With a growl like a rabid animal, Mikhail sprinted towards him, half in-flight, half running, as he streaked past the lizard soldiers, oblivious and uncaring, his eye on the prize, on the only prize that mattered, getting even with the man who had taken his wife.
Jamin's eyes widened as he saw the dark-winged shape streaking towards him, and then he gave him a sadistic grin.
"Jamin!" Mikhail screamed, but his words came out an inhuman howl.
A spear was thrown past him. Somebody fired a pulse rifle. But it was as if Mikhail was in a long, dark tunnel, for the only thing he saw was the man who had taken away the woman he loved. His feathers flew as his wing pounded down on the pile of stolen grain and almost tripped on it, and then regained his flight and streaked once more towards his quarry. He meant to get him. He meant to get him and kill him.
Jamin laughed, and then reached down to his hip, a practiced move, a move which had been rehearsed many, many times. Out of a holster the Chief's son slid out a Sata'anic pulse rifle, long and black and bristling with an infra-red targeting scope.
Mikhail's wings pounded and he took fully to the air, an eagle diving towards a prey animal it meant to devour for supper.
The deadly red laser-beam slid up, aiming right at him, aiming to kill.
Mikhail banked his wings and rolled.
Jamin fired and missed.
Mikhail screamed his name.
Jamin fired again.
Pain burned into his wing as the pulse rifle caught him mid-flap and took out some of his long, primary feathers along with a chunk of flesh.
Jamin laughed.
Mikhail shrieked with frustration as the sudden loss of aerodynamic balance caused him to crash into two lizard soldiers who scurried into the shuttle with loaded baskets.
Mikhail slammed into the ground.
The two lizard soldiers drew their swords and pointed them at his throat.
"Drop it," the lizard said in the hissing Sata'anic language. "Drop the sword, or I will cut you down where you lay."
Mikhail let go of the hilt. They kicked it away from his hand.
Jamin stepped down the ramp, his combat boots clanking against the steel as he stepped towards him, wearing a victorious grin. He aimed the red dot of the laser-pointer straight at Mikhail's head.
"Where is she?" Mikhail hissed. He slid his hand down towards his pulse rifle, ready to use its single, lonely shot, but he was surrounded by the lizards, and they all had swords and pulse rifles aimed at him.
The Chief's son stared at him with a mixture of bemusement, naked hatred, and some other emotion that if Mikhail didn't know better, he might think was regret.
"I don’t have her anymore," Jamin said. His expression changed. He gave Mikhail an evil grin. "I made a gift of her. To your own Príomh-Aire."
It took a moment for it to register that Jamin had just spoken to him in Galactic Standard.
"My ... Príomh-Aire?" Mikhail recited like a dumb parrot.
"Yes," Jamin said in heavily accented Galactic Standard. "Your own god moves against you, for Lucifer himself came to collect your wife to be his own."
An odd sense of vertigo caused the lizards that surrounded him to suddenly dance and become blurry. The third ship Pareesa had described as belonging to the Evil One, slender and white, with a shape like a raptor and a great, bulbous eye on the underside which she had blinded with a spear. The white-winged Angelic, more beautiful on the outside than even him. No! It could not be! Why would the man he had spent his entire life defending turn on him and take away his wife?
And how in Hades had he gotten here … when no one, not even Hashem, had any idea where he had crashed?
The Sata'anic soldiers twittered, great guttural guffaws, cracking jokes that it was about time he had fallen into their trap. One of the boar-like Catoblepas kicked him and asked Jamin how they would split the reward money?
"And now," Jamin smirked at his lizard friends. "It is time to find out if you really are immortal, or if a few shots of this pulse rifle will put you out of my misery once and for all."
Jamin aimed the pulse rifle straight for his heart.
"This is payback for ripping out my heart," Jamin said softly in Ubaid, his eyes burning black with hatred as he met his gaze.
Mikhail rolled, yanking up his wing so it took the brunt of the shot. It knocked Jamin off balance.
Jamin pulled the trigger.
The shot went awry. Mikhail shrieked as Jamin burned a hole into his wing.
