The navigator plotted the new course and handed it off to helm. Within a minute they’d begun their parabolic arc away from their previous vector.
“THE Daedalus IS changing course to PURSUE.”
What the hell? “That doesn’t make sense,” the Captain said. “If they have us on scope, then why haven’t they decelerated? At this rate they’ll approach us too fast to...”
Holy shit.
“They intend to ram us again,” the navigator said.
“That doesn’t make sense,” the helmsman said. “The relative Vs are too great. If they started a full deceleration right now they would still hit with enough impact to obliterate both ships.”
The Captain reached out and grabbed a chair. Both ships. They weren’t just damned. They were actually suicidal. They intended to destroy both ships. What kind of madness was this? What the hell was going on onboard that ship?
It didn’t matter, though. In old sailing parlance, the Daedalus had the weather gauge. They could force the collision on their terms. The Catherine didn’t have the acceleration to stop it.
***
The rage blazed in Spetzna as his pulser throbbed, accelerating AP/Explosive slugs to supersonic velocities. The rounds exploded on impact, a staccato of glittering flashes pouring all that anger, all that rage, into the Greeks. One of the dirty bastards exploded in front of him, twisting in streamers of crimson gore as the rounds tore through his body. The smell of exploded rounds and pulser ozone penetrated his filters and burned in his nose, tickling the back of his throat. The sound of detonations filled his ears, pulsing in a rhythm of death. Funeral drums, throbbing in his brain in time with his heart.
They fought through a hall, Greeks coming at them from all directions, moving in jerks, then flowing forward, spider-like in the flickering lighting of the battle-damaged hall. It seemed that every Greek in the universe had been waiting outside the secondary bridge.
And he had to kill them. His hands shook with the pain of it, the need. He had to see them all dead, all mutilated, twisted and torn on the deck of the ship. He needed to piss in their mouths and tear at their bodies. He needed to hurt them, to see them suffer, to hear their screams echoing in his ears.
In all these years, it had never been like this. War had been a job. He’d killed with the detachment of a professional, the way a whore screwed. Now he knew the orgasm of slaughter, he knew the joy of pain. He knew what it was like to destroy men utterly for the pure, unadulterated joy of it.
Dear God, what was he thinking?
He almost stopped to vomit as the feelings sank in. Now he shook with horror. Now the weakness in his limbs was that of sickness, not of ecstasy. The demon. He had to find and destroy the demon, because the demon had looked into his soul, and had found a kindred. It had awakened all that was the most twisted and stunted in an already malformed spirit.
It fed off him. He could feel it. It had since he’d arrived. Angry then drained, angry then drained. The demon had skewered him with a tap and now sucked the nectar of his wicked soul, leaving him thin and transparent, like blood in vodka.
He had to keep control. He had to starve it. Pasha had said it, Spetzna was the angriest man alive. A constant buffet on which a demon could sup.
He scanned his troops and realized that he was down to nine. He had to get them out of the kill zone. There were just too many Greeks. In his anger he hadn’t realized where he was or where he’d let his anger lead them, only that they killed on the way. He needed to think.
“Grisha, I need the nearest proscribed area!” he shouted.
The tech specialist nodded. He’d studied the ship schematics earlier and Spetzna could only pray he remembered the big picture. His prayers were answered a moment later when Grisha pointed down the halls. “That way!” he shouted. “The engine room!”
He called out orders and his few remaining troopers ran down the halls. There were fewer troops in that direction, as the taboo of the proscription would be working on the minds of the Greeks, no matter how far they’d fallen. Commandments were one thing, you could repent and redeem yourselves from those. There was no redeeming the sin of breaking a proscription. It was indelible.
He’d already killed all the ones that had armed for a proscribed area. The firing died off as the Greeks hesitated, unwilling to fire down the hall toward their own engine room. They grabbed cover behind rusty pipes and in corners and they dug in. One of them seemed to be screaming for weapons. It would take a few minutes. Spetzna took a last survey of his troops. Five. Valya, Igor, Grisha, Pasha, and a recruit he barely knew named Mira. Pasha couldn’t fight. His jaw and teeth were all kinds of shattered.
