Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  Pyr shoved her toward a safety harness but had no time to see she used it.

  Power surged from the floor into her feet, then the rest of her body.

  “Again, Pyr. I am sorry, but you are not the master.”

  Eva spasmed in the three point harness as the ship’s improvised attacked shocked her over and over. Between blasts of energy, she cursed Pyr.

  “How...was this a good...idea,” Eva said.

  Pyr glanced at the collapsing building they’d left behind and decided not to answer. She fought her way to the cockpit and shoved her weight into the seat. “This is your last chance, Hades. Don’t make me shut you off.”

  “I wouldn’t respect you if you did anything less,” Hades said.

  Between electrocution and gas attacks, Pyr keyed fresh codes into the computer.

  “Pyr!” Eva yelled from the passenger compartment. “This safety harness is crushing my chest!”

  With her last keystroke, the ship ceased bucking and diving, leveling out as it performed calibration checks.

  “Good evening, Pyr. I am Demeter. What is your instruction?” the computer said in a generic female voice.

  “What is our tactical situation?” Pyr asked, already knowing the answer.

  “There are a significant number of FCF atmosphere capable ships, drones, and what I presume are commando transport shuttles closing on us at an alarming rate,” Demeter said.

  “Autopilot. Evade at all costs, but try not to throw us around so much,” Pyr said. Body aching, she returned to the passenger and storage area. Wind buffeted Eva from the mangled door hatch.

  “We are alive, for now, but I am not taking you to your father right away.”

  “You said if we made it to the ship we’d win,” Eva said, looking smaller than she had during the action of the last half hour.

  Pyr shrugged. “I’m unemployed. For now, I think Empyrean will be busy with humans and their allies. If you stay with me, it will involve running for our lives.”

  “Why did you want to kill my father?” Eva asked.

  “Your father was never the target, and neither were you. I was sent to kill the president of the UEF before the humans mount their attack on Empyrean.”

  Eva was in pain, sick, and afraid. She studied Pyr for several heartbeats. “Don’t you fear Empyrean?”

  “Empyrean is the god of sun gods,” Pyr laughed. “The God of Eternities, some say.”

  “What happens to us?” Eva asked.

  “If you mean you and I, we will die horrible deaths at the hands of assassins more ruthless than I am. If you are referring to our people, they have a chance to avoid extinction. But only if they remain allies of the humans.”

  TWO

  Pyr checked her course and realized she could not initiate a displacement field this close to the gravitational well anchoring the field to Urian. If she tried, the resulting disruption might obliterate every ship between the planet and the first Lagrange point, including the FCF Impregnable.

  Empyrean might like that, despite having forbidden the complete annihilation of the system to assassinate President Ron Antoine III. By now, the god of sun gods must realize her betrayal. Kill the president quietly had been the directive, but now that quiet was no longer an option, solar destruction was probably not off the table.

  “Where are we going?” Eva asked. She sat in the co-pilot’s seat, looking miserable. “I need to see if my father is all right, say good bye and let him know I’m alive.”

  “He knows you’re alive,” Pyr said, taking the manual controls and steering Astral’s Revenge farther out into the Urian system to prepare for displacement drive deployment. “As for our destination, we are going far enough away from Empyrean’s advance to forget all that has happened.”

  “Like your betrayal of our people,” Eva said.

  “I saved our people,” Pyr said. She could have said more, explained that neither of them would be here if not for her service to Empyrean.

  “Why can’t I see my father?” Eva asked. “Now that you are on our side, he would probably allow you on the Impregnable.”

  Pyr laughed.

  Eva clenched her jaw, furrowed her brow, and sulked. “You know what I mean. He’d keep you someplace else until he knew you could be trusted. But he’d let me talk to him at least.”

  Pyr didn’t agree, but neither did she argue.

  “Why can’t I send a message?” Eva demanded, looking like she belonged in the stylish but tactical outfit she had donned just before Hades had used Astral’s Revenge to attack her penthouse.

