by Jean Johnson
He skirted warily around the frost-rimed statue of their first attacker, picking his way carefully across the shard-strewn floor. Not because the pebbled safety glazing could cut through his military boots, but because their scattered presence made footing treacherous. Someone groaned faintly as he approached the windows. Li’eth blinked, twisted to stare at the bloodied Terran male on the floor, realized he was still bleeding in oxygenated red, and called out, (I think Simon’s still alive! Can anyone help?)
(I will stabilize him,) one of the Seers offered, picking his way forward, his brown ears flattened back against his skull, his whiskers down in distress, but still willing to come out of cover and help. (My body-healing works on outsiders. I have also first medical skills for V’Dan, and he is V’Dan in biology. Keep the Salik away?)
(Absolutely,) Li’eth promised. Stopping a few feet from the opening blasted in the windows, he peered out cautiously.
More explosions peppered the city with brief flares of light and clouds of darkness, too dark to be geyser steam. Their sources came from mechanized Salik soldiers, most of whom were rampaging individually through the city streets. Some from time to time shot up into the air on their suit thrusters, blasting holes at random into the upper levels of the bigger buildings before charging in and wreaking havoc inside. Faint shrill cries wafted up from the fighting, tiny streaks of lasers from those few citizens who had anything for fighting back. But mostly . . . mostly it was death, destruction, and the stunning of hundreds and thousands of victims.
Small, boxy shapes trundled along the roads down below. Squinting, Li’eth realized what they were, as robots moved out, metallic and pale, and came back out of various buildings carrying colorful oblong lumps. Stunned prisoners. A literal roundup of sentient meat for shipping off to the slaughtering pens. Gorge rising, he almost reached down and seared those machines with the heat-energies he clung to mentally . . . but stopped himself. At this distance, he’d be as likely to damage innocent lives as fry those harvester bots.
Do not waste your strength, either, he chided himself mentally, and used a tiny bit of telekinesis to scrape the floor clear of debris. Lowering himself to his knees, he composed his body for comfort and focused on figuring out what he could do with a minimal amount of psychic inergy spent, and what he should do from among those options. Those suits probably have thermal sensors, so they might zero in on my location if I try to make another heating orb. I don’t want to draw attention up here; our soldiers are down, they could get close enough to stun me, and if I drop, Jackie drops, reducing our defensive strength greatly. I suspect those shoulder cannons were set for a full hour in their strength; he’d not have bothered on a short-duration stunning.
But . . . I could move the storage orb out there, to lure them into a trap as they try to figure it out. There were legends of fire-calling Saints doing things that were not normal, not natural with fire. Didn’t Saint Gile’an once “. . . summon up the summer sun to thaw the snow-buried souls of the army . . .” during his war to help my ancestress wrest the Eternal Throne away from the madness of her kinsman? Isn’t that like the thermal sphere Sonam showed me how to make? And . . . and if my strength holds to shift thermal energies, wouldn’t it make a lovely trap and weapon?
Opening his eyes, which had closed automatically during his moment of deep thinking, Li’eth tried to lift his mind up and out of his body. The Terran psi, Heracles, had shown everyone how to do so in that group Gestalt back at the Winter Palace. It took a couple tries, but he lifted up, soared out, shifting his perspective . . . and bringing the heat with him.
The abrupt coldness around his body almost broke his concentration. Quickly parceling the heat he wielded into two portions, with the smaller of the two left behind to keep his body comfortable in the damp cold of the breached building, he moved the greater portion with his awareness over the canyon and condensed the energies into a small but thermally bright marble. Air molecules that intersected with it glowed into the visible spectrum as they absorbed fractions of that energy. They shot outward at high speeds, creating sizzling gusts that swirled the falling snow, rapidly losing their glow but not their velocity.
Splitting his attention a third time, he looked out and down at the robots and mechsuits and waited. Like a g’at, stalk-hunting his prey. Sure enough, after what felt like a mi-nah, two soldiers blasted upward to investigate Li’eth’s thermal anomaly. Splitting his attention again—in the way that he could hold on to something with his elbow and ribs, with each of his hands, with individual fingers, even—Li’eth sank his kinetic awareness into each suit and hauled.
