Thread Skein (Golden Threads Trilogy Book 3)

by Leeland Artra

  “Got them. Sending sixty enforcer sentinels to keep them busy, but they can defeat them. Any chance we can stop shooting pillows and get serious?” His tone was far more acerbic than usual. He was as worried as Vesta about the outcome.

  As he spoke, she saw sixty of the large silver sentinels spin out of the massed group, flying a patrol pattern high above the city, providing most of the visual data they were using to track all the movements. The group of sixty formed into a fighting formation, turning south. Their armored bodies glistened in the sun as rainbows danced off their gossamer wings. Lightning began to arc between them as they dove on the three mages.

  “Stand by. I’m working on that. I need at least twelve more minutes. The security override from Ticca’s original call for help stopped working the moment we discovered she was dead. We should have considered this contingency, and either cut off the Imperial registry from the main systems, or unlocked everything ahead of time. If I get a second chance, there’s no lock I’m leaving in place. I should have released all the locks before she was killed, but I was afraid Duke might check.”

  Sixty sentinels swarmed the three mages. Vesta sighed, noticing that the lower-yield crowd control weapons the enforcer sentinels had didn’t do much against the combined shield of the three mages. Arkady growled, slamming one of the sentinels directly on top of their shield, forcing its internal systems to overload.

  Arkady’s gleeful cackle caused Vesta to review the results herself. The explosion was massive, catching the mages by surprise. Their combined shield crumpled, blowing them off the wall. All three of them managed to maintain their own personal shields.

  “They’re certainly well-protected. I wonder how many layers of shields they’re maintaining.”

  Something else registered with her for the first time.

  “Arkady, can you take some readings? These mages are expending far more energy than should be possible. There’s not this much energy available via the mana lines in this area. I’m sure of it.”

  Arkady grunted acknowledgement of the request.

  Vesta also activated a tracking system like the one in Algan that had triangulated the power source of that mage. Unfortunately, with the Nhia-Samri and Guild mages all using power, it would be really lucky, with the limited magical sensors remaining, to identify where they were getting the power.

  “That isn’t going to work. We didn’t have a chance to get Brandon’s latest sensors exported from Elraci before the accident.”

  “You’re too pessimistic at times.”

  “I’m a realist.” He huffed.

  The mages twisted in the air, each casting a different spell to soften their landing. Arkady split the sentinels into two groups and had them attack, full force, two of the mages individually. Nine sentinels, combined and coordinated, could effectively cause issues. Although their shields weren’t penetrated, the two mages were slammed and thrown around at the coordinated attacks. Vesta enjoyed watching them getting kicked around.

  This is more than just an old city. This is my home, and I’ll be diurdin if I let you keep pulling it apart.

  Just as Vesta managed to release the locks on another hangar of enforcer sentinels, she noticed the city’s maintenance system had dispatched a repair unit to the wall. A repair walker moved over the hole, spraying the tungsten carbide and carbon filament repair goo, which was packed with nanobots designed and programmed to combine the elements at the atomic level, creating a nearly indestructible nanotwinned material in a variety of final styles.

  In that case, the bots would form the goo into a perfect nanotwinned patch that would be indistinguishable from the rest of the wall, which looked like an ordinary alabaster granite.

  The one mage who wasn’t dealing with sentinels flew back on top of the wall and rushed to stop the repairs, hitting the repair walker with a magical blast that caused it to explode. Repair materials went everywhere, encasing the mage.

  “Oh, ouch! He’d better work fast to get out of that, or he’ll be in a lot of trouble.” Arkady laughed.

  “I liked that repair walker. It came from Duianna Prime,” she grumbled.

  She let a small amount of her attention stay on the mage, who’d inadvertently attacked himself. The materials were hardening as the nanobots did their jobs. Without the preprogrammed directives, the nanobots were hardening the mass of repair materials in an uneven and chaotic pattern. Small spurs were growing in some places, while other areas went glossy as they hardened into polished stone. It was a rather interesting sculpture.

  In two seconds, enough of the material had hardened that Vesta was pretty sure the mage wasn’t going to get out of it.

  “You know, that might be a way to take care of the other mages.”

  Arkady’s attention came back from fighting the other two mages. “What? He didn’t make it? That’s interesting! We’ll have to put that on display someplace later.”

  Vesta checked on Electra’s progress. She and Ellua had the regents’ families together, and were herding them to the throne room. There, Daggers were already gathering the remaining key officials. The plan was to get them out of the eastern palace gates, and to the eastern docks, before the Nhia-Samri realized they had left.

  Reviewing the other data, Vesta saw that Warlord Eshra-Zunia had a group of 100 warriors carrying the unconscious and bound Bayion out of the city. The warlord had consolidated the rest of her forces, and they were moving to cut off the palace’s eastern routes.

  “Urd!” Vesta yelled. “Bayion is almost out of the city.”

  “She’s moving fast. She’ll be able to block the routes from the palace to the eastern docks.”

  As if they could read the situation, the Nhia-Samri all turned as one, and began pushing towards the palace from all sides. Many of their teams began running around the guards and Dagger squads in their dash to form a blockade line around the palace.