  “What is done is done,” Pyr said. “I can put you in an escape pod with a beacon if that is your choice. They are small and hard to find in the void, even for a ship like the Impregnable.”

  “You don’t care about me or my father or our people. All you want is to run away,” Eva said.

  “Your father is as good as dead,” Pyr said, turning the ship and sliding the accelerator forward.

  “I don’t believe you,” Eva said. “You’re afraid. That’s why you're running away. You could save my father. How many impossible missions did you face in the service of Empyrean?”

  “Perhaps I dislike your father. Perhaps I dislike you. Maybe I am glad there are so few of us left in the galaxy,” Pyr said. She checked her calculations again, reluctant to relinquish manual control of the ship. There was an illusion of control when she drove Astral’s Revenge. It was as though her destiny made sense.

  “Just take me back for a short time. Allow me a chance to say goodbye,” Eva said. Tears glistened across her diamond-colored eyes and heat flushed her cheeks.

  “Demeter,” Pyr said. “What is the status of the FCF Impregnable?”

  “It has been breached by Astral shock troops, as you already know,” Demeter said. “Atmosphere has been venting from the starboard side for some time now.”

  “Take me back to my father!” Eva yelled. “Please, Pyr. I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to be like you.”

  Pyr’s hand twitched as she restrained herself from chopping the girl across her throat.

  “Please, Pyr. He’s my father. I’m his only child.”

  “I am almost at the safe distance for displacement drive activation,” Pyr said, attending to her screens and instruments. There was no need, not this close to her navigation point, but the sight of the young girl disturbed her more than she wanted to admit.

  “Please, Pyr!” She clenched her fist and growled when Pyr turned the ship farther away from Urian and the FCF Impregnable. “I hate you! Why won’t you save my father?”

  “Have you ever fought Astral shock troops? What you ask is impossible,” Pyr said.

  For several seconds, Eva stared at Pyr. Her nostrils flared as her chest rose and fell. “Put me into an escape pod. I’d rather die than be like you. If you try to keep me, I will kill you in your sleep and sabotage everything you do forever.”

  Pyr turned her head, stared at Eva. “I doubt you will do both.”

  “You’re a demon!”

  Pyr leapt out of the pilot’s seat without bothering to direct Demeter to take over. “Yes! I am a demon like none you will ever know! I have burned for a thousand years!”

  The Gift of Empyrean flowed not just over her hand, as it had when she’d forced her way into Astral’s Revenge to deactivate Hades, but over her entire body. She arched her back and screamed at the ceiling. Pain on pain on pain ravaged her mind and body and soul with the intensity of pure fusion.

  “I am Pyr! The Angel of Death. The Hand of Empyrean. The End of All Things!”

  Eva shrank deep into the co-pilot’s seat, holding her forearms across her eyes as Demeter stretched a protective field around her. The safety mechanism was designed to keep her stationary when the ship spun out of control and did very little to prevent Pyr’s advance, despite heat-retardant properties.

  “You never want to be like me!” Pyr screamed, bits of plasma flying like spittle and burning holes in the cockpit comp
uter screens.

  Eva sobbed, trembled, writhed in the restrictive co-pilot’s seat, not understanding what Demeter had done to protect her. “I love him. Please, if you kill me, at least save him.”

  Pyr, still enraged, stepped back. “He abandoned you.”

  Eva cried.

  Pyr released the Gift and shuddered in the cascading de-escalation of raw power, as it abandoned her like a star going dark in an unfriendly galaxy.

  “Stop crying,” Pyr said. “I don’t like it.” She seized the manual control stick and yanked the ship around with enough force to crush Eva, had she not been enveloped in Demeter’s safety bubble.

  The girl, one of the last of their race, would not or could not stop crying. Tears traced purple paths across her alabaster skin as her blue crystal hair rubbed together to make a mournful song like none Pyr had heard.

