Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  One of the uk’tek appeared, and he slithered up to a protective position at her side.

  Someone shouted, “Make way for Thessa Zane den Uta! Wardeness of Widden, Keeper of the Phanes System, High Priestess to Mahl, Speaker for Mahl, the Prophet of Phanes, Scrivener of Souls, and Arch-sorceress Supreme of the Faith! Stand aside and make way!”

  The Republican soldiers passing through the lanes paused and looked at her, confused, but she also saw awe in their eyes. Awe that one person could command such adulation from her people.

  There were other tents arrayed all around them, with medics and med bots rushing about. Armored and armed Republican soldiers moved about on urgent missions, delivering messages and supplies to all the tents. A single warhulk was parked nearby, its plasteel window open and the pilot seat empty.

  “Is it over?” Thessa said, her memory too blurry to even conjure up all she had seen and done during the battle. “Did the Ascendancy…?”

  “Yes, they left, my lady. Well, most of them. Stragglers were taken as prisoner. Most self-destructed, following some kind of no-man-taken-alive protocol the Machinist’s programmed into their soldiers—that’s what one of the Republican soldiers told me, anyway. Each one that self-destructed killed at least one or two people. It’s not been the easiest of cleanups, I’m told.”

  “My daughters?”

  “All dead,” Myelic said flatly, as though talking about just one more building that had collapsed. “A few mechanicae dropped onto the Dexannonhold’s spire while you were fighting on the ground level, and entered in through doors on the roof. Your First Traitor fought longest, but the Order Guard rushed down to the first floor to defend you when you stepped outside to face the hordes, leaving her to fight alone.”

  It was just as well. If they died, it meant they had been weak. Mahl only valued the strong. Still, she would miss them.

  “A pity,” was all she said. Later, she would mourn. Not just for their sake, but for Mahl’s. He would need to see that the destruction of her entire family line meant something to her, or else the defilement had no meaning.

  “What about the rest of Phanes?”

  “Honagher is completely lost,” Myelic said, guiding her lady gently along. “The Ascendancy thoroughly destroyed all operations there, and there were few survivors. The rest of the system is well enough, and being secured by Republic ships, as well as ships from something called the Brotherhood of Contrition.”

  “I’ve never heard of them.”

  Myelic looked around, and whispered into Thessa’s ear, “They worship queer goddesses, my lady. They all come from penal colonies, and take oaths to serve their goddesses.”

  “So, they are prisoners who are used to following the orders of women. That is not a bad thing, Myelic.”

  “My thoughts exactly, my lady.”

  Their retinue of followers grew larger as word got out that the High Priestess was awake. They moved as an entourage through the base.

  Still clutching the Item, Thessa looked about at all the aid her planet had received. With Myelic’s support, she walked the lanes of tents. Here and there were a few windowless prefab military habs, with doors that shunted open and closed.

  They heard men and women moaning from behind some of those doors. A few wounded soldiers were sitting shirtless in front of one tent, receiving nanite-infused plasma injections, stem-cell gun treatments for burns, and popping regen capsules.

  “Good lord,” said a man’s voice from behind her. “You look like shit. What’s your secret?”

  Thessa turned slowly and looked at the soldier walking up to her, his helmet removed and held at his side. He had black hair and a balck goatee, and looked barely thirty years old, but that could have been because of regens, which Thessa knew the Republic favored for its wealthy people and for soldiers. He had a coiled golden wyrm on his right glove and chestplate, along with a medal pinned to his left pauldron. His nametag identified him, in bold letters that vaguely resembled the primary alphabet used in Vastill, as MEIKS. The stripes on his left arm showed he was a sergeant.

  The man smiled in a way that seemed too pure, too innocent. Thessa disliked him instantly.

  “Captain Lyokh sent me to check on you. Again. He’ll be glad to know you finally woke up.” Meiks looked around at the supplicants crawling on all fours, at the one presently kissing her toes, at all the people pining for their High Priestess’s attention. He gave them a look that said he thought they were the dumbest people he had ever seen, but was entertained by their stupidity.