  Vesta felt herself warming as she realized that they’d probably guessed that the palace was about to be evacuated. Ellua’s updates had stopped. In hindsight she realized they should have kept Ellua coordinating the battles. If Electra tried to get out, they would encounter enough Nhia-Samri to slow them down. Outside the palace she and her group would be easy targets.

  She materialized all the control room monitors, and herself in the center of them, just so she could slam her fist into the consoles and stamp her feet. She started pacing. Arkady appeared to the side.

  “Odd how good that feels, isn’t it?”

  “Electra is surrounded, completely cut off! Bayion is captured! And you want to talk about physical sensations?” she screamed, stomping her foot.

  Arkady took a step backwards. “What else can we do? Unless you want to expose our status. So far, we haven’t been able to release any of the combat locks. We could use everything we have in perfect coordination, but that would pretty much shout, ‘Vesta is awake,’ to Duke. Even then, I’m not sure we could win with just the crowd-control stuff.”

  She turned and stomped towards Arkady, hands raised in fists. “WE CANNOT FAIL!”

  Arkady nodded. “I agree. What we need is Ticca here to call for help. That’d give us an excuse for releasing the locks on the military defenses.”

  “SHE’S DEAD! THE EMPRESS IS DEAD! NO ONE IS LEFT!”

  “Then we have to protect the regents. They’re the rulers now.”

  Vesta had started to walk away when Arkady’s words penetrated a part of her systems.

  Turning around, she stared at Arkady, open-mouthed. “The regents are the rulers.”

  Arkady nodded. “Yes, that’s what I said. They...oh.” His eyes widened as he, too, understood what he’d said. “Do you think it’ll work?”

  “Like you and Duke, I don’t know how Muriel’s security override works. If it doesn’t work, we would be no worse off.
But if it does, we’ll have time to doctor up the records like I did at Algan to satisfy Duke that you and I are still locked down. It would give us all we need to regain total control of all our systems.”

  Vesta spun, finding Electra and connecting to her audio implant. “Electra, you’re cut off. There is one hope. You have to get Ellua to cuss and call for the city to stop the Nhia-Samri.”

  “What? You’re already helping,” Electra replied, her voice pitching up nervously.

  “I’ll explain later. This is a long shot,” Vesta said.

  Electra didn’t respond as quietly as she had been, and Ellua heard. “Who are you talking to? Of course everyone is helping.” Ellua’s voice came through the connection.

  Vesta engaged the throne room monitors, and started chewing industriously on her nails as she waited. Electra moved before three of the LUMED consoles, reviewing the situation and pointing. Ellua was standing next to her, looking at the displays as well. Electra made sighing noises, and Ellua’s eyes followed her gesture and moved, focusing on the indicated data or image.

  Finally, Electra gave an emotional sigh. “We’ve been outmaneuvered. The palace is surrounded. The Nhia-Samri almost have Bayion out of the city. If they get him out, we won’t be able to track him.”

  Ellua’s face tightened, and her eyes teared up. She turned to Electra, shaking her head. “Lords and Ladies, help us.”

  Ellua turned away from Electra, looking across the screens floating around the throne room. Electra made a small motion that caused Ellua’s eyes to go past the displays, to the children at the far end of the room. Tears ran freely as Ellua stared at the families grouped in the throne room who had no way out.

  Vesta calculated that Ellua’s eyes were on her own son and daughters. Seven nannies and as many Dagger guards kept the kids in line and quiet.

  Arkady stood next to Vesta in the virtual control space, watching. “She’s clever.”

  “Shh. Wait for it.”

  Vesta pulled up a display that showed Ellua’s heart rate had picked up, and her system was flooding with adrenaline as the feelings washed through her. Ellua’s emotions were edging in the right direction.

  “Even if this does work, it was a poor thing to do,” Vesta said.

  “We can find a way to apologize afterwards, if this works,” Arkady responded.

  Ellua flopped onto one of the regent’s thrones. She cried softly, her eyes on Electra.

  “I don’t know how you know so much! Is there nothing more you can do?” she begged. She looked back at the displays, and slammed her fists into the throne’s arms. “Urdu, make this city protect us! It’s supposed to have amazing powers to guard the citizens and palace!” She broke down completely and cried out in anguish, dropping her face into her hands.

  Arkady and Vesta didn’t see Electra rushing over to Ellua’s side, embracing her in a hug. Their attention was fixed on a large display in the control room wall that had appeared. Tall orange words scrolled across the screen:

  IMPERIAL SECURITY OVERRIDE ACKNOWLEDGED: SYSTEM LOCKS RELEASED.

  IMPERIAL ATTACK ORDERS CONFIRMED.

  OBJECTIVES - PROTECT PALACE FROM AGGRESSORS, DEFEND CITIZENS FROM AGGRESSORS.

  Arkady looked at Vesta with a wide smile on his face. “Thank you, Muriel Neyon-Banaschel! We have our orders.”

  Vesta didn’t bother to answer, as she was already releasing the locks on all of the city’s combat systems. Vesta’s systems, burning with anger at the attackers, tingled with the power of the reactivated systems.