  “We will go and see what has happened to your father’s ship. The Astrals have most likely destroyed every mortal they can find by now. That is why Empyrean sent me. They have no concept of restraint. You will see there are worse monsters than me,” Pyr said.

  Eva shook her head, denying something that was unclear to Pyr.

  Returning to Urian seemed to take less time than leaving, although Pyr knew it was exactly the same. In a thousand years, she had never discovered why her mortal mind played such tricks. What could be the purpose of self-deception?

  Eva awoke, hair a lifeless mess and her face resembling a purple spider web with all the crying she had done over the last several hours. Pale blue hair, white skin, and purple tear tracks — the girl was the picture of a winter rainbow on their long vanished homeworld. The girl’s slim arms flexed as she pushed against the armrests and looked around.

  Pyr wondered if the girl knew where she was, but didn’t care. This mission to save her father was foolish. Empyrean could not be betrayed and then courted. Boldness was death.

  She flew around the FCF Impregnable, which was not looking impregnable. Many holes had been punched through the exterior. Work crews had patched the worst of the damage, stopping the loss of atmosphere — mostly.

  Whoever remained to steer the ship was making for a displacement drive jump point, engines burning with all their power. Pure, desperate flight from danger seemed to be the captain’s mandate.

  “We are too late,” Pyr said, her soft voice barely touching the air.

  Eva squinted, then sat motionless as alert realization colored her expression with anger and suspicion. “Why are you so evil?”

  “This conversation does nothing to change the fact that the Impregnable has been boarded by the Astrals,” Pyr said. “You have not earned the right to judge me, girl.”

  “I thought we came here to help my father and his crew?”

  “We did.”

  “Then let’s help them.”

  “Empyrean’s shock troops have been here first. You will not like what we will find within. And there is no way to penetrate the hull.”

  Eva sat forward on the co-pilot’s seat and pointed at the main screen. “There is a breach right there. The Astrals, or whatever, must have made it.” Her eyes darted across the scene with increasing speed and her body trembled violently. She took several deep breaths, gripped the armrests of the hair, and slowly regained her composure.

  “Am I evil and a liar?” Pyr asked, watching for her reaction.

  Eva spun and pointed a finger at Pyr. “You could have stopped this! Use that thing you did! Use your full power to save my father!”

  “Not his crew?”

  “My father!” Eva’s voice lost force. “My father, my father.”

  Pyr yawned, then stretched, then steered the ship through shadows between Urian’s sun and Urian.

  “We can’t see anything here,” Eva croaked.

  “I don’t trust the star in this system, not after what you made me do,” Pyr said. “You can’t see.”

  “You can?”

  “I don’t need to see, not like you think,” Pyr said. She searched for what was there and what wasn’t there, until she knew the best place to follow Empyrean’s troopers.

  “Are you bored?” Eva accused.

  “Yes, by you.” Pyr scanned the cockpit for a good place to bind the girl.

  “I don’t understand you, Pyr. We should work together — you, me, and my father — to get our people someplace safe. Stop serving humans and all the other mortal races. Why are you looking at me like that?” Eva asked.

  Pyr moved with invisible speed. Snatching the girl by her wrists, she seat-belted her in the five-point harness, then tied her hands behind her back. She studied her work for a moment. “Do I need to gag you?”

  “You might as well, you crazy…”

  Pyr, in her years of assassination and secret missions, had learned a thing or two about keeping prisoners silent. When she left Astral’s Revenge, Eva was safely secured in the cockpit of the ship.

  “Demeter, keep an eye on the girl,” Pyr said.

  “Yes, Pyr,” the ship’s AI said.

  “The girl is attempting to break free and kick the controls of the ship,” Demeter said into Pyr’s earpiece.

  “Let her try.” Pyr braced herself against the void, then decided at the last minute to use protective gear. If Empyrean withdrew the Astral Blessing, she would find life in the void unpleasant.

  Singing softly, she went to the secondary airlock and opened it. Across a span of two hundred meters was a hole in the previously indestructible warship. Pyr thought one final time of her people and the girl Eva specifically, then leapt.

