by Jacob Holo
Jack formed his chaos sword and slashed into the whip. It went taut and then broke off, the severed end evaporating into a mist of dark particles.
“Tesset, let’s take her out!” Jack said. “I’ll support you!”
“Understood!”
Jack angled his wings and flew straight at Othaniel. Briefly, he saw Seth and Riviel squaring off, lance clashing against broadsword. Knight Squadron poured heavy salvos into his foe.
Jack closed in as Othaniel gathered energy for another attack. Suddenly, she jerked her head to the side, focusing on something behind him. With an outstretched arm, she sent a whip speeding pasting him.
The ribbon of dark energy snaked through space, searching strangely before it collided with Tesset’s hidden seraph. The whip coiled around an unseen arm and leg before her stealth field collapsed.
“Jack, help!” Tesset cried, her rail-carbine floating away, split in two with an antimatter grenade affixed to the barrel’s end.
Jack cut through the whip, but Othaniel created another one and sent it curving around him, heading for Tesset. He reached out and grabbed hold. Sparks showered out of his palm. He clenched his fist and stopped it completely, barely aware of the burning pain in his hand.
“Listen here, Disciple,” Jack said. “You don’t get to play with the others. Not until you’ve dealt with me.”
With a sharp twist of his wrist, he snapped the whip in two. Both ends vanished into black smoke.
Othaniel backed away.
Jack spread his wings and rushed her. Othaniel raised her hands, forming a black triangle of coherent energy between them.
Jack slammed his sword into the triangle, and it bent inward, weakening, deforming, and finally breaking. He followed through, striking Othaniel’s raised forearm but rebounding off the brass armguard.
“Tricks like that won’t save you!” Jack raised his sword for another strike.
“Get out of the way!” Tesset shouted.
Jack reversed his wings’ thrust and pulled sharply back. Tesset’s mnemonic bandolier flew past him, still carrying four antimatter grenades. The bandolier caught against Othaniel’s previously injured arm, looped around, and locked on tightly.
The antimatter grenades exploded in a titanic flash. Othaniel’s right arm and part of her torso vaporized, and she flew back and struck the spire wall, cracking against it.
Searing heat rushed outwards, filling the space with white light. Nearby lattice structures melted away under the antimatter inferno.
But as powerful as the attack was, Othaniel’s seraph stood up from it almost immediately. She spread her lithe, flexible wings and took off. At first, Jack thought she was about to engage him again, but she turned and fled past the explosion-deformed spire. Riviel retreated with her.
“They’re heading for the others,” Jack said.
“Follow them!” Seth flared his wings and sped after the enemy seraphs. Jack and Knight Squadron formed up behind him. They wove a path through the artifact’s interior, climbing now towards the surface.
Far above them, Jack saw a huge opening into space, its edges warped inward. A spire rose up beside it, disappearing high into a black sky punctuated by explosions and crisscrossing fusion beams.
Another seraph, larger than the other two, flew through the opening with a portal lance in its hand and sped up the spire. Two thrones followed it: one white, the other black.
“That seraph has Veketon’s portal lance!” Jack said.
“Ignore it,” Seth said. “We’re going after Veketon!”
The two thrones climbed after the third Disciple seraph, and Jack noted their severe battle damage. Quennin’s had born the worst, with regenerating holes in the torso, a missing arm, and cracks in her primary halo-wing. By contrast, Veketon had only a few gouged in his armor, but they looked deep.
The other two Disciples flew out of the artifact, their sparse brass armor gleaming in the sunlight.
“We’re almost to the surface!” Seth said. “Get ready!”
Alliance seraphs rushed into the open, the smooth white surface of the artifact forming a horizon. Disciple seraphs and pursuing thrones closed on the spire’s peak.
Jack and Seth pulled into the lead.
High above them, Othaniel broke from the group. She flew out towards a formation of Fellerossi warships, formed an energy whip with her only remaining arm, and lashed out. It scythed through two dreadnoughts and a negator before she pulled it back.
The last Fellerossi negator field crashed.
The Disciple negator fields blipped off, and the Disciples vanished in three quick fold points before the fields slammed back on. Only Veketon and Quennin remained, and they were both hurting.
Jack grinned wolfishly. This was it.
Veketon and Quennin couldn’t run, not with Disciple negator fields disabling their fold engines. They were both wounded, and the Alliance seraphs were nearly at full battle strength. It wouldn’t be easy. Taking down thrones never was, but they were here, finally, at the end of their journey.
The two traitors obviously knew this, and they fled towards the greatest concentration of their fleet’s power.
Jack readied his chaos sword and shield. The Alliance seraphs flew up along the artifact spire.
“Knight Squadron, close the distance!” Jared shouted. “We’ll focus on Quennin first! She’s more wounded! Take her down, then shift fire to Veketon!”
“Hold it, Jared!” Seth said. “We need to—”
“New contacts exiting to our right!” Yonu said. “Massive fold signatures!”
“Uh oh,” Jared said. “That’s the Ascendant, and it looks like it brought friends!”
A huge concentration of fold points expanded outward into space as eighty frigates, twenty-nine dreadnoughts, and the command ship Vengeful Ascendant entered the system in a tight spherical formation. Reflective armor shone brightly as they brought their weaponry to bear on the Alliance squadron.
“Break formation!” Seth shouted.
Over one hundred fusion beams slashed through space as lambent white lines. Plasma sleeted onto the Alliance formation, smashing against barriers and sending seraphs tumbling wildly through space. A second later, the Vengeful Ascendant fired its main weapon.