  Combat sensor data started pouring in from the hundreds of preprocessing stations embedded in sensor clusters around the city. Her view of the city grew exponentially clearer, as the processing systems began creating profiles of aggressors and guards.

  In the palace, deep reverberating klaxons began to sound. Ellua and Electra stood staring at the multitude of new monitors that had bloomed into existence, each one showing weapon systems’ reports and overhead a holographic combat map of the city formed. The natural light of the room vanished as hidden steel panels slammed close over the windows sealing the palace.

  Deep in the city, the reinforced combat generators fired off, and power levels spiked across all of Vesta’s systems. The structural reinforcement fields in the city and palace walls burnt with the extra energy, engaging the millions of high-energy military shield emitters embedded in the walls. The entire city began to glow a soft white.

  Dust and dirt was flung into the air around the palace, blurring it in a haze of brown, as ancient doors surrounding the walls dropped open, and thousands of combat drones took to the air. Nhia-Samri warriors fell back, covering their faces from the rush of debris.

  Vesta connected herself to the public announcement system via the automated voice interface systems, so it wouldn’t be her voice the city heard.

  “Attention! This is an Imperial military action. Hostile forces in violation of Imperial Law have breached the city and have been identified. All citizens are to proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to the closest designated emergency evacuation site or emergency bunker. Imperial guards, all hostiles are to be detained or destroyed.” She set the message to auto-repeat every thirty seconds.

  In her monitors, Vesta saw that Warlord Eshra-Zunia, the hundreds of Nhia-Samri with her, the tens of thousands of Nhia-Samri throughout the city, and all of the guards and Daggers had stopped fighting. Enemies and allies turned towards the palace, most with their mouths wide open. They all stared at the shimmering wall of Duianna Empire military combat drones from before their worlds existed, descending on them from the air around the palace.

  Above the city, hundreds of enforcer sentinels dove as a swarm, each one opening its previously locked military weapons ports. At the eastern and northern docks, the water boiled as hundreds of additional enforcer sentinels leapt from the underwater hangars. The silvery insects burst into the air, spreading their wings as they swarmed towards the palace.

  Arkady was dancing as his arms moved in blinding speed over the controls. “Duke’s locks on the sentinels’ combat weapons have been released. We’re weapons free across the board.”

  Vesta stood in the middle of her control room, using the thousands of new sensors to coordinate the hundreds of thousands of activated combat systems. Her mind spun as the level of calculations and interactions pushed even her to the limits. Still, she laughed. “You thought you could just put me to sleep for thousands of years, kill my empress, attack my city, and threaten my Aelargo without fear? At last, I don’t have to hold back, and I will show you how wrong you were!”

  Chapter 11

  Misfortune Plays No Favorite

  Runa-Illa

  Runa-Illa kept her back to Lebuin as they climbed up the sandstone escarpment. Everyone in the group was still simmering mad at Lebuin for taking his extended reading trip, while the team fought Nhia-Samri and hauled his body over the mountains. Her temper flared every time she looked at him. For the last few days she’d made a point to keep her back to him.

  She couldn’t avoid her connection to him, and although he tried to block some of his feelings, Illa knew it hurt him. Reaching the top, she stepped out of the way of the rest of the team. As she stepped away from the precipice, she got a surge of regret and guilt that was not her own, and she knew Lebuin was watching her.

  The only time she didn’t feel that guilt from him was when he was working on opening the journal. The needed focus required to unlock the threads took all his attention. Now that she thought about it, she realized that was why he pulled the journal out at every break or rest period. In a way it was letting him escape those feelings, and yet work towards a possible solution to save them all.

  Sure, you feel guilty now. But you chose to sit in that library, reading fairytales. What kind of God would do that?

  She adjus
ted her head wrap and cloak again to fully cover her. Through the cloth slits, she looked out over the burning sands of Elraci. The place was so depressing that she hadn’t even thought of working on that new song since waking next to it. For her whole life, that place had been the deadly Circumveni Desert, but now she knew it had been so much more.

  I wonder who decided to rename this place the Circumveni Desert. Elraci was wiped from existence, but surely people would want to remember what it was. They had to have had a history.

  She no longer wanted to think of the place as the Circumveni Desert. She felt a need to honor the memory of what had once been there. Elraci was once a green and fertile kingdom filled with scholars, scientists, philosophers, and millions of other souls. Her heart ached, taking in the wasteland before her.

  Nigan climbed up the opposite side of the small plateau from exploring a little ahead. He stepped up next to her. She stopped herself from grabbing him just to breathe in his intense scent. She’d flirted with him for weeks before they finally embraced. She’d caught whiffs of his scent before, but in that first embrace, she was able to breathe him in, and it shocked her how much she’d swooned over it.

  “Looks like another full hot day,” he said with his perpetual friendliness. She couldn’t see his face through his head wrap, but she could hear his expression.

  She grinned as his joy infected her mood.

  I do love that man. His ability to remain obstinately cheerful is a miracle.

  “Every day is a hot day here,” she groaned back, trying to not let him know she was smiling. She had to keep him on his toes.

  “Ha! Wrong again. You know, you really should be careful with your pronouncements.” He held out something to her in his gloved hand.