  Her aim was true. The relative speed of the two ships was constant. She struck her target and somersaulted several times before crashing to a stop.

  Pain flashed up her left arm and her head felt as though something had exploded inside of her, despite clear evidence the impact had been the cause of the trauma.

  Committed, Pyr moved quickly. This wasn’t the time to second guess her motivations or be angry with Eva for opening wounds long forgotten. She jogged corridor to corridor, flaring her solar powers to confuse cameras and create shadows which she then slipped into and behind. The afterglow of blinding light matched her soul.

  The ship marines and security forces of the Impregnable sought her. She heard radio chatter and saw flashlights. When humans used infrared night vision optics, she saw that as well. Killing would become necessary if she stayed long, not that the fate of the ship was in much doubt.

  For the sake of expediency if nothing else, she moved around the men and women, avoided their patrols, and sought her ultimate enemies.

  The Astral shock troops were easy to follow. Half-melted walls and floors sagged. Mortal bodies smoldered where humans and their mortal allies had met fate at four thousand degrees.

  Pyr caught up to the Astral rear guard. The creature possessed ten arms and legs, standing on the back four as it twisted to face her with it glowing red mandibles. She thought of an insect, but understood this creature’s natural habitat was in magma flows, not fields of flowers and scenic summer days. Heat and other conversions of energy powered the creature, she believed, but a mystic scientist she had encountered long ago claimed the Astrals relied on gravitational pulses as much as anything.

  She couldn’t prove the theory and it didn’t matter. What she did know was that she had never killed one.

  This will be an interesting abuse of Empyrean’s rules.

  Drawing her blades and coating them in raw energy, she rushed forward. The creature’s bellow reverberated like thunder and cut into her ears like lightning. A wash of energy slammed across her face and upper torso, an oxygen-stealing hammer blow that suffocated her for a long moment. Without the Gift of Empyrean, she would be finished.

  When would the power abandon her?

  The creature turned away, not bothering to finish the fight.

  She stabbed downward with both blades, then dragged them against each other until the creature’s head popped off. Startled, the other Astrals retr
eated.

  “Come and die!” Pyr challenged.

  Some did.

  Others raced to complete their mission.

  Pyr cursed and ran into a new hallway. “Demeter, can you tell me an alternate route to the bridge?”

  Her ship computer didn’t answer.

  Pyr navigated from memory of the floor plan, making educated guesses about areas that were not part of her original plan to kill the president. She knelt over a wounded crewman.

  “What is the second quickest route to the bridge from here?” she asked.

  “I’m dying,” the man said, slumped against the floor. The shock of his wounds wearing off, his hysteria and pain-filled sorrow bloomed with passion.

  “You are. Now tell me the way,” Pyr said.

  The man stared up, considered her question, and grimaced. Encroaching desperation moved his eyes in twitches and jerks. “Why? The most direct route is forward to the main lift.”

  “The second most direct route. What is it?” Pyr asked.

  Speaking slowly, fading from blood loss, the man provided the information out of order and too slowly for her needs. Working with AI ship computers had spoiled her.

  “Thank you,” Pyr said.

  “You’re not going to help me?”

  “I can’t,” Pyr said. She moved quickly through areas the Astrals had never been. She ran where she could and leapt through doors as soon as they were partially open.

  “Pyr,” Demeter said. “Something is blocking my signals.”

  The conversation degenerated into static and squealing radio and infrared relays.

  Demeter broke through again. “The girl may be able to communicate with you. It seems the blocking protocols are directed at me specifically.”

  “Put her on. She can monitor their surveillance and update me,” Pyr said.

  Neither Demeter nor Eva responded.

  An Astral turned the corner as she looked up from consideration of her communication problem.

  Fire blasted into her core. Pain followed, but the Gift of Empyrean held. She screamed as she lashed out, retaliating with her swords by instinct.

  The Astral charged, grabbing her with three of its powerful claws and driving her against the wall.