The Questic was on the way. This had to work.
As if Miri heard her silent prayers, the proximity alert beacon began to chime self-importantly from the command loft. Another vessel was exiting the flex point.
“What are you doing?” Tyron challenged. She took a menacing stride forward, placing her body in front of Jon. The brave shield maiden still.
Jon seized her by the shoulder. “Ty, don’t.”
His gaze never left Erelah.
“She did this. Locked us out from the com-sys,” Tyron said. Her stare was damning. Erelah knew she was marked a traitor in the soldier’s eyes forever, despite the brief period of acceptance she had afforded her.
“Actually, you did,” Erelah corrected.
Tyron’s eyes widened as realization sank in. She lunged. Jon grabbed her by the collar, barely restraining her.
Jon wedged himself in front of Tyron. “Erelah, what are you doing? Think about this.”
The alert continued to bleat, an insistent tempo.
“This is how it has to be. I’m so sorry.” Tears prickled the corners of her vision.
“You’re surrendering to Tristic?” His face folded.
“Jon, she will pursue us until there is nothing left.”
“We can figure something out.”
“No.” Her courage threatened to lag once more. “It has to end here.”
“Tristic won’t stop with just you. You know that.”
Erelah nodded, but did not correct him. True, if she had planned on simple surrender, Tristic would capture the Cassandra or just have it destroyed in a grand and menacing gesture.
No, that is why I must make a grand and menacing gesture of my own.
“When this is over, you’ll regain control of the ship. But don’t linger. Just in case.” She saw the expression of anger on Tyron’s face change. Although the bull-headed soldier had refused to hear her plan, she had become a part of it.
“I can’t let you do this.” Jon took a stride forward, decisive.
Erelah pushed out at him. That now familiar pricking sensation rushed over her with ferocity. It hungrily lashed out as she focused on Jon. Feelings and images flooded from him. She ignored them. They were a distraction. Instead she delved into the deeper place under his waking mind, the bedrock.
Erelah uttered a single word, focused as a command: “Sleep.”
Jon collapsed to the deck mid-stride on joints of wet paper. Tyron was instantly kneeling over him, her face distressed. She righted Jon’s head, clasped his hand and folded her forehead against it.
Erelah lowered the weapon, hating its cold sinister weight. She allowed the thing to clatter to the deck. Tyron did not take this as an invitation to move in on her. Now that she knew what Erelah could do.
“This was your plan?” Tyron growled. She turned an accusing gaze up at Erelah.
“He would have tried to stop me.”
The question was plain on Tyron’s face.
“I can’t make you sleep like that. Like I said, you’re all sharp edges, hard to get underneath.” Erelah replied. “Besides, you have to watch over him.”
“Just do what you’re going to do. You’ve already done enough damage here.” Tyron looked back down at Jon, the anguish in her voice like nothing a soldier would ever reveal.
Erelah wanted to tell her how much he saw in her: the potential he believed dwelled beneath that hard surface. She wanted to tell Tyron how right Jon was and to plead with her not to destroy that tender faith he had in her. Because she deserved it.
39
That crazy skew bitch!
Sela glared at Erelah, but was reluctant to leave Jon’s side. He was vulnerable.
The proximity alert chattered on. Although the tempo had not increased, it sounded more insistent. Sela knew what she would find if she were to access the sens-con: a Ravstar carrier.
Suddenly, the deck bucked. Metal creaked somewhere to her left and overhead. It felt like the fist of a giant pounding the tired old Cass. It was the signature turbulence of disrupted ions pushing forth in a tremendous wave that could be created only by a massive vessel exiting the conduit. The Cass, still adrift, had been too close to the flex point when the Ravstar vessel emerged and as a consequence had borne the brunt of the ion displacement of a far larger vessel.
Any moment now, they’ll destroy us.
Sela fold over Jon, trying to keep his head from smacking the bulkhead as they were rocked in the fading backwash signature. His breathing seemed fine. He was essentially asleep. She exhaled a shaking breath.