It took more effort than anticipated. Not because it was difficult but because when split, his attention did not provide enough will-backed strength. Letting the thrusters on the left one sputter, he hauled energy up out of the one on the right. That energy, he fed into the tiny, bright sphere, then lashed out and yanked up the energy from the one that had almost reached its position a good seventy or so mitas in the air.
(Not to disturb you or anything, but your hair is on fire again . . .)
(Thank you.) He was still bringing a percentage of energy back to his body to keep it warm; more energy reaved from the enemy meant more energy on his person. Letting the second suit fall, its occupant dying or dead, he siphoned off some of that power around himself and fed it into the growing sphere.
The first suit hit with a bam that echoed up from below, no doubt cracking the plaza tiles. Five, six heartbeats after it, the second hit with a softer, crackling splash, striking the edge of one of the geyser pools. That drew attention from the other Salik, and within half a mi-nah, half a dozen more had launched themselves skyward. One at a time, Li’eth caught and ripped thermal energy out of their oddly jointed bodies, sending the off-lined suits and their contents crashing downward.
The last of the six struck one of the collection vehicles down below. Li’eth flinched in horror, and almost lost control of the now beach-ball-sized sphere. Jackie surged forward in his mind, catching and holding the fire.
(This is a war. Casualties are inevitable,) she soothed in a detached sending, most of her focus on holding in the heat, a trickier, more finicky project for her since this wasn’t her inborn gift. (They would have died horrible deaths eaten alive. Right now, they are stunned and feel nothing.)
(I know. I know, but I did that to them . . .) Grimly, he rewrapped his concentration around what he was doing.
A fresh mind, one of the Seers, touched theirs. (You are shapers of sight? Our people need hope. The Fire Lord should appear.)
(Got it,) Jackie sent back, catching the Solarican’s subthought images on who and what that Fire Lord was. A moment later, the bright-glowing sphere unfurled into a fiery golden Solarican, half-g’at-like in his feral stance, crouching on the air like it was a cliff top. (I’ll challenge the Salik visually—everyone, meld and send your energies to the prince! Li’eth—)
(I’ve got it,) he reassured her, feeling revitalized by the surge of inner energies rising within him. He was so detached now from his body, he could barely feel it, but took a moment to enclose himself in a pocket of . . . just so much warmth, and no more, to keep from searing the air around it. Just in case anyone was touching him to feed him that energy. So when the next group of Salik rose and tried to attack the flame-furred, ten-mita-tall Solarican climbing all over the sky, he was able to shift the sphere in tandem with her holokinetic projection, rushing it through his targets and first scorching, then siphoning out all the thermal energies.
With each pass, the sphere gained more power than it lost, growing in size both pyrokinetically and holokinetically. Within just a few more waves, the Salik pulled back and launched missiles. Li’eth reached out to suck the heat out of them, only to have Jackie poke his mental hands away.
(No, don’t do it that way—they’re chemical explosives; they can still explode once they thaw if they survive the landing, and there
are stunned civilians on the ground. Blast them out of the sky; it shouldn’t take nearly as much energy.)
She was right. So he peeled off small marbles of heat and flung them into the heart of each roaring missile, exploding them in billowing balls of flames—and then stole that energy, snuffing the flames like a straw sucking liquid back up into itself, leaving behind dark puffs of chilled clouds that drifted down like tiny soot-stained snow pellets. Three, four, five times he struck the missiles, and the rippling image of the Fire Lord roared and slashed with his fiery fingers splayed, claws fully extended, shooting out bright stars of destruction that the missiles could not evade. Seven, nine, twelve missiles bamfed in loud, cracking explosions that were followed by a whomp of the air collapsing inward from the sudden shock of lost energy.
No one attacked for a few moments. Gradually, he became aware of several rumbles in the air, and turned his attention skyward. Dozens of ships had descended out of the clouds, triggering a shaft of fear before he realized some were not Salik but were instead the soaring bulk of Solarican V’Dan warships . . . and yes, Terran ships as well, a full half dozen of their silvery, swept-winged vessels that swooped and spun through the sky, reflecting the Fire Lord illusion in gilded streaks along their streamlined hulls.