They backed down the hall, Mira practically carrying Pasha, their pulsers up but not firing. Not when the Greeks couldn’t fire back. If one of them fired and the Greeks fired back reflexively both would be damned to the darkest pit of hell, their souls tortured for all eternity, with no hope of escape.
They reached the end of the hall, the deck and walls painted brilliant yellow to demark the border between sacred and profane. Spetzna stopped, gasping, his breath tearing in his throat and lungs.
They had pushed him into this. They had murdered and tortured their way up and down the borders and now they had killed almost all of his soldiers. They had to pay. Those dirty bastards had to pay.
He raised his pulser and gazed through the holographic sight, putting the red dot on the head of a Greek. His hand spasmed on the trigger but he couldn’t pull it. He couldn’t fire. He couldn’t fire that last, soul-killing shot.
He forced the pulser back down. He had to beat the anger. He had to figure this out. There was a way to keep control. He just needed to find it.
But how was he going to kill the demon if every act of violence launched him through escalating cascades of rage? Setting aside whether it was even possible to kill it, how could he kill something if the very act was his own downfall? And yet, this thing had been feeding on people all across the border, maybe for all of human history. He had to stop it—it didn’t really matter how.
But control. Be like Valya.
Slowly, he forced himself to lift his pulser over his shoulder and lock it into its peace harness. He stepped back farther onto the painted yellow zone, taking quick glances over his shoulder. And farther. He heard the safeties on the peace harness lock down. He was in the room.
And Igor arched his back and screamed, blood spewing forward out of his chest, dripping from a giant, throbbing cylinder of flesh. He writhed, his face a mask of terror and agony, agony so great it lifted him off the ground, transmuting agony into weightlessness, up and up and up...
No, wait, that cylinder of flesh was a tentacle, coming down from the ceiling, vivisecting him from behind, lifting him into the air before discarding him like so much decaying flesh.
He looked up to the pulsing, viscous mass of glistening flesh, sack-like and spouting tentacles, clinging to the ceiling above the door, smelling of death and rot and grease. It didn’t roar. It didn’t need to. Spetzna’s mind roared for it, in despair, in horror, on the edge of madness.
Mira dragged Pasha away and Grisha and Valya scattered even as the voice spoke behind him. “I’m so glad you could arrive in time. You almost missed my rebirth.”
Spetzna spun, scattering sideways into the room, past the giant engines, the trunk-like fuel lines, the massive consoles. He kept one eye on the demon above him, the Thing That Could Not Be, even as he turned to see the figure behind him, between the engines, dripping pus and reeking of gangrene and shit even from here. A thing that used to be a man, dressed in the robes of a Father Superior. As he watched it, its face cracked and sloughed half off its skull. Through great, seeping wounds on its side, nascent tentacles pushed through befouled and torn cloth.
“I am Icarus,” the thing said. “I am your new god.”
***
Streams of fear and hate poured down palpating lines of psychic energy, grounding on Icarus, fueling the transforma
tion. The hate filled him and beat in his mind and heart, searing through his veins even as his anatomy transformed into something else, but the strongest, the most potent... the most delicious came from this Russian.
They were in the maelstrom now. He could feel the energies out there, fertile and vile, a bed of ecstasy for him to find his apotheosis. A rippling field, ripe and ready to complete his transformation, to turn the unfertilized egg the alien had built out of his body and soul into the zygote of a future god.
“Mother,” he whispered and along that psychic channel, the alien quivered acknowledgment. He was in the maelstrom, the spawning place. He had been torn open and asunder, and he was ready.
That Russian stood across from him even as the other three pulled themselves away from where Icarus’s future mother nested in the ceiling. She had dropped the psychic cloaks now and everyone could see her... Icarus didn’t know if she even could maintain the cloaks while birthing him into something new, while ripping the souls from these pitiful creatures, slurping out their corrupted energies and remaking them into the primal force of creation, of birth/rebirth.
“What is your name, insect?” Icarus/Mother said. “Not that ridiculous Russian name, I don’t have all day. What do they call you?”
“The call me Spetzna,” the soldier said.
“Is that because you’re mentally retarded, Spetzna? Are you that kind of ‘special?’”
“Fuck you,” Speztna growled, and pleasure and food flowed from him and into Icarus.
“Fuck you, Icarus, sir,” Icarus/Mother corrected.
Somewhere, deep inside Icarus, something screamed, half-remembered, in protest. A tiny, insignificant voice cried out that this was not right, that Icarus was a man of God. Icarus crushed that voice with a flicker of his power. Then he turned to one of the soldiers, reached out with his mind, and plucked off her hands.
She screamed, waves of ecstasy quivering their way down his psychic feeders. He writhed in the pleasure of it even as the thing inside him grew and spasmed. The voice cried out louder, and he answered by pulling her legs apart until her hips tore from sockets and her legs snapped.
He hated them, hated his own men, hated even himself, in that pure, delicious emotion that fed upon itself, growing with each surge of emotion. Hate was all he had left now, a casual hate. He’d felt before as if the alien had hated him and his race. Now he understood. Hate was the end, not the means. The hate was everything.
Once they had reproduced by carefully nurturing their energies over centuries, by building nests of enslaved animal biomass and turning them into unfertilized eggs. Once they had been creatures on the brink of extinction, having killed off their own most fertile members for food, an evolutionary dead end. Then they had branched out into the stars and found life, and procreation had never been the same again.
Spetzna screamed as the woman died. Had all that ecstasy happened in a split second? Was his life so full to over brimming now that he could barely judge time anymore? He flicked his attention out, smashing Spetzna into the wall using only his will... that power that the alien couldn’t use without him and that he couldn’t use without the alien. With another flicker, he tossed the woman to Mother. Mother needed to eat too, if this were to work.
“This is what it means to become a god,” Icarus/Mother said. “You think you understand sex? You don’t begin to understand the first thing about true procreation, about splitting yourself off into a you that is not you. Your pitiful grunting fluid exchanges are nothing compared to the act of transforming into a god.”
The other woman and man tried to charge in from either side and he batted them away. There was a third man, too injured to fight. Their pain fed his rage.
“By tomorrow, I will have become. The deaths of all of these people will fuel my ascension. I will rise from this rotting form and I will blaze anew.”
With that he crushed the woman and the still-functioning man, teasing out waves of pain and energy in orgasmic waves of pleasure. He would have taunted Spetzna some more, but that one was Mother’s now. She would need his pure, orgasmic, incomparable rage.
***
Captain Grigory Petrovich Romanov stood on the bridge of his ship. The pressure of the pursuit lay heavy on the bridge, a psychological oppression that made the tech serfs afraid to speak. The Captain didn’t break the hush. He felt it too.
“Status?” he whispered.
“THEY HAVE cut THEIR drives as WELL,” the sensor operator said. “WE are both SUBlight now.”
The maelstrom had been caused by the death of no less than seven different ships, probably in the days before the Collapse, before the proscriptions. The Catherine the Great had sailed into some of the densest debris and used their grapple fields to gather and throw off a cloud of chaff around them. The Daedalus seemed to have lost them for the moment. That was good. How long would the Daedalus search before giving up? It was in sensor range now, it just didn’t have a lock. Still, it had to know approximately where they were. They hadn’t moved much since it last knew their position.
At least here, he had the advantage. This was the last place the Greeks would want to be, with all their priests blind.