Her fury blossomed. Erelah. I will take this out on her pallid hide, if I live through this.
Sela rose, whirling in Erelah’s direction, and glimpsed the sealing cargo bay door and the younger woman’s pale face just before it shut. The lights on the magseal flipped to red. Locked.
She sprang to her feet and covered the distance with swift strides.
Her plan. Her stupid Fates-damned plan!
She used me to bring us here.
The dream about Atilio, watching him flip through nav charts. It had been her own hands entering the coordinates of this destination like a puppet, doing another’s will. Somehow, the girl had slipped inside of her sleeping mind and used her to program the nav.
In futile rage, Sela kicked the door. Even if she managed to wake the Cass’s engines back up, they could not spool up the velo drives in time. They were locked out, adrift. Erelah had wanted to be sure that Jon did not intervene.
Sela ran back to the command loft, leaping over Jon’s sprawled form.
The ion wake of the Questic had sent the Cass into a slow spin, but the external vid feeds still tracked the newly arrived vessel. She regarded its image on the screen. It was not the same raptor class vessel that had attacked Merx. This was a deacon class carrier as large as the Storm King. Now it lumbered like a spiny, coiled monstrosity. The black hull gleamed in muted star light. Her velo drive glowed in a sinister cool yellow.
It was a ship meant to inspire fear and awe. All it evoked from Sela was unadulterated fury.
“Oh, you’re an ugly bitch, aren’t you?”
Sela jabbed off the proximity alert. The Cass drifted in silence now. The occasional hiss of fried circuits sounded under the uncertain flicker of the lights. Coolant dripped from unseen leaks to bubble and pop, releasing a sickly burnt smell. At least nothing was on fire yet.
There was nothing she could do here.
She rushed back down into the companionway. Back in the corridor she pressed against the bulkhead, slid down the wall, drew her knees up and sat next to Jon.
We’re not going out like this. Think, Sela, think!
She looked overhead at the meshwork of conduits and exposed wiring, marveling at the fact that they had not had a catastrophic failure yet. It was a tech’s nightmare of patches, bypasses and creative wiring. Even if she started pulling wires at random to override the computer, she would likely make it worse.
“Damn it all!” She pounded a fist against the cold metal wall.
“Ty?”
It was Jon’s voice, thin and uncertain. She looked down to see him move a shaky hand to his head. He pushed up onto an elbow.
“Nominal?” It came out as a breathless sob.
“What’s happened?” His gaze was distant, fuzzy. “I think I was dreaming.”
“She did this.”
“Erelah?” His face folded with lingering confusion. “Where is she?”
She jerked her chin toward the bay. “She sealed the door to the hangar. She’s in there with that bloody stryker.”
He studied her. “What did you do?”
Sela felt the blood rush to her face. She could not look at him. The plan. Erelah’s stupid plan. Had she only bothered to listen, could she have prevented this? “She planned this. I never thought—”
Jon climbed to his feet. Weaving heavily from wall to wall, he made his way to the bay hatch. In an unconscious replay of Sela’s actions moments before,
he beat and kicked ineffectually at the metal.
“Erelah, damn it! Open this door!”
“There’s no time,” Sela said. “Ravstar is here. Their carrier just exited the flex point behind us. There has to be a way around the command lockout.”
He looked back at the hatch, laying one last dull smack against it with the palm of his hand. Grudgingly he allowed Sela to pull him toward the command loft.
Sela opened the only operational system they could access: Sensory horizon.
Of course the viewers still worked.
She wants us to see, to witness this.
“Still in command lockout.” She tapped ineffectively at the interface to her right.
“There has to be something…”
Jon’s voice trailed off into defeated hurt as he frantically tabbed through a flurry of screens. Each new command settled on the same override lockout.