The whistle of an arrow split the air.
"Hashem's bushy eyebrows!" one of the Sata'anic lizards shouted.
Mikhail rolled towards his sword.
"We're under attack!"
More arrows.
Shouting, human and lizard, as all hell broke loose. Humans rushed into the light of the bonfire, eager to take on the lizards, not only win back Gasur's life-giving grain, but also to get a coveted Sata'anic sword.
Mikhail rose to his feet and looked frantically for the location of Jamin.
"Fall back! Fall back!" one of the Sata'anic soldiers shouted.
The lizards backed up in a perfect square, firing occasionally at the humans, but for some odd reason the pilot of the shuttle did not aim the on-board pulse rifles at the center of the group the way that they normally would.
"To Mikhail!" Pareesa shouted.
Mikhail swung at a burly pig-man who struck back at him with a newer version of the very sword he carried. Their swords rang as they hacked at one another, two experienced swordsmen, though Mikhail was better because he had trained under the Cherubim.
He hit the boar-man in the shoulder. Had he been at peak strength, he would have cut the man's arm off, but in his weakened condition, all he managed to do was to incapacitate him.
The pig-man stumbled backwards. Another soldier stepped in to take his place. Mikhail hacked at him, too, this time getting lucky when the lizard left open his midsection for a split second, just long enough for Mikhail to stab him. The lizard cried out and fell to his knees. Mikhail kicked him out of the way, only caring about one thing. Where was Jamin? He had to get him! He had to find out what he knew!
He heard a death-cry as a human found their death at the end of a Sata'anic sword, and then another as the humans took on species bred to be far larger and stronger than they were.
"Shoot them!" Pareesa screamed.
Mikhail spotted the Chief's son standing back at the exact same spot where he had seen him in the first place, at the top of the ramp of the shuttle, pulse rifle drawn and aimed right at him. With his other hand, he had his palm poised over the power switch which would shut the door, denying Mikhail his means to escape this world and summon the armies of Hashem.
"Fall back!" one of the lizards shouted in their language.
Mikhail crouched, ready to attempt another sprint at the shuttle, the only way he would find Ninsianna.
The Sata'anic soldiers backed up the ramp in a well-organized square. One of the pig-men fell. One of the other lizards grabbed the man and dragged him up the ramp.
Jamin slammed his hand down upon the close button, and then made a Sata'anic prayer gesture of his hand to his forehead, his lips, and his heart as the door closed.
The shuttle fired up her engines, spewing forth a great cloud of burning hot air and dust as it lifted off and headed into the sky.
Mikhail streaked after them, his heart pounding as he frantically flapped his wings, trying to keep up as the shuttle sped up and gradually pulled away.
"No!" he screamed as the shuttle outpaced him.
That adrenaline which had kept him focused, kept him fighting long after his body should have given out, finally reached its limit and abandoned his system. The darkness closed around him until all he could see was the shuttle as a pinpoint, a point of light in a long, dark tunnel as glorious unconsciousness crept up and claimed him as its own.
He fell. He fell from the sky, the earth reaching towards him as it sought to claim him
for herself. That voice he had heard in the darkness, the voice that sang the song, cut into his fog from that other place.
'Mikhail! You are fallen! You must fly!'
Strength flowed into him as the song which had kept him alive poured into his veins and whispered to him to flap his wings.
The ground sped towards him.
He beat his wings, disorganized, messy, missing feathers and reeking of cooked flesh, unable to pull up as he slammed into the ground. Darkness reached up to claim him, but as it did, a single memory flitted through his mind as he drifted in the song. A hand. A voice. A black-eyed girl wearing a crown of stars.
'You are not alone,' she had whispered as he'd stood at the threshold of death.
He reached for her and called her name.
Amhrán
~ * ~ * ~
Chapter 79
Galactic Standard Date: 152,324.02 AE
Haven-2
Supreme Commander-General Abaddon
Abaddon
She was a valiant ship, eager to take on their enemies despite the crushing damage to her wing. Now-General Abaddon, if he was still even officially a general, pressed his hand against the wall and whispered to the ship which had been his first great love.
