloudy planet quickly filled his vision, and in seconds Orion felt the first shudders of atmosphere beating against his warmech. The clouds took on dimension as he got closer, and he had a moment to enjoy the gold-tinged nimbus-scape. He saw towers of fluff, sandy cyclonic swirls, rolling wall-clouds, all of it constantly in motion, constantly changing.

  When he hit the atmosphere proper, a dense mix of oxygen and nitrogen, his warmech shook violently. He adjusted his entry trajectory, pulled back his thrust and held fast as a green-gold plasma envelope flared around his warmech. Orion was blind for a moment as he plunged into the clouds, but then he broke through to see the planet’s maroon sea tens of thousands of feet below. The lingering steam stripped away from his warmech, and he laughed wildly when he saw Aurelia and Kangor not far below him. Though he had feared his first planet-dive, Orion now found himself exhilarated.

  “Still time to get in on that bet, AD?” he crowed as he ratcheted up his mini ion engine and roared after them.

  “No, no way,” she cried over the link between the suits. “You don’t get to see how you like—”

  Orion raced past them, laughing as he pushed his warmech to its absolute wall. Warning signs flashed in his faceplate display, but Orion didn’t care. He had control of the warmech, control of the flight rig, and he could feel it all working in harmony with the air pressure, wind currents and planetary gravity. He continued to race toward the frothing maroon waves of the sea, even as Aurelia and Kangor pulled out of their dives behind him.

  “Yo
u are being reckless, little friend,” Kangor bellowed over the link.

  “You win, you win,” said Aurelia.

  Just a few hundred feet before impact — at a speed that would make water feel like diamond-glass — Orion cranked back on the steering levers, killed the ion engine and sent a command through the eye-movement activated display to flare the wing panels. His flight rig groaned in the heavy air of the planet, but Orion quickly decelerated to just a few hundred feet per second. When he fired the ion engine again, he rocketed off to the west, just a few dozen feet above the great red swells of the foamy sea.

  “Hey, I think I’m getting the hang of this,” Orion chuckled as he called up his rear-view camera to see his companions hovering high in the sky behind him. “Now, you two get low and follow me. We need to stay under their scans on approach.”

  They rocketed west in silence, the red waves licking at their bellies. After a few minutes and hundreds of miles of maroon ocean, they reached the craggy shores of a continent. The landscape looked quite barren as Orion soared over it, the flat land a mix of gray stone, snow-white sand and sparse tufts of maroon grass. If complex life ever inhabited this planet, it had long since turned to dust. After some minutes more, Orion saw in his faceplate display that their destination waited just ahead.

  “We’re close,” he said to Kangor and Aurelia. “Follow me to the pinged spot.”

  With an eye-movement command, Orion put a digital “X” on a distant ridge and transmitted it to his teammates. They cruised southwest, curving and descending in tight formation. Then, coming in fast, they flared their wing panels, dropped out of the air and planted their steely feet in the shadow of a rocky crest. Yellow-gold clouds roiled overhead, and strong winds spattered their warmechs with dust as they retracted their flight rigs.

  “Wait here,” Orion told Aurelia and Kangor.

  Orion clawed his way to the top of the chalky ridge with a few powerful motions of his mechanized suit. According to the plan he had agreed to with Commander Vanlith, his team would take the warmechs in and destroy any anti-aircraft weaponry guarding the terrorist camp. Then the Star Sentry would deploy dropships carrying a mix of Briarhearts and SpaceCorps volunteers, including cranky old quartermaster Clynn, to Orion’s surprise. With the SpaceCorps troops and hardened mercenaries working together, Orion hoped it would be a simple matter to overwhelm the Dawnstar fanatics and cover themselves in glory.

  Yet when he reached the top of the ridge and used his warmech’s binocular zoom, Orion discovered something wholly unexpected across the miles of sand and scrub brush. He could see a walled stronghold, just as predicted, but it had already been attacked. The four anti-aircraft guns crowning the walls smoldered, and the main gate lay bent in the sand. Inside the courtyard, Orion saw cracked soil, burning bodies and stone buildings with black smoke snaking forth from the windows.

  “Alpha team to Star Sentry,” Orion said, opening an audio link with the moon-shrouded ship.

  “This is Star Sentry,” said Commander Vanlith.

  “Cancel beta team,” Orion said, still scanning the compound.

  “Come again, alpha?”

  “Cancel beta team,” Orion repeated. He pulled back his binocular vision, turned and leaped down to the sand in front of Aurelia and Kangor, his warmech landing with crushing force. “Need to investigate, stand by.” He closed the link without giving her a chance to respond.

  “What’s going on?” Aurelia asked when she saw the chagrin on his face.

  With long, whirring strides, Orion started around the bottom of the ridge. “I don’t know, but someone beat us to the punch.”

  “Surely there is still someone to punch.” Kangor sounded almost disappointed.

  Orion shrugged the massive shoulders of his warmech stiffly. “Don’t get your hopes up, big guy.” With an eye-movement command, Orion opened the compartments on his boot modules and extended stout boosters. “You guys ready to see how these things jump?”

  Since the warmechs weighed too much to fly without their flight rigs extended, Orion and the others skipped across the barren plains on bursts of propellant that covered dozens of feet with each leap. Their heavy suits left three deep sets of boot prints amid the patches of maroon grass, and with every soaring jaunt, the burning compound in the distance came nearer. When they landed at the busted gate, Orion heard Aurelia draw a sharp breath and Kangor mutter a vycart obscenity.

  They tromped into the courtyard. Amid the burning wreckage of small dropships and crumbling gun towers, Orion saw perhaps two-dozen dead bodies — though it was hard to get an exact count. Groups of three or four Dawnstar soldiers lay tangled together in smoke and flames, while others rested dismembered in far-strewn pieces, cut cleanly at long angles as if by some impossibly huge blade. At the door to a dour stone building just four stories high, Orion saw an empty warmech. This one, however, was no functional gunmetal gray Zanthic Munitions model like theirs. The empty warmech looked sleek and nimble, with an iridescent faceplate, space-black armor plating and flashy yellow accents.

  “Who did this?” Aurelia asked.

  “She’s here,” Orion breathed. Lurching forward in the suit, he thundered toward the compound’s main building. Aurelia and Kangor followed close behind on their own grinding gears, and when they reached the black-and-yellow warmech, Orion sent the command to open his diamond-glass cockpit bubble.

  “Who’s here?” Aurelia brought her warmech to a short stop, sand flying from under its metal boots.

  “Are you saying one person did this, Orion?” Kangor asked.

  “The woman who brought the lightning down on us, back on Corvis Stoat.” Orion scrambled out of his warmech and called the liquid-manacite gauntlet to his right arm. “She did this.”

  His teammates disengaged from their warmechs and climbed down as well. “How can you know it’s her?”

  Orion pointed up at the gun towers, waved at the dismembered bodies. “Her lightning smote those anti-aircraft guns old-school style, and with her warmech’s strength, she drew her spellblade out into a broadsword that was probably bigger than me. Now come on!”

  The three of them dashed into the smoke. They passed through halls and rooms where furniture, books, bodies and crates burned with lazy flames. Orion’s smartcloak did its part to shield him from the heat, while Kangor grew a fireproof red hide, and Aurelia simply walked through the fire barefoot as if it did not exist. In the far corner of the square building, they found a switchback staircase that led to the upper floors of the safe house. Orion felt the living metal coating his arm shiver.

  “Should we sweep the second floor?” Kangor said, his voice low as they ascended the concrete stairs with careful, tight steps.

  Orion shook his head. “Straight to the top. There’s another spellblade running hot here, I can feel it.”

  They reached the top of the stairs and stepped past a thick security door that hung from one hinge. After a dash down the hall, they reached another blasted door and charged into some kind of war room with blacked-out windows and an array of computer installations. Behind a large steel desk, the woman in black-and-yellow leather held a fat red durok at sword-point. He sat slumped in a chair with a pained expression on his bloated face, and his manacite-swathed forearm lay severed on the desk. Oozing blood had soaked through stacks of parchment and was dripping off the edges of the metal desk.

  The woman with the yellow-veined spellblade turned her reflective faceplate toward Orion. “Good, you’re finally here.”

  “Don’t kill him,” Orion said, frozen in the doorway. “Let me bring him to—”

  The faceless woman plunged her nimble sword through the Kalifa of Light’s eye and out the back of his head before the word “justice” could die on Orion’s lips.

  With a frustrated growl, Orion conjured a sword to match hers. Then he charged with Aurelia and Kangor at his sides, his formidable friend
s ready to back his move. Yet when the three of them stepped onto the well-trod rug that splayed Dawnstar’s streaming sun symbol across the floor, vibrant amethyst light flared and caught them in its grip. When the flash subsided, Orion and his teammates found themselves paralyzed in a gentle purple glow, suspended a few inches above the ground and unable to move much but their eyes and lips.

  “You got something against a fair fight?” Orion said, struggling against the shimmering stasis field.

  The faceless woman wiped her silver sword clean on the durok’s shoulder. Then she sent his dead body sprawling back out of the chair with a relaxed kick. After watching the electric yellow veins pulse vividly in her spellblade gauntlet for a moment, she turned her reflective helmet to Orion and walked around the desk. She flipped back the corner of the rug with the tip of her sword, revealing a great number of silver glyphs painted on the wooden floor. “A clever technique, don’t you think?”

  “A very old technique,” Aurelia grumbled with a glance down. Orion could see she tried to form gestures with her stiff fingers and call on the power of the Jade Way, but nothing happened. “I haven’t seen a manacite snare in a few thousand years.”

  “Free us or kill us, you faceless shrew,” Kangor bellowed, veins bulging in his thick arms.

  “We’re not there quite yet,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

  Orion resigned to relax his muscles so that he could be as loose and ready as possible the instant the stasis field came down. “This… this was all to capture us?”

  She shook her head. “No, not at all. My… well, for now call it my organization, contracted these religious fanatics to assassinate the politician. They failed, and now their Kalifa has paid the price for that failure. This,” she said, gesturing to the stasis fields, “is something else entirely.”