by Chad Huskins
The XO relayed the order.
Thirteen seconds later, seven Canis Majoris-class ships stabbed out of the darkness, and approached from the broodlings’ flanks. The broodlings engaged with plasma and particle-beam weapons, their tentacles lashing out at the Grennal ships like they meant to eat them. Probably did. Just as they engaged, though, Task Force Two made their presence known. Led by Vaultimyr, with its greatwyrm’s wings extended for full cover, they took the broodlings head-on.
“Now, Captain Trepp,” said Desh, his voice calm but his eyes blazing with avarice.
Just as the broodlings were nearing the Isoshi ships—which had been their main target, of course—Miss Persephone came crashing through the planet’s immense gas rings right under them. Trepp did not cut power, did not slow down. Hell, she didn’t even utter an acknowledgement of her orders received. Persephone had lain in wait, using a supermassive static-damping stealth technology developed by the Grennal, and integrated into six of the Republic’s ships two months ago. Now, she came up and at an angle to the lead broodling, scraping its hull and leaving behind a trail of plasma mines, also of Grennal origin, all of which detonated as the Grennal ships simultaneously opened fire. A massive Brood tentacle reached out to Persephone, narrowly missed.
Task Force Two opened up with a salvo of fresh weapons from the manufacturing plants, which were sitting on protoplanets in the Oort cloud and being closely guarded by Grennal warships.
The Isoshi ships turned on the broodlings, as well, as did the Faedyan ship, which, while being dead, had been secretly outfitted by the Grennal with a Pacifier-style weapon, with a yield four times higher that Lord Ishimoto’s own particle-beam weapon.
Kalder watched as the lead broodling was destroyed within minutes! It was the fastest defeat of a Brood ship so far!
Cheers went up, but were quickly doused when the other broodlings moved in, and Desh screamed at his people not to count their chickens just yet. And none too soon, for the klaxons sounded as an energy surge was detected. One of the broodlings was targeting them from hundreds of miles away.
“Particle beam fire imminent!” someone from the crew pit shouted.
“Plasma shield up!” Desh called.
Two seconds later, all the stars vanished, and they were cast into darkness. All sensors went dark, they couldn’t tell what was going on outside of their bubble. Lord Ishimoto shuddered as the massive energy beam splashed over her perfectly dark shield. When the shuddering ceased, Desh ordered evasive maneuvers before lowering the shield.
Thus began the latest in organized, multifaceted plans against the Brood. The battle waged on, with some wins and one terrible loss—an Isoshi ship, its reactor somehow struck dead on, was vaporized in its own explosion. The resulting radiation threw all other coalition ships’ sensors out of whack, and the battle nearly turned into a rout. But Desh remained calm, he communicated swiftly with the xeno captains, all while Kalder sat at the back of CIC, watching the viewscreens and the tac display.
More than once, he tempted fate, putting his own body and sanity at risk by tapping into powers he little understood. He opened himself up to these dangerous avenues, to those threads just beneath the surface of the universe, to zero-point energy.
One broodling’s tentacles seemed to bend unnaturally against itself, and then explode. No one in CIC understood why this had happened, they only cheered when it created the small opening that Vaultimyr had needed with her Pacifier.
XO Vosen glanced over at him once, and commented, “Senator, your nose is bleeding.”
“It’s nothing, Mister Vosen,” he said, wiping it away absentmindedly. “Please, keep your mind on the battle where it belongs.”
IT CONTINUED LIKE this, a battle across planets that stretched them thin. Retreats and regroupings were a normal part of the struggle. The war was like an organism, gaining in size and going through growing pains, uncertainties, identity crises, all of which stirred a mind to violence even more.
On the day Meringulf was destroyed, Kalder watched from Lord Ishimoto’s observation deck, barely able to stand as his feeble body attached itself, parasite-like, to the force of zero-point energy, which helped him compel the molecules of one patch of a broodling’s hull to turn against itself, liquefying, and peeling away into the darkness, creating the opening that an assault force of Knights exploited. A suicide mission was conducted by two Knight-bearing Novas, and they detonated Grennal bombs in the broodling’s guts with a yield that surpassed any other sentient-made explosion in history.