Still, there were more Salik ships than Solarican, Terran, or V’Dan, a lot more . . . and then the clouds roiled and scattered around the bulk of an immense hull in the distance. For a moment, only the outline of the clouds let him see it had a five-lobed hull . . . the shape of a Salik capital ship. One designed to land, he realized, the kind used for a major invasion of ground forces in an area they believed could be securable with overwhelming force.
Hands touched his shoulders. Fingers slid up to his neck, his scalp, using direct physical touch to augment their powers. (We cannot stop that by freezing it . . . but we can disable it,) his Gestalt partner murmured. (The last two dropships of Terran troops has arrived, and if we can get that big ship down, then our forces can help mop up what little survives.)
(Sear them with the raging blade of the Fire Lord,) several Seers sent in near unison, their minds enmeshed in a way that allowed them to group-think as one. (Strike now!)
Li’eth didn’t have to think twice; the analytical part of his mind had already realized how if that great ship got any closer, it would crash in the city and not far from their own position. So—with a bounding felinoid roar from Jackie, ironically echoing the ship that had forced him into leaving home—the feral Fire Lord image surged through the sky to meet it.
Met it, and torpedoed through it with a twist at the last moment that broke the now-massive golden fury into many lesser white-hot lances, like straws on a twig-broom branching out from the main shaft. He tried to pull in extra heat to keep it going, keep each firecone bursting through bulkhead after bulkhead. In the back of his mind, the others shoved their own limbs forward, their own will, using his mind as the tool. Some of the scattered pinpricks resurged to life with sharp stabs that clouded his inner eye with increasing heat and pain, until he heard Jacaranda yelling at the others, shielding him, throwing them back and out of their meld. Keeping them from literally burning him up in their efforts to help.
Coming back to himself, to an awareness of his own body, sensing the flames still dancing over his slightly scorched sleeves, he blinked and looked up with red-clouded eyes in time to see the nose of that massive ship hitting the ground somewhere beyond the far canyon edge. He didn’t see the actual point of impact, since his physical position sat lower than the rim. But he—and everyone with him—saw the snow and earth slamming upward in a billowing roll of shock-concussed debris. Watched as the great ship teetered bow down, stern slowly rising. Felt the shock wave reaching the canyon, bowing the curved wall of nothing sheltering them from the incoming blast, flexing the air pressure against their eardrums with a painful sonic bang followed by rumbling stone and crumbling metal.
The great ship continued to slide forward, dual-lobed hindquarters rising higher and higher. Some of the cannons on those giant, turret-like lobes tried to fire, tiny puffs of light and dark. Then the nose of the ship jolted and dropped the whole thing down a visible notch, dozens of mitas in depth, some sort of ravine unseen from this angle. Ponderously, slowly, the whole thing shifted, cantilevered up and over that crack in the plateau.
(Shit!) Jackie thrust forward, extending a sheet of telekinesis across the top of the whole canyon in a path stretching from their position diagonally across the gap. Knowing she needed help, Li’eth warped the thermal energies still left in his grip, converting them to kinetic inergy. That snuffed out the fire dancing along his sleeves, hands, and hair.
The force of the ship’s landing upside down on the cliff shook the whole valley, blurring his vision first from the vibrations, then from the dust clouds raised as parts of that cliff crumpled and gave way. Objects, hard-flung from the impact, soared down into the valley, crashing into buildings and cratering whatever they struck. All save for a cone-shaped path overhead, where they just tumbled across will-hardened air, spinning and bouncing until they parted to either side and did not hit the building containing the remnants of the Church of the Spiraling Eye.
The last few shards dropped short of their position, permitting them to drop the last bit of shielding. Li’eth slumped in place, head bowing. Lifting a shaking hand to his face, he wiped at the cooling wetness on his lip, his cheekbones, and stared at the deep red smears for a long, uncomprehending moment.
(You have taxed your holy gifts to the precipice and beyond. Much like that abomination above our city,) one of the Solarican Seers stated. The brown-and-cream-furred one, whose warm fingerpads brushed against his temple, bringing with it healing energies. (I will repair the microscopic tears in your sa’achen rro faan drrunn.)
He had no idea what those words meant, but they came with an underthought of some sort of barrier thing in his body keeping the blood from bleeding out from between his cells in all the wrong ways. He wasn’t medically trained, and he hurt too much right now to care. It took a few minutes before the pain subsided; by that point, someone had found what looked like spare priestly robes to wrap around both him and Jackie while they knelt by the battered opening in the narthex windows.
The great capital ship hung over the edge of the crater by about a hundred mitas though it was hard to judge distances from so far away. One curved edge had landed on one of the great, pyramidal buildings, crushing the missile-damaged tip, but the rest of it held. There would have been no danger of the spaceship’s dropping into the valley either way as it was, however. Not when the whole ship stretched over a kila long and a third that wide, a quarter that tall.
A ship that sat upside down at an awkward angle, with fiery pinpricks lighting up its beige-painted hull, remnants from being reamed by dozens of vicious thermal strikes. Various non-Salik vessels swarmed the thing, shooting at any and all gun turrets, disabling it further in preparation for drop shuttles to innie-out the incoming Terran troops. Salik forces also swarmed that way, including mechanized soldiers, equally determined to defend their own invading cousins.
The “neutral” Salik that had lurked under the surface of this world were clearly neutral no longer. Had clearly waited until they were certain they would have massive support to sweep through the greatest city on Au’aurrran, the greatest source of resources and personnel for building up a resistance to any invasion. He hated being right about his paranoia, and just knelt there in awe at what had just happened. Part of him wanted to ask . . . Did I do that? But he knew it was more like, Did we do that?
Seeing the size of it looming over the large buildings of the valley, realizing just how much psychic inergy had been required to bring it down, Li’eth could see why his brain had started bleeding. (For the first time in my life . . . I think I see just how much power it takes to wipe out your ‘Grey’ foes . . . the ones you say are technologically superior by leaps and bound
s.)
(Like a Human is to an insect,) Jackie agreed. She had dropped her face onto his shoulder, not bloodied but certainly exhausted by everything they had done. (Thank god some of us are scorpions and stinkbugs.)
He chuckled weakly at that, nuzzled her—and flinched as something large, metallic, and holding a big stunner rifle in those servo-tentacles roared up into view. He didn’t have the strength left to freeze the marauder, though. (Shakk! I can’t . . . !)
A loud bang hurt his ears, and stung his eyes and nose with a sharp, sulfurous reek. Coughing, he flinched back from the armored figure. Jackie, arm still extended, weapon smoking slightly, shoved telekinetically with a scrap of remaining strength, and the mechsuit swayed outward instead of inward. It wobbled out of sight and vanished, leaving behind crashing, scraping sounds signaling its now-out-of-control fall.
(It’s Johnston’s gun. I grabbed it on my way to check Buraq,) Jackie confessed, lowering the weapon in her hand to his lap, her arm sort of curling around him like a hug. He peeked down, relieved to see her finger was not on the trigger and that she still held it so that the muzzle pointed up and away from his far leg. Sensing his worry, she snorted mentally. (I have good weapon discipline.)
(Still glad to see it.) He shifted his head a little, his cheek nuzzling hers. (We need to rest while we can. I’m done, pyrokinetically. Cryokinetically. You’re going to have to do all the saving until I’ve recovered, with your Terran projectile weapons that go through Salik armor.)
(Deal. And it only goes through the faceplates at close range. Your pistol-sized lasers bounce off that part. I’m seriously regretting agreeing to let the soldiers leave their combat weapons on the shuttle, just for diplomacy’s sake.) She sighed.
Footsteps rattled into audible range. Both of them twisted to peer at the main entrance to the half-shattered Church. The remaining Imperial soldiers from their escort shuttle hurried into view, four soldiers plus the two members of the shuttle crew, Lieutenant Shi’uln and a backup pilot. What Li’eth saw the half dozen men and women carrying made his eyes sting again, this time with relief.