“Even if we could move, we burned out the nodes when we left Merx.” Sela used a scraped knuckle to gesture at the reads. “The carrier will be on us before we can reach full spool-up.”
“We have to do something.”
“There’s nothing left!” she said with sudden fury. “Erelah has seen to that! We’re dead.”
A new, excited pinging sounded.
“She’s prepping to vent the bay.” Sela snapped off the strident warning. The Cass’s androgynous voice echoed her observation in Commonspeak.
Jon tried to open the vox link. Only dull static answered. He turned to Sela.
“You knew.” He glared.
“Only that she had a plan. But not this—”
“You knew something. And you didn’t say a thing.”
Sela turned away, unable to answer. The guilt twisted in her gut. Erelah had tried to tell her and she had refused to listen.
“She knew you wouldn’t go along with it, so she came to me and asked me to help.”
“And so you did.”
“No. Jon, I refused. Because it meant betraying you.”
He slapped a hand at the console arm. The screen flew back, striking the bulkhead.
“Just go. Try to talk to her.” Her voice simmered with defeat.
Jon watched her in the red glow of the useless tell-tales.
“There’s nothing for you to do here anyway,” Sela said.
---
“Erelah! Open this door right now!”
Jon’s voice issued from both the speaker on the wall and came muffled through the thick bay door. Erelah’s spine stiffened with the impulse to obey.
“Whatever it is you’re planning, you don’t have to do this!”
Hands trembling, she grabbed the last of the environmental scrubbers and sprinted back to the Jocosta. The ruined components clattered to the floor as she exchanged them for the fully charged ones. She kept her back turned to the hatch. She knew what she would see there: her brother’s distraught face hovering at the other side of the thick glass.
“Don’t do this!”
There was a hollow tug in her chest. She paused halfway up the side of the Jocosta to look at the door. Jon pressed his open palm to the glass. She could see the pale curve of his face beyond. He took this as a hesitation from her. His pounding on the glass renewed. She forced herself to look away.
A weakness. A momentary weakness. Nothing more.
There was no time. She willed her limbs back into motion. Sliding down into the cockpit that still smelled of charred filaments and ozone, Erelah donned the headgear.
The flight computer accepted her passkey and rolled through its familiar protocols. To her primed imagination, the stryker’s sounds seemed more menacing, as if the ship knew her intent. The Cass’s computer continued to count down the bay depressurization as she sealed the Jocosta’s canopy.
The engines hitched once, but activated. There was no time for a pre-flight check. There was time only for luck and prayers. The j-drive spool up took mere seconds, not the plodding forever of a velo. A deep hum began to resonate through the body of the stryker. It vibrated her bones and wrapped her brain with its numbing harmonics.
It failed to drown out the insistent voice on the vox headset:
“Just answer me,” Jon begged.
There was a fierce desperation in the plea that she could not shut out.
If I do not do this, they are dead, or worse.
She could not choose a fate for Jon and Tyron. They did not deserve that. For a moment, another weak moment, she paused. Her fingers actually hovered over the abort sequence controls.
Instead, she triggered the vox open.
“I’m sorry, Jon.”
Then cut the channel completely.
The Jocosta glided effortlessly from the hangar.
Nyxa make me your vessel. Nyxa make me your fiery sword and your instrument. Nyxa guide my hand and my eye. Nyxa clear my Path.
The prayer rolled on and on, a litany in her head. She muttered it under her breath in a tuneless humming, unthinking. It was something to fill the empty space and flat air of the cockpit.
Uncle would not have been pleased.
He would not have condoned this destructive and violent act. But he was long dead, having abandoned them both to a place of hard choices.
The Jocosta was nothing, a mote of dust compared to the, Questic. A science vessel named in ancient Eugenes to mean the quest for knowledge. The word had a darker meaning too: to interrogate under torture. That was not an innocent accident. Nothing within Tristic’s power was ever innocent for long.
Erelah felt the hybrid’s presence push against that barrier in her head. It held, firmly. She learned that the harder the force Tristic exerted from without, the more solid the barrier would become. Her voice would never torment Erelah’s mind again, but she could sense her excitement. The beast thought her broken, surrendering and finished.
Erelah relished the correction that came next. Although, delivering it was likely to bring her end.
Time. Be patient.
Nyxa make me your vessel. Nyxa make me your fiery sword and your instrument…
The message she wanted to see rolled onto the heads-up. The Questic’s engines were nearing a powered-down state. Their fuel reserves were low. The image of the drive field around her midsection glowed a hot yellow-orange, like the smoldering embers of a forge.
Here she would make a different weapon. Here she could become a fiery sword.
Nyxa guide my hand. Nyxa clear my Path.
Everything that came next seemed from far away: a story she was telling in her head. Her hands did not shake as she keyed in the final commands. They were the hands of someone else, a warrior twin. She was braver. Her spine did not quiver, but sat bolt upright in the seat of the stryker. This twin did not waste thought on failed farewells or lost futures. She did not flinch as she felt the surge of energy engulf the stryker. The radiance grew around them, blinding and fierce.
And with her warrior twin, Erelah embraced the blackness that followed.
40
Sela understood why Erelah had left the viewer active while the rest of the Cass’s systems remained locked out. She wanted witnesses for an impossible feat, the last act of incredible bravery that Sela had dismissed as a coward’s end.
This was not cowardice. As a soldier, to witness such an act of self-sacrifice from one who had been ally and enemy alike, it rendered her speechless.
A deadly blossom of azure veined with white consumed the entire midsection of that hideous Ravstar vessel. The hulking metal beast crumpled inward and folded toward the mouth of the flex point Erelah had created with the stryker. Like the delicate fabric of a curtain, the skin of the carrier undulated under the ravages of the distortion wave.
A tremendous ball of fire issued along the exposed side of Tristic’s carrier. The flames quickly snuffed out in the cold of space. For a brief flickering moment, the wash of blue grew stronger still, eating metal wherever it landed.
“Great violence and forc’,” Sela muttered in amazement.
In that moment, she realized the full scope of Erelah’s meaning.
After a punishing period of conduit travel, the reserves on the carrier’s velos must have been nearly drained. Somehow, the tiny stryker had the ability to trigger a flex point. This was catalyst for an explosion that blessedly had little fuel. It had been just enough to mortally wound the Questic.
Otherwise, we would not still be here.
The vortex vanished, leaving the ravaged carrier to twist against an invisible eddy, a huge gash dissecting its decks. It listed like a crushed insect, floating and writhing on the surface of a pond.
Around Sela the command loft of the Cassandra popped back to life. The once red-barred consoles now resumed their prior interfaces. The drives hummed in a building crescendo as spool-up was initiated.
Erelah had done this. Or, more correctly, she had done this through Sela.
Their window was short. Regardless of the mortal wound that had been rendered, there was no real guarantee Tristic had been destroyed. The Cassandra was vulnerable to capture. Jon would have argued against it, but he was not there to stop her. He would have wanted to search the wreckage, seek out something that remained of his sister, as ridiculous as it sounded.
They could not risk that hesitation. Sela made the decision for him. Another fault in the growing list of harms done against him.
She guided the Cassandra through the rapidly-splaying field of debris. At first, the vox was alive with the sound of living ghosts. Hectic voices pled for rescue. Others responded with ineffectual shouts and orders. Sela snapped the speaker off.
I have witnessed the end of too many things already.
Within moments, the aptly named dead node was a memory as the Cassandra limped its way through the conduit.
Jon remained at the other side of the bay door for a long time, knees drawn up, back pressed into the curve of the bulkhead. He watched some private landscape with red-rimmed eyes. Was he recounting every sin? Blaming himself for every squandered opportunity and wasted hope?
Allies and Enemies: Fallen Page 30