The apocalypse cannon measured five kilometers long and took up half the Ascendant’s internal space with its thick mnemonic plating and massive gravitic field generators. Within the depths of the command ship, matter and antimatter collided, and powerful gravitic fields channeled the released energy into a coherent beam of purest white fury.
It pierced through space next to the spire, and the beam’s nimbus struck Yonu’s disoriented seraph. Her chaos barrier shimmered brilliantly, instinctively closing around her seraph as her conformal weapon pods vaporized. Armor melted and dripped away as her barrier shrank in closer, weakening and retracting. She had fractions of a second to live.
Jack flared his wings and dashed in. He skirted the beam’s nimbus, his own barrier crackling, and crashed into Yonu. The force of the collision pushed both of them clear of the beam, but she was still disoriented. Jack looped an arm around her waist, angled his wings, and arced back around. He landed on the far side of the spire, putting it between them and the Fellerossi reinforcements.
“You okay, Yonu?” he asked.
“Ouch…” she moaned painfully.
“Right. You’re alive. That’s good.”
“Jack, look out!” Seth shouted.
The antimatter beam tracked towards him like an implacable column of energy.
“Damn it!”
The beam struck the spire in a blast of energy and glowing debris. It bored through the entire width, through a full kilometer of Keeper stone without deflecting or even weakening.
Jack curved away as the beam sliced past him. The spire’s top, an obelisk ten kilometers tall and one kilometer thick, broke off, its molten edges glowing orange. The Alliance seraphs ducked behind the spire fragment as a second wave o
f fusion beams targeted them.
“Yonu, are you okay?” Seth asked.
“Still alive, thanks to Jack,” Yonu said. “My weapons are gone, though.”
“Better them than you,” Seth said.
Fusion beams hammered the spire fragment and splashed off in arcs of light. The seraphs huddled together on the far side.
“Veketon has swung around and joined up with the Ascendant,” Jared said. “Fellerossi ships are quickly targeting down the remaining Disciple negators. I read two left that are still functional. Seth, we’re running out of time. We either rush them now or we lose this opportunity.”
“Then let’s get moving before they can escape,” Jack said.
“Hold on,” Seth said quietly. “Those Disciple seraphs… Something is going on here, and we don’t know what it is.”
“Both thrones are wounded,” Jared said. “This is the best chance we’ve ever had.”
“Not all of us will survive the attack,” Tesset said.
“This is what we volunteered for.” Jared handed his rail-rifle to Yonu and retrieved his chaos sword. “Sir, your orders?”
Seth was silent for long seconds. On the other side of the spire fragment, the fusion onslaught continued unabated. But the Ascendant had yet to fire its second shot, perhaps waiting for the seraphs to approach in the open. Boring through the fragment would take only microseconds, but that was all the time a seraph needed.
“The presence of these Disciples complicates matters,” Seth said finally. “We need to preserve our strength and figure out what is going on.” He held the portal lance out to his side. A point of white light formed, opening up into a wide disc. “All seraphs fall back to the Judgment.”
Jack held his tongue. He knew this wasn’t the whole reason.
“Sir, we can still do this,” Jared said.
“I’ve made my decision.”
“Very well, sir.” Jared extinguished his sword and docked it against his wing cluster. “All right. The debate’s over. Everyone in.” He led Knight Squadron into the intra-gate, and Tesset followed them through.
Jack lingered behind.
“Seth, we’re here to kill Veketon,” he said.
“I am well aware of that.”
“Not to fight these Disciples or find ways to minimize our own losses, and certainly not to save Quennin. I’m sure you remember that.”
Seth nodded gravely. “You’re as perceptive as ever, but I was speaking the truth. The Disciples represent a dangerous unknown. They have seraphs that seem almost like thrones. They have Ziggurat weapons, and they know of and oppose the Keepers. We need to understand what all of this means.”
“Those reasons are all fine and good, but I know better. If we attacked now, Quennin would be dead. Jared and Yonu would have seen to that. Both of them lost family to her, and we both heard Jared order Knight Squadron to kill Quennin first. I know you mean well. I know you want to kill Veketon without killing Quennin, but she can’t be redeemed. It’s dangerous to believe in a false hope like that.”
The channel was silent as the shower of fusion plasma ate away at the spire fragment, turning one side into glowing molten ruin.
“Your insight is welcome as always,” Seth said sadly. “But my beliefs are my own concern. And my own burden.”
Seth terminated the channel.
Jack sighed wearily and thought, One of these days, your honor is going to get us both killed.
He rushed through the intra-gate.
Chapter 11
Alone
Onboard the Vengeful Ascendant, Veketon’s battered throne rose from the catapult pit and came to rest in the throne bay. A scaffold unfolded from the ledge, building itself piece by piece until it met the torso cockpit. Veketon pushed himself out of the pilot alcove and hurried onto the scaffold’s lift.
To his left, two gravity cranes pulled Quennin’s throne up by shoulders. It hung limply in the bay, its primary halo-wing cracked in three places and turning in slow revolutions. Fluid dripped from the torso and broken remains of its right arm. A medical team of six Fellerossi doctors rode a second scaffold up to her cockpit.
Veketon ripped his slipsuit helmet off and tossed it angrily aside. He didn’t bother waiting for his lift to reach the ground. Instead, he jumped down the last two stories and ran across the bay to Quennin’s throne. Startled technicians cleared a path for him.
The medical team gently placed Quennin on a gravity pallet and brought her down. Veketon slowed to a jog, then stopped next to the scaffold. When their lift reached the bottom, they guided the pallet to a specialized medical ward adjacent to the throne bays. Both he and Quennin were far too frail for Outcast surgery.
A hologram coalesced next to him, forming into a scrawny man in black and orange robes.
Fuurion bowed. “Venