Timberwolf

by Tom Julian

  Timberwolf shook off their attempts to enter his mind and drew closer, killing them both with smashing punches. Others began to converge on him. He could sense that they were being driven towards him by Kizik. But he killed them all, plasma driver and laser cutting them down.

  He saw Kizik disappear down a tunnel, but one of Kizik’s personal guards had grabbed him around the legs, buying the master a few seconds. Timberwolf hit him between his six eyes with a concussion blast, caving its head in. He was running now, through a twisting tunnel carved from the regolith. Ahead of him, Kizik scurried faster than Timberwolf thought possible, barely visible around the turns.

  Am I chasing or being led somewhere? Timberwolf wondered.

  SABACHTHANI

  Gray’s party ascended the steepest part of the hill on their hands and knees. Half would climb while the other half put down suppressive fire against the Sabatin leaping from below. Huddled farther up on a ledge, Izabeck was still writing in his electronic notebook, his eyes darting and stylus moving frantically.

  “Son, give me the book,” Gray shouted over the gunfire.

  “I have to finish it!” Izabeck said, clutching it to him.

  “I’ll finish it.”

  Izabeck handed the book over, tears welling in his eyes. His doubts felt meaningless now as it seemed like the apocalypse raged around him, demons of various stripes tearing each other apart before his eyes.

  “I’m sorry about before. God told me to doubt you. I had to be sure.”

  Gray had his hand on Izabeck’s shoulder, eyes full of understanding. “Son, there are no sins left. You taught me that.”

  “I’ve got God’s forgiveness?”

  Gray didn’t respond for a moment, considered what God had personally told him when he’d answered his prayers just a few minutes ago.

  This is not my concern, God had said. It had been the coldest response. No interest. No approval. No judgment. No contempt. No hope. No opinion at all of these events.

  “Sure,” Gray responded to Izabeck, to the man’s utter delight.

  “I’m ready,” Izabeck said with closed eyes, rubbing his arm where the nuke was.

  “I know. A little farther,” Gray responded, motioning to the plateau just a few dozen yards away.

  A Sabatin leaped from below and hung in the air. Getting a claw into Ahmed’s back, it took the man back down with him. Below, Ahmed screamed and thrashed, the men on the ledge unable to do anything to save him. Then a Sabatin, its jaws grinning with blood, had Ahmed’s rifle. Only half-knowing why, the beast pulled the trigger. Blinding plasma bursts raked the ledge. A shot struck Cisus under the arm and the man fell into the midst of the Sabatin below.

  Gray, Michael, Warner, and Izabeck climbed the hill again, the plateau just above them now. Windwhistle was still on the ledge and he fired down like a machine, knocking the Sabatin back. “By God, I don’t waver. I am a force of judgment, ferocious and brave. I heed the judgment of God and rid his kingdom of aliens. I shoot them in the middle. Of. Their. Fucking. Skulls.”

  A Sabatin jumped to the ledge, right in front of Windwhistle. He pumped a grenade into its mouth and it exploded with a clang, leaving a standing armored shell. Then the ledge collapsed. As he fell, Windwhistle fired more grenades at the Sabatin, even as his left hand was bitten off on the way down. When he landed at the bottom, he fired his last grenade into the ground, disappearing in the blast.

  Gray looked down from the plateau, to the hole in the ground that Windwhistle had made. He’d bought them a few precious seconds, but more Sabatin were rushing the hill. It was just four of them left now—Gray, Michael, Warner, and Izabeck in front of the door that led up the Bone Yard.

  “I’ll have your life now,” Gray said to Izabeck.

  The man knelt, back to the door in the rock face. “I give it to you. I give it to God.”

  “You’re a martyr,” Michael said, maybe even meaning it.

  “They were all martyrs,” Gray said.

  Izabeck rose, giving Gray the tightest and briefest of embraces. “I don’t have far to go. I’m already in heaven. For me, it was always just up this hill!”

  Gray gave him a resigned smile as Michael opened the door with a creak and Gray, Michael, and Warner slipped through. Warner was the last one he saw, the old man’s face worn and creased. He gave him a long, sorry glance before pulling the door closed.

  Izabeck knelt there a moment, in true peace, even as the horrific battle raged below him. The fighting was now a frenzy of violence. Lasers flared. The Trike and the sentry Arnock still fought in front of the bridge. The Trike, now on top, sent its dagger tongue through the sentry’s face, finally making it go limp.

  Izabeck found the events in front of him indescribable, but he had done his best. He had safeguarded the third testament. He let out a sigh, considering the message he had gotten from God right before he had given the book to Gray.

  Sabachthani.

  In his notebook, he had read the word in the multi-language thesaurus. He had found it accidentally as he struggled to complete the verses. He knew God had put it there to find. It was an old word from the language of Jesus Christ; no doubt the Dachas had picked it on purpose when naming the Sabatin. Gray should have known this crusade would fail, should have seen the sign in that name alone.

  Izabeck didn’t care about dying. He opened the chamber in his arm again, wincing. He offered the pain up to God. He connected the two wires together that made a circuit. He fished out the third wire that activated the trigger. Tears stained his dirty face, but they were tears of relief. He knew that he had played his part correctly and that he had ensured the Word of God would be protected.

  Sabatin appeared momentarily on the lip of the plateau, and then slipped off. “There is no god but God and I heed his judgment,” he said to himself, fiddling with the trigger wire. He cried again and laughed at the same time. Holy tears. Sabatin…Sabachthani…the Aramaic word for forsaken.

  If it was meant to be, the third testament would come to Gray again through other means, but what was left in the book was not the story Izabeck had written. So be it. “The forsaken have followed Emmanuel Gray here,” he coughed.

  Around him now were six Sabatin. “There is no god but God and I heed his judgment.” A snap of silver jaws. “There is no god…”

  FIRE

  With an ungodly crack and a blinding light came the sweep of a nuclear shock wave and then nothing but fire.

  The Chapel turned to embers and casually blew away.

  In the column room, flames reached to the spiral staircase and climbed all the way to where Wrath had fallen.

  In The Warehouse, fire spilled in, swirling the boxes and containers into ashes.

  High above The Catalog, the sun flickered and went out, its event horizon collapsing. Dull floodlights clacked on, and the floor of The Catalog dropped away, leaving a massive, gaping hole, and a pillar of smoke rose from The Command Center Plain below.

  Dust fell like snow. A pitifully mangled Sabatin crawled along the edge of the hole, thrown up here by the blast. Its armor was melted, its limbs horribly burned. It squeaked in pain and then stopped moving, giving a last agonized breath.

  Gray, Michael, and Warner pulled themselves from the hatch in the floor in the bone yard. In front of them, the train was pulling away on an automated schedule. They ran for it, Michael fastest and youngest, getting on. Next Gray got aboard and then they both reached back for Warner. The old man stumbled in the dust, collapsing. He locked eyes with Michael and Gray for a moment; his artificial left foot had fallen off, damaged in the fighting. He waved them off, but there was nothing they could have done to help him anyway.

  Behind them, the door to The Catalog got smaller and finally disappeared as the track curved around the mountain of dead spaceships. Then, the ground rippled from the blast, the massive door blown off its hinges and flying through the air behind them. The train continued on its track, a cloud of dust overtaking them from behind.


  In a tunnel, the shock wave hit Timberwolf. The pressure shot him forward, squeezing him along with the rubble and fire. Sunrise! Zret! he thought. He’d read the rig’s brochure when he first got it and in bold print it had read nuclear survivable. He assumed that it had been marketing bullshit, but even as his external temperature exceeded six thousand degrees, the integrity of the rig held.

  He slammed against a wall in the storm of dust and debris. A moment later he was floating freely, held aloft by the pressure waves sweeping by him in all directions. Then he was in a clear chamber, falling suddenly. He landed hard, flat on his stomach, and everything was darkness, only his audio sensors working. He heard something not far away, a tick-tick sound.

  It was the claw-steps of Kizik somewhere near.

  THE COFFERS

  Wrath had one good limb and he pulled himself along the dusty corridor. He could smell the battle not far away, the burnt cinder of plasma blasts, the sweet and pungent chemical lasers. He wanted to fight, but he knew he had to heal, had to get to the lowest place he could. It was in his programming and part of his natural instinct.

  Wrath slipped through a duct as he heard the sentry Arnock entering the battle above. He heard thousands of Sabatin clawing the ground and smelled the oily blood of the Arnock spilling in a deluge. He slid to the bottom of the duct and pried open a series of barriers with his working claw, his others hanging useless at his side. When he was through, he flopped on his back over a slowly turning air filter, slipping through the blades of the filter, unable to stop his fall.

  He tumbled from the ceiling into a huge room, landing atop a mountain of treasures. Gold and platinum coins, crystals, ancient texts, artwork, statues—the currencies and valuables of thousands of worlds. Wrath’s animal mind had no understanding of where he was and the wealth surrounding him. He was cold now and slid down to the floor.

  Above him, all of Highland shook wickedly and a rumble deep and near overtook the place, but nothing in the room was even toppled. Wrath was exhausted and he slept in a corner of Highland’s great Coffer, the sweet death given him by Droma still numbing his lips. One simple thought crossed his mind. Alone.

  DETENTE

  Gray and Michael ran, neither of them acknowledging the other. They just ran. During the fighting, Gray had pushed Michael’s betrayal to the side, but what he’d done was sinking in now. Michael had decided Timberwolf’s fate, taking action just as certain as putting a burst into his back. Maybe it had been the right thing to do, but it hadn’t been Michael’s choice to make. In his anger, Gray felt a weakness in himself. Michael had done what he didn’t have the guts or clarity of mind to do. He’d cut away Timberwolf, eliminated his blind spot. Part of Gray was prideful and embarrassed he hadn’t taken out his own trash. The train had stopped about two miles short of The Eye. They trudged through the bone yard, breathers on, the dust from the explosion overtaking them.

  They slipped through the door to The Eye. Outside, they were hit by a blast of frigid air that stopped them in their tracks. A wet snow pelted them and collected in drifts. The stillness of The Eye was gone, replaced by a driving wind. The cloud wall was still intact, but it was losing its cohesion and tightening inward, lightning crackling up and down the barrier. They trotted forward, hoping beyond hope that Nemesis…

  Nemesis lay on its back, a sentry Arnock’s claw broken off and impaled through its hull. The ship gave off a thick, black smoke and it was clear it had been burning for hours.

  “Goddamn,” Gray said, the hope dropping out of his voice. He finally met Michael’s gaze, but the man was a blank slate, looking not through Gray but past him.

  In the distance, a small train car approached on tracks barely visible in the snow and dust. With no other options, they hopped aboard as it moved passed. A voice greeted them; it was Penny’s. “Would you like to go to the landing bay?” it asked.

  “Please,” Gray responded.

  “Landing bay, eleven minutes. Please hold small children by the hand.”

  “Penny?” Gray asked.

  The voice didn’t respond.

  “Are you Penny?” Gray asked again to no response.

  The two sat on the train in silence, done explaining things to one another, thinking only of surviving the next eleven minutes. Soon, a massive structure the size of a stadium that must have been the landing bay loomed in the distance. Gray looked over at Michael and the man was pointing his sidearm at him. Michael’s eyes were without feeling. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, for trapping Timberwolf in The Chapel. “That gives us some balance,” Gray said, opening his jacket to show that he was holding a weapon on Michael as well. The two kept eyes locked and didn’t notice the pillar of smoke that rose over their destination.

  MEETING KIZIK

  Timberwolf dragged himself out of a pile of dust, his visual sensors barely operating. He made his way by touch along a wall, following the tick-tick. He got a reading in his heads-up that the air was nominally safe to breath and he flipped open his visor.

  He climbed down a hole in the floor and found himself in a gleaming white chamber. In the corner of the space, Kizik was there. He was huddled and seemed a lot smaller than Timberwolf remembered. He reminded himself that this was only the second time he had actually seen Kizik for real.

  Timberwolf didn’t feel him in his mind. He came within ten feet of Kizik before the Arnock did something shocking. Kizik spoke, with a sound that was almost musical and seemed like three voices in different octaves.

  “I had hoped for this. To see you.”

  Timberwolf had expected meeting Kizik to be overwhelming, but it wasn’t. He’d known the being for so long.

  “This is new. I didn’t think Arnock could speak.” Timberwolf drew closer, ignited a plasma blade with a shake of his wrist. Kizik’s burnt cinnamon musk filled his nostrils.

  “I wanted to communicate with you in a way that made you comfortable,” Kizik said.

  “None of this makes me comfortable.”

  Kizik backed away from Timberwolf, into a corner. “We should continue. Our minds are intertwined.” He emphasized the highest octave of his voice. “We keep our people from war by watching, knowing.”

  “You’re nothing but lies. You let me know only what served you.”

  Kizik backed up, started to shiver and buzz, but Timberwolf didn’t feel anything in his mind.

  “Don’t bother,” Timberwolf said, feeling freed from Kizik’s control. He was just feet away now and he raised his arm, glowing plasma sickle ready to slice through the creature.

  Then he heard it, like a mocking laugh in his mind. He was frozen there, unable to bring his arm down. Kizik spoke with his lowest, darkest octave. “You and I. Our connection was like no other. Other Arnock can’t touch your mind. I can.” The creature moved behind him. “I wanted to see you physically. To understand the mistake I made. You’re a remarkable being, too dangerous to exist. You will die. Your brother will live.”

  Kizik forced Timberwolf to bring the sickle to his own throat. He tried to pull it away, but couldn’t. “We’re finished,” Kizik said in all three octaves.

  With a rabid howl, Droma and one of her clan-mates appeared. Unable to stop himself, Timberwolf swung at the pair, slicing the clan-mate’s chest from top to bottom. Droma was then on Kizik, cracking one of his legs, the creature releasing a puny screech.

  Still possessed, Timberwolf threw Droma against the wall and pulled back his blade to end the Phaelon’s life. Then Kizik was gone, limping down an adjoining tunnel and Timberwolf realized what he was doing.

  “God, he’s still here!” Timberwolf fell down on his haunches. He’d undertaken this whole thing to rid the spider from his mind and he couldn’t do it. Droma looked down at him, seeming to understand his pain. The Phaelon took off, rushing after Kizik, and Timberwolf knew he couldn’t follow.

  Timberwolf was numb, other Arnock couldn’t invade his mind, but the connection with Kizik seemed even stronger. He staggered through a tunne
l, his sensors indicating an opening to the outside not far away.

  THE RUINS

  “Put your goddamned gun away,” Gray snapped at Michael, as they looked over the landing bay. The place was a disaster, burning lifters scattered about and broken. None looked salvageable. A blast radius and a scorch on the ground indicated where a single lifter had taken off.

  Michael put his pistol away and hung his head. There was nothing here to help them get off this rock. Gray wondered if he’d lost everything, if there was even a next step for him. There was no prize left on Highland. No war with the Arnock to ride off to. The Assault Corps was on its way, but the production facility was destroyed. Would he fall to his knees when they got here and beg for protection? Could he go back to The Clergy and kiss Cardinal Jacob’s ring? Put aside his fury with Michael and go about the galaxy shooting and looting?

  “Do I just run?” he asked aloud. “Do I just run?”

  NUMB

  Timberwolf found himself on a platform overlooking the landing bay. One lifter had gotten away. It must have been Salla. It looked like she punched the emergency liftoff and wrecked all the other vehicles. The smoking dead sentry Arnock crumpled in the corner told him why she did it. So much for the good neighbor policy.

  The platform moaned, weakened. Stacks of empty Sabatin containers were nearby, tossed about. A single shot rang out from across the landing bay, winging Timberwolf’s shoulder. He dove away and flipped up his visor instantly, scanners still only half active. There, just fifty yards away, were Michael and Gray. He hadn’t seen them on his heads-up.

  “You can kill me easy.” Gray approached over a catwalk, arms wide, rifle lowered. His armor off, he wore only a T-shirt and cargo pants. Michael followed, rifle trained on Timberwolf. “You have a gift to survive. It’s what God took away and then the Arnock gave you back. Remarkable. Letting you die back there would have been a sin. Glad you saw to it we weren’t guilty.” Gray and Michael reached the platform. “Got a nice new rig. From Penny? The old box of bolts liked you, huh? You didn’t come after me back there. What’d you go and do Timber?” Gray stopped for a moment, cupped his chin mockingly. “You saw Kizik, didn’t you? Had a live audience for once!”