  “Is your captain…?” she began, and stopped. The world spun around her for a moment. It was a strain just speaking. “Is he in charge of the entire fleet?”

  “No, just the ground forces. But he would like to speak with you, just as soon as you’re feeling up to it—”

  “Take me now.”

  Meiks blinked.

  Myelic said, “My lady, you should get some rest—”

  “I wish to speak to your captain now, sergeant.”

  WHEN LYOKH WAS a boy, his father played a game with him with building blocks. His father would lay a foundation, and they took turns putting the building blocks in place. Piece by piece, they erected a structure. Sometimes, his father would lay a piece in a strange position, putting the whole thing off-balance, issuing a challenge to Lyokh to follow it up. If he placed a piece wrong, their tower would topple, so he tried to put a block in a place to counter his father’s move, maintaining balance. His father never said it was a competition, but it was. Everything with him had been. So, one piece at a time, their tower grew in strange and sometimes beautiful ways.

  But eventually, the tower toppled, and the person that laid the last piece was the loser. Lyokh imagined that could be a kind of metaphor for life, that we’re all adding one layer after another to the world around us, and the loser was the person who placed the tipping piece.

  Lyokh looked at the compristeel wall that was still being assembled like a god-child’s version of the building blocks game. He stood on Thrallyin’s back, holding tight as Artemis of Artemis piloted the wyrm. They were a thousand feet in the air, soaring over low rooftops, taking a tour of the perimeter. The fab rooms of Lord Ishimoto and the other ships up in orbit were using asteroids from Phanes’s belt to manufacture the giant shield walls, and then shooting them down to the surface. After the pieces crashed through the atmosphere, parachutes slowed them down so the Novas could latch onto them with towing cables and position them on the surface.

  The fortifications were almost complete. Key districts had their walls already erected and their plasma shield emitters had been rated for orbital bombardment, to defend against the Machinist Ascendancy should they return.

  As Lyokh watched another enormous piece lock into place, he wondered at how far they had come. He marveled at how easily the walls appeared to go up. Working in construction, he and his father had toiled for weeks to erect one wall. Here, the whole process of putting up another section was finished in seconds.

  Beneath him, the wyrm undulated slightly, keeping its back as straight as it could rather than arching, so that it did not buck off its passengers. Lyokh held fast to the bars on the Tamer’s chair. Behind him, Takirovanen leaned over the side of the serpent like a daredevil, a harness keeping him latched onto its spinal protrusions. He was alternately staring through his rifle scope and using his visor to scan the rooftops.

  “Anything?” said Lyokh.

  “Negative,” said Takirovanen. “I don’t think we have any more hidden guests.”

  They had been sweeping the area for any sign of remaining stragglers. Some of the Ascendancy troops had gotten off the planet in their carriers, but most had been left behind, either killed, captured, or self-destructed.

  He looked straight ahead, at the next Nova lifting off from Launch Pad Four, atop one of the Eighth Ring pyramids. Another shuttle carrying up the dead. Heeten—what was left of her—had left this planet in just such a way. It always seemed surreal, a
nd yet strangely normal, to be watching such a thing happen after a battle. You knew it could be you in that shuttle, just as easily as anyone else. Could’ve been you, no question. And you thought about the faces of those you knew, even the ones you knew fleetingly. Sometimes especially those.

  He glanced backward, at the massive palace-fortress that loomed over Vastill and cast an enormous bladed shadow over half a hundred districts.

  Lyokh thought back to their last push for the Dexannonhold. He tried to recall its importance, and why he was here in the first place. It was not possible. Not at the moment. He had lost the meaning of it all, like how you lost the meaning of a word after it had been repeated too many times. They call that semantic satiation, he thought, not remembering where he had learned that. So what is it called when you lose purpose?

  I think you call that despair, said a voice inside his head, one rife with gallows humor.