No one would ever know that Kalder had used his power to create the opening. No one would ever know just how much that use of power had weakened his body.
Julian was by Kalder’s side, not understanding what his mentor was putting himself through.
KALDER SAT, HIS eyes weeping tears of blood, as the cams were set around him, placed in just a certain order to get a look at all angles of his face. Dolstoy stood to one side, reminding him of all the questions the journalists were likely to ask. When she saw the crimson tears, she winced. Julian was right by his side, by now used to his mentor’s bloody weeping, even if he didn’t understand it was due to the expenditure of his self and a connection to a power that might as well have been brought down from the Divine.
Lord Ishimoto was parked far, far outside of Taka-Renault’s Oort cloud, surrounded by a host of Grennal and Faedyan ships. Kalder’s appearance was being broadcast across the galaxy by QEC, and two fairly popular journalists were looking at him, asking questions about the war effort, about how far he had pushed himself and others. They grilled him about his choice to go into Taka-Renault without adequate backup, yet also found room to praise him for the assemblage of so many different races. He was asked how this conflicted with his hardline stance against all corpus alienum.
Kalder didn’t even remember how he answered. One moment he was staring at the holograms of his interviewers, his accusers, and the next he was in his bunk, being attended by Julian and a ship’s steward—Kalder had come to believe that Julian and the male steward had become intimate with one another, though he would never pry.
When he slept, a single night seemed like years. His dreams were a tortured landscape of half-seen terrors, nauseating stirrings, and the constant sense of falling. One morning he awoke to hear that the body of a yeoman had been found outside his room, his guts exploded, his brain melted to fluid that leaked from his nose. It scared everyone. Desh thought this was the first sign of a new Brood weapon, some kind of disease that had gotten aboard their ship. He even ordered a temporary quarantine. But Kalder understood it had merely been his unconscious mind tapping into zero-point energy while he slept. He had been using it a lot lately, and was coming to fear his own reflection. The dead yeoman had just been unlucky enough to walk by Kalder’s quarters that night. A pity.
ONE EVENING, KALDER awoke, fully naked, and standing on the bridge of the ship. No one saw him, but he knew he was there. It wasn’t a dream. He saw Desh and the others moving about, performing tactical maneuvers. He closed his eyes, and awoke again in his bunk. He knew he had traveled, but how?
In his dreams, he started to see something. Something large and serpentine. A monster. It was always coming, always on its way towards him, with jaws as large as a small moon. He remembered the dreams that Lyokh had reported to his shrink, and wondered if this was that.
I am coming, a voice said to him, deep and resonant. I haven’t forgotten.
Kalder knew these visitations were his own fault. He was messing with forces he knew little about, and he worried it would begin to endanger the fleet.
AND YET HE pressed himself more, tapping into powers he had been terrified of for most of his long life. Blasphemous uses of power, he was sure the Buddha man would say. And yet, humanity was going through the dukkha. The suffering. And so must Holace Kalder suffer, he told himself repeatedly. To better understand that suffering, he must endure it himself. What sort of a leader would he be if he did not share it?
One day, while Lord Ishimoto had been sent in to help resupply ships around Deirdra, Kalder stood alone on the observation deck, bleeding from every orifice in his body, one of his eyes bulging halfway out of its socket, expending himself while he stared hatefully at a single broodling that was tearing apart the Brotherhood ship Divine Influence.
All the other ships had taken on a tactic of looping around the Watchtower’s Safe Zone in tight parabolas, attacking in the open and then retreating behind the Watchtower, over and over again. It had worked for a while, but now the broodlings were maneuvering in cleverer ways, adapting, and the tide was turning back against the coalition forces.
“Behold the power of the only gods that matter!” he said through bloodied spittle that frothed at his mouth. “Behold the supreme reach of the Strangers!”
In front of him, a broodling exploded, seemingly at random. Throughout the ship, he heard the surprised cheers of a beleaguered crew. Kalder collapsed, and did not wake up for several days, when he stared into Julian’s worried face and babbled, clutching at his apprentice’s robes, saying, “Don’t…don’t let them leave me again…not stranded…I cannot take it again! I cannot endure it…”
DAYS ROLLED INTO weeks, rolled into months, and before he knew it another full year had passed. Kalder had watched tens of thousands of men die, had seen more alien ships get caught up in the potential defeat of the Brood, and had witnessed even more destruction from fallout clouds on Deirdra. Reports said that nearly a billion were now dead. Was it finally time to cut their losses and flee?
The dreams of the large serpent never left him. Sometimes they even plagued him while he was awake, and whenever they did, there was always the voice. I am coming. I remember my promise. Just hang on. Survive until I get there.
Who was this voice? Survive? How?
Kalder didn’t even know how he’d done it this long, but somehow he’d managed to get Pennick to keep fighting his battles back on Monarch, probably because Pennick felt they were too deeply in this together now, and he really wanted Kalder’s endorsement for Imperator when the time came, just like he promised. And if they won this thing…if they actually managed to defeat all the Brood forces amassed around Taka-Renault, then there was going to be a lot of praise for all those who supported the system’s defense, and Faith 6A was going to shine favorably on any politician remotely connected to such a rallying point for all sentient races.
But if they failed…
Kalder was in his office, having just wrapped up another tedious conference call, when Julian came bustling into the room, handing him a printout on slinkplast. “From PI, sir!”
Kalder took it at once, read over it three times to make sure he had interpreted it correctly, then looked up at Julian, who was grinning ear to ear. “They did it?”
“They did it, sir.”
The relief that flooded through him almost brought sobs. He still had a stoic reputation to maintain, and self-dignity, but this…The Isoshi and PI really worked it out. My god…my god…
He looked at the calendar on his eyescreen. More than two years had passed since they started this war. Two years of constantly battering a seemingly unbeatable foe. And all the while, the worldship had remained hovering squarely above Deirdra, trying to crack the Watchtower’s egg, its shield weakening every day. And the coalition ships that hid within the Watchtower’s Safe Zone had seen their numbers dwindle week by week.
And aboard the worldship, perhaps only six or seven hours had passed. Kalder had not received many updates from them, just enough to know they weren’t dead, and that they were still broadcasting the Tablet’s readings. He couldn’t even imagine what a tortured, hellish seven hours it had been for them.
: The Worldship
Thessa’s resolve had never been so tested. Each time she fell, she considered staying down. Her muscles were tight and burning with acid between each fiber. Her body had been wracked by the rapture of Mahl’s power, and her mind was pushed to the brink of madness with each passing hour. Her VPMCs were down to just twenty-seven. One of them had dashed into the enemy screaming, tearing off his helmet and defiling his own face with a combat knife to show how glad he was of defilement.
The Brood hadn’t cared. The Brood showed no interest or fear of anything they did. The Brood just kept coming in all its shapes, all its sizes.
Thessa wept crimson tears as she felt herself connected to an indescribable power, a thing so fundamental to the universe that she believed she was being shown divinity. Kalder had called it zero-point energy, the foundational energy of every particle of matter in the universe. Thessa’s father had believed it to be the defiling grace of Mahl. Thessa believed those two things needn’t be mutually exclusive.
The ground beneath her quaked, partly from the enemy’s works, partly from her own exertions. As each wave of machine-things raced at her, she pulled at their insides, warped them, made their chiton exterior their chiton interior, and their fleshy-wire guts became their outsides. In most cases, the transition caused them to pop like pimples, and mucus and viscera slipped from her helmet and obscured her visor. The creatures seemed to understand that she was a greater threat than any other single person, and they attacked her with single-minded ferocity. Her loyal Marines threw themselves between her and the enemy, using rifles and plasma arcs to carve their own way through enemies.
And Thessa laughed. She laughed in Mahl’s face, knowing it would enrage him, knowing it would make him test her more, and a supernova of orgasmic energy sang through every pore of her as she gestured towards a twenty-foot-tall arachnid-machine, and transformed its many legs into unholy parodies. The thing squealed—it might’ve only been the squeal of metal and gears in protest, but Thessa delighted herself in imagining its pain.
Behind her somewhere, Commander Meiks was screaming “The wall!” as Captain Lyokh tore into another centipede beside him with his field sword.
The Knights of Sol had made a formidable wall around the Giant Egg, protecting the woman called Lerwin as she kept the broadcast of Captain Lyokh’s strange Tablet going. Thessa suspected the Tablet was another Item of Power, and under any other circumstances would have devised to take it for herself. But now was the time for Mahl’s wrath, and she unleashed it with every breath she could muster.
Overhead, a hole had been blasted into the ceiling by multiple incendiary shots from Prophet, and a few downed aircraft had smashed into it, making the hole wider. The war blazed from above and below, and all around them.
Suddenly, the ground split beneath them, parting just long enough for a whole host of drones to come spilling out like maggots from a festering wound. Everyone was flung to one side, including Thessa, who scrambled back to her feet and connected with every drone for a hundred yards, and caused them to burst like blisters. Her Marines fired into what was left, the Knights of Sol poured their hateful bullets into the stragglers, and the Brotherhood of Contrition pulled what survivors they could to safety while the warhulks covered their retreat.
“THE WALL!” the Knights cried, just as a Nova swept in through the hole above and dropped off a couple of ammo hoppers. Lyokh shouted at men to recover them and bring them over to the warhulks on the front line. He was an effective leader, a good man to have around in pitched battle.
A particle beam cut through the air, coming from somewhere amid the enemy throng. Thessa and her people took cover behind a compristeel shield wall, and peeked over the top to see the last remaining Mantis go crawling over the enemy, firing down into them at point-blank range with its railgun-head.
Another convulsion of the ground sent Thessa back on her ass. A Marine helped her stand, asking, “Are you all right, my lady?”
“Victory is within reach,” she hissed, eyes wild and a grin splitting her face. “We have but to seize it! Mahl has shown us!”
“MAHL HAS SHOWN US!” they cried in unison.
“If Mahl gets us outta this,” said Meiks from behind her, targeting another drone, “I
’ll give him a rim job he’ll never forget!”
“Mahl hears your promise, and he holds you to it,” she said, her nose spewing blood like a faucet as she targeted another group of drones.
LYOKH FINISHED THRASHING the four-armed drone to the ground and then fell back, letting his friends cover his retreat to the shield wall they had erected. As soon as he was behind it, he dropped to his knees and waved Morkovikson over. The Brother Penitent leapt to his side, and they went through the same ritual they had repeated for the last seven hours now. Morkovikson opened a side compartment of his STACsuit, exposing the suit’s compristeel-protected lung, and detached his hose to connect it to Lyokh’s own lung.
Lyokh breathed in the fresh air, and felt the sweet, sweet reprieve, however temporary, as his suit’s internal pressurization leveled out. “Thanks, but you can’t keep coming to my rescue like this.”
“I can and I will,” said Morkovikson. “Recall, you are better than me, and I’m a lesser being—”
“Shut the fuck up, I don’t care what you did in another life. I need you alive and fighting and healing these people.” Lyokh cast about, his eyes alighting on four dead men. The problem with the dead in this kind of battle was that when they died they tended to go in spectacular fashion, destroying even their life-support systems, making it difficult for Lyokh to salvage the parts he needed to keep his own suit going.
It wouldn’t matter much, anyway, he thought.
Indeed, for it turned out his suit’s damage was more extensive than he’d originally thought—it wasn’t just his helmet, but part of his gorget, too, and some place he couldn’t find around his armpit. To prevent total atmo loss, he’d have to strip almost naked and replace his entire suit, something he just didn’t have time for, not in the froth of battle.