He wasn’t supposed to be able to feel the maelstrom. He wasn’t a man of God, and yet he could feel something out there. A tickle in his mind. Hatred and joy? He shook his head. He was letting his imagination get away from him. There was nothing out there but the ship. That was what he felt. The crew of the Daedalus was crazy beyond reason, willing to kill both of them and destroy their ships. Unspeakable evil. Incomprehensible evil. It was no wonder it ate at his nerves.
“CAPTAIN!” The shout shattered the tension on the bridge.
“What?”
“It changed course,” the Sensor Operator said. “IT’S found us again.”
***
Firearms were proscribed in this, the most holy room of the ship, but that didn’t leave Spetzna unarmed. As he leapt to one side out of the reach of the tentacled horror, he pulled his axe from his back. The pole swung out, the 45cm serrated circular blade spinning free until he hit the activation stud and the blade turned into a whirling circular saw.
The demon’s next tentacle met with the blade of his power axe, slicing away and spraying a sticky brown fluid. Spetzna whirled the blade over his head, catching the next tentacle as it launched in, lopping it off as well, trying to keep track of Icarus in his peripheral vision even as he fought the demon.
The demon withdrew a moment, but Spetzna wasn’t going to let this son of a bitch have a moment. He leapt in, hacking at the abomination, slashing and whirling, his spittle frothing on his mouth. This thing would pay. It would pay.
No. He had to keep control. He had to calm down. He was just feeding the creature, making it stronger. Every beat of anger in his temple, ever pulse in his neck was just another morsel for this... thing. More food for the unholy. He could see it grow stronger with each pulse. He didn’t know if it was the strength of his anger or his proximity, but he could see every pulse of rage echoed in its repulsive, pulsing form.
Calm, reserve.
But all the killing. All the killing led up to this. Countless men and women, occasionally children. Their faces danced in front of him, mocking. They wouldn’t let this thing live. Spetzna had taken their lives and now they demanded blood. He couldn’t give them his own.
He hacked and leapt and now the thing skittered away from him, but it didn’t try to stop him. Of course not. He was feeding it. It needed him to lose control.
This thing was the embodiment of every act of evil he had ever done. It forced people to kill, just like he had been forced to kill. It destroyed lives just as he had destroyed lives. It was evil. It was pitiful. It was a mewling, unspeakable thing, unfit to live, to breathe. It was a sacrilege, a cry against all that was holy. It was sinful and low and must be stopped. It didn’t deserve to have a happy life, to have a wife and children. It didn’t deserve to serve out its term and retire. It had to keep
killing, because that was what one did. That was duty and honor. That was the call one made when given the choice between serving the church and turning away. This abomination had probably seen so many people die on its watch, so many people it couldn’t save, that it chose not to save. People that would have survived if they didn’t hit the inconvenient chokepoint on a battle map somewhere. This thing should just lay down and die but it didn’t dare lay down and die because that was an even greater sin, so it just kept slipping farther and farther down the path to hell and he couldn’t get out and killing him would be a goddamn courtesy.
No. No. What the hell was wrong with him? He was just feeding it. The damn thing was trying to have a damn Satan baby right here in this room and he was feeding it. He had to get control, he had to get control or it would win.
In his heart, he’d always hated violence. This was the opportunity, his chance to win a war without fighting. This was his chance to finally be the man he’d always wanted to be.
He lowered the power axe.
The alien stopped running, its bulbous, amorphous organ-sack of a body pulsing in the light, wet like leeches full of blood. It seemed to consider him a moment, then Icarus spoke, or the demon spoke through him, Spetzna wasn’t sure. “So, you’ve stopped fighting.”
A wave of energy picked him up and smashed him against the wall, knocking the wind out of him and rattling his armor, his gut lurching. He collapsed to the floor, scrambling for his axe. That son of a bitch. He started to get to his feet to make it pay when he noticed Icarus writhing in ecstasy. Stop it. Get control. You might be the angriest man alive but you don’t lose control. You are control. Valya is dead, but she is your example. You are the epitome of careful action. This is not you, Mikail Vladomirovich Vetrov. You can beat this thing. You can starve it.
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