  Lyokh shook it off. Tried not to think too hard about it. Thinking too hard is what caused it. He tried instead to recall what all he had seen once the Dexannonhold’s doors had opened, and part of his mind rejected it outright. The mechanicae floating in air, their bodies stretched and malformed with impossible geometry…and the High Priestess, her hands waving in the air, like a maestro conducting an orchestra.

  A chime sounded in his ear. A message from Meiks.

  Looks like our princess is awake, he thought.

  “Artemis,” he called over the Tamer’s private channel. “Take us back to Base Camp One.”

  “Can do, doyen.”

  Artemis was seated on his chair, but was not visible because his chair was at the dead center of the wyrm and encased inside a windowless compristeel command center, with screens on the inside showing him tactical readouts, weapons checks, and the overall health of his wyrm.

  As Thrallyin dipped back towards the surface, Lyokh felt the tingling from his sphincter up to his spine, and his stomach flip-flopped for a second. The beast came to rest on its preferred perch, the roof of one of the medical habs that, like the prefab wall units, had been sent down from orbit and pieced together by Orphesians and construction drones.

  “Want me to stay on patrol, doyen?” Takirovanen asked.

  “Negative. Come with me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Together, they unstrapped their harnesses and used the tethers to repel down Thrallyin’s side and onto the roof. By the time they had descended the ladder, the wyrm had already spread its wings and taken to the skies again.

  Lyokh and Takirovanen hustled down the lanes between habs. Base Camp One had been built using the corners of two large pyramids, which had miraculously not been touched in the battle, as natural barriers. No part of the street and its buildings had been spared in building the base. The steps that led up to each level of the pyramids were covered in tents where the wounded, both military and civilian, had been taken.

  Vaultimyr had sent down Crescent, Regal, and Talon Wing, and the Brotherhood had sent down every platoon they had brought with them. The lanes were congested with soldiers going to or returning from patrols, bots scuttling off on myriad errands, contrite brothers shuffling their loads of decrepit weapons, and, of course, Vastillians. Too many Vastillians to count were barging into the camp every day, trying to hear word of the High Priestess’s fate. Lyokh would be glad to finally be able to tell those people something about her.

  Approaching the lane where the Command Center rested, Lyokh spotted a woman, walking barefoot, arm-in-arm with one of his soldiers.

  “I’ve seen a lot of that recently,” said Takirovanen. “I wonder when other captains will take notice.”

  Lyokh had noticed it, too. Female Vastillians making themselves friendly with his people. He had discouraged this, but there were two problems with that: the first was that it was logistically impossible to guard all the tents all the time and monitor his men against having unprotected sex with locals, and the second was that, well, almost everyone had surmised what had gone on between him and Heeten.

  If I say something to them about fraternizing, I look like a hypocrite.

  “Spread the word around,” he told Takirovanen. “Say that it makes us all look bad, less professional, like we’re taking advantage of women in their grief. But it can’t come from me. Understand?”

  “Completely. I’ll spread the word.”

  As they stepped up to the Command Center, where Meiks had taken Thessa Zane den Uta, Lyokh spotted the throng of people waiting outside. Vastillians. Hundreds of them, clogging the streets. Lyokh grabbed the nearest soldier he recognized. “Dutrix, grab a couple of guys and push these people back to the end of the street. We can’t have them blocking the lanes, we need these arteries to stay open.”

  “Yes, doyen.”

  “Brother Morkovikson!” Lyokh hollered, spotting the man’s voluminous beard moving down one lane. “You got that medical supply list ready for me?”

  “It will be ready by zero-eight-hundred, Captain,” the Brother Penitent replied.

  “Good man.”

  Lyokh shouldered his way through the crowd huddled around the Command Center. On his way inside, he bumped into Ziir going out. “Doyen,” he said curtly. “I got that recording ready, I managed to isolate the Champion’s words.”

  That’s what they were all calling the mechanicae that had stood at the center of the street and shouted nonsense at Lyokh: The Champion. Ziir had gone through Lyokh’s helmet’s cam footage to find that moment and upload it onto a data packet.