“Soon, gorm beag,” he whispered to the Jehoshaphat. “Soon I shall let you pay back the dragon for the damage he has wrought to you.”
As if she had heard him, the Jehoshaphat trembled beneath his touch, eager with anticipation of the foreplay to come. He caressed the wall, attentive to her every sigh. They were two old warriors, him and her, both scarred and in less than top condition after their recent scuffle with Shay’tan. But just as Sarvenaz had refused to let him go, so would he not let the engineers who complained they were short on supplies, or time, or authorization from Parliament to make repairs, dissuade him from getting his Little Falcon back into fighting condition.
The trembling grew louder, and then it settled into a rhythmic hum. His comms pin chirped.
“Sir?”
“Yes, yeoman?”
“The antimatter induction ports have just been realigned.”
“I know,” Abaddon said. He caressed the wall. “Will it hold?”
“I have no idea, Sir,” the Flight Engineer said. "She should go forward just fine, but if we need to maneuver in battle, I can't promise the supports we jury-rigged to stabilize her hyperdrives will hold.
Abaddon closed his eyes and focused on the way the vibration rumbled through his rapidly regenerating feathers. Slow. Steady. Reliable. Bloodthirsty. Yes. The Jehoshaphat would fight.
"We only need to go in one direction, yeoman," Abaddon said to the engineer. "Straight ahead."
"Yes, Sir," the Flight Engineer said.
Abaddon glanced up at the officers who had gathered in his war room, both in person, and also on flatscreens all around the room. They were good men. Men he would trust with his life.
"The moment we cross over the border," Abaddon's expression was grim, "there will no going back. Not just for me, but for any of you. If you have any doubts at all that this course of action is the right one, now is the time to bow out and join Re Harakhti's fleet. As you all know, Lucifer is dead, Parliament is a mess, and the Emperor has not had the magairlí to seize back control of his empire."
Abaddon watched the faces on the screen, searching for signs of doubt or fear. He found none. Most of these commanders had human wives of their own, and of those who didn't, they had lower-ranking members of their crew who either did, or desperately wished they did because they were the last of their bloodline.
He glanced over at Captain Shzzzkt, his Mantoid communications officer and third in line to take control of the bridge. The Mantoid species had absolutely no problems reproducing.
"You sure you want to do this, Shzzzkt?" Abaddon asked softly.
Captain Shzzzkt touched his voice modulation box.
"When I was born, there was no Emperor," Shzzzkt said. "Only a Parliament which refused to grant our planets admission. All the time our planet has belonged to the Alliance, it was Lucifer we looked to represent us, not the Emperor or Parliament. And he looked to you, Sir, to uphold the letter of his law."
The Mantoid lifted his hard outer wings to expose the soft, gossamer wings below which enabled their species some semblance of flight, not true-flight, but close enough that they'd been able to take up some of the slack caused by the Angelics dropping numbers.
"The newer sentient crewmen all took a vote, Sir," Shzzzkt continued. "We will serve the Emperor and Parliament as much as we can, but as far as we're concerned, until somebody can produce Lucifer's body, we shall follow your orders, Sir, and not the petty bickering of politicians."
A lump rose in Abaddon's throat. He had been less than enthusiastic when a young Lucifer had proposed the audacious plan to allow the newer sentient races to earn their Alliance citizenship by serving in the military. Only recently had their homeworlds been granted full Alliance status, Lucifer's plan all along. The snub was recent enough that the newer races held no illusions that they were anything but second-best citizens.
"Thank you, Captain Shzzzkt," Abaddon's lip twitched with suppressed emotion. He turned towards the other commanders. "I presume the same is true on all of your ships?"
"Yes, Sir," the other ship's commanders all answered.
"You all know the plan, then," Abaddon said. "Re Harakhti has amassed a sizeable flotilla of Leonid and Centauri battlecruisers along the border closest to the place where Shay'tan ambushed this fleet. As we speak, he has authorized his fighter pilots to fly sorties along the edge of Sata'anic territory, just enough to antagonize the dragon and keep his attention there."
He pointed to a holographic map of the Milky Way galaxy.
"So far as we can tell, Shay'tan is completely unaware we've amassed this second fleet in a stellar nursery at the opposite end of his empire," Abaddon said. "The radiowave disturbances caused by the dust cloud renders our navigation equipment useless for jumping into subspace until we get at least 300 light years inside the Sata'anic border, but it also means Shay'tan won't see us until we drive right past him."
"Why here, Sir?" the young Leonid First Lieutenant who commanded the tracking ship Invincible asked. "Why are we crossing the border here?"
The Invincible was a small ship with a large deep-space radar, exactly the kind of ship Abaddon needed to calculate these jumps. It was piloted by a vigorous young Leonid who wasn't entirely certain he wanted to tag along on this mission. How could he convince his men that a small, non-descript bird had landed on the Eternal Tree while he'd been dead and sang a mournful song for a broken seed which had become lodged in a branch which looked remarkably like the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm?
"This is the last place the Eternal Light was seen before it disappeared into points unknown," Abaddon told them the only truth that might make sense. "Somehow, the Emperor knew humans still existed before Lucifer pulled his coup d'etat, and somewhere in the galaxy, there are 99 ships under the command of the former Supreme Commander-General's lover, most likely searching for the same planet that we are."
"What should we do when we run into Shay'tan's forces?" one of the Angelic commanders asked.
"We hit them hard and keep on going," Abaddon said. He pointed to the place where their instrumentation would enable them to use the Invincible's deep-space radar to calculate a jump beyond the borders of the Sata'anic Empire, into territories which were almost completely uncharted. "But while we're on our way through, if we do hit Shay'tan hard, it would not aggrieve me to cut the dragon back down to size."
He flared his wings, prickly looking with their immature grey pinfeathers, but already the quills had begun to flesh out. If he kept progressing at the same rate of healing, by the end of the week he should be able to fly once more.
The other commanders gave him a salute and grinned. What doubts they might have harbored had been dispelled by none other than his own miraculous recovery from the dead. They viewe
d it as divine provenance of She-who-is, but Abaddon knew it was the remnants of his Seraphim genome, his latent ability to heal restored thanks to the unpolluted potential in Sarvenaz's human genes.
Abaddon resisted the urge to scratch his arms and legs. His face had been the first to slough off the scar tissue and leave him looking no older than before, but every other square inch of his body peeled healing skin like a Sata'anic lizard molting their skin. The itching was driving him nuts!
"You know the drill," Abaddon told the commanders.
"Keep low, move fast, kill first, die last," they recited the familiar Angelic battle prayer. "One shot, one kill, no luck, pure skill."
Abaddon gave them a hawkish grin.
"Just follow my lead."
He killed the flatscreens, and then signaled Captain Shzzzkt to go and carry out his orders. There was only one last order he wished to relay, one he had discussed with Sarvenaz just minutes before he had come up here to launch this latest mission.
"Major Pharzuphel," he said. "One moment please?"
His second-in-command paused, her eyes red-rimmed from crying. He had survived because her lover had risked his life to run into the collapsing cave and shove him into an ancient cryo-chamber. Lieutenant Valac hadn't been so lucky. While he had survived by diving underneath the cryo-chamber, his legs had been crushed by a falling stalactite and the lack of oxygen in the cave had caused significant brain damage.
"Sir?" Pharzuphel spoke with a disheartened voice.
“How is he, Major?”
Pharzuphel’s snow-white wings drooped with dejection.
“He still hasn’t woken up, Sir,” Pharzuphel said. “And even if he does, the doctor fears he may never regain full use of his legs.”
Abaddon’s expression softened.
“Keep talking to him,” Abaddon said, "even if he cannot answer you. Because on some level he can hear you, and so long as he knows you haven’t abandoned him to die, he will fight to stay with you. He will fight until he doesn’t have a choice, and even if he loses that battle, know that he will wait for you just but on the other side.”
Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 80