  “I was just about to call you and ask if you wanted me to include it with the update package I’m sending to the Visquain,” Ziir said.

  “Sure, do that,” Lyokh said. “But also, copy me on it. I’d like to listen to it again when I get the chance.”

  “Yes, doyen.”

  Lyokh pushed through the Command Center, passing the fields of screens that were showing surveillance footage coming from all over the city. First Infantry Tactical Intelligence Unit had come down to do what they did best, setting up surveillance infrastructure, patching into the already extant security grid of Vastill, air-traffic cameras and so forth, while networking in the cam footage from the wyrm flocks, Nova shuttles, and skyrake squadrons currently conducting missions acorss this vast city. Vastill spanned hundreds of miles, and Novas were still conducting reconnaissance farther out, reconnecting with units cut off weeks ago, when their drop ships had veered off course and dropped them in random spots. In some of those areas, there were handfuls of mechanicae still fighting or fleeing to the sewers, or into the city’s sublevels, where millions of Vastillians had fled and still refused to come out.

  They fear an occupation force, Lyokh thought. And who can blame them? From their perspective, they probably can’t tell the difference between the invaders and the ones that came to save them from the invaders. It was all just bloody battle and destruction to them.

  He passed by air-traffic control, which was currently occupied with the monumental task of directing all the Novas dropping off the pieces of compristeel wall and making sure they didn’t ram into one another, or get caught in crosswinds, or swing too wide with their wall pieces, or any number of other potentially disastrous events.

  When he came upon High Priestess Zane, she was standing in a private room, shouting at someone he couldn’t see until he stepped inside the room. Meiks was there, holding up his hands in a half defensive, half appeasing gesture. Reyes was there also, as were the High Priestess’s Iniquitous Incarnate, their hideously scarred physiques looking powerful, and the alien Order Guard, who were staring their dead black eyes over at three MPs.

  “—cannot keep me here like some prisoner!”

  “We’re just trying to protect you,” Meiks was saying. “You’ve still got enemies out there, and they must’ve wanted you pretty badly if they were willing to—”

  “I can do to you what I did to them,” the High Priestess promised, the acid in her voice enough to corrode metal. “You saw their bodies? You
saw what power Mahl wields through me?”

  Meiks just stared at her.

  Lyokh stepped into the room, and cleared his throat. “Is there a problem, Sergeant?”

  “Just trying to get the Wardeness here to understand that we’re only trying to keep her safe by keeping her indoors.”

  Lyokh looked at the Zane woman, and she looked back at him. The second her eyes alighted on him, he froze. Something about the eyes…so much like an animal’s. Feral and attentive, while at the same time encapsulating the mad intelligence of a zealot. He knew that look well. Had grown up with it all around him. The eyes of one with supreme and knowing righteousness, who was quick to anger when their ways were contradicted. Also, they were the eyes of a ruler and of privilege. This woman was used to having things her way. And if she possessed some weapon that did all that anatomy-distorting business at the Dexannonhold…well, he both understood why her followers were so devout, and why they feared not giving her everything she demanded.

  Zane’s eyes crawled over him, making their own assessment. She relaxed fractionally, but maintained her haughtiness. Lyokh recognized the change in her. He saw that she saw his rank, his bearing, and the deference everyone else in the room gave him.

  She’s look at me and thinking, “Here’s a man I can deal with.” She sees me as a fellow alpha. Speaking with someone like Meiks makes her feel small. She knows she is destined for greatness, because some idiot told her, and she knows that her time is too valuable for low-level soldiers. Probably she’ll begin to look down on me the second she starts dealing with the Visquain.

  “High Priestess,” he said, walking forward and giving her the slightest bow. It was done out of courtesy, but let her wonder if it was actual deference to her grand self. “I am Captain Aejon Lyokh, and I’m leader of the Republican Ninth Legion’s ground forces. I’m glad to see you’ve recovered your strength. We thank you for your assistance at the Dexannonhold, however it was done. It was magnificent, surely a thing worth mentioning when the Battle of Phanes is laid down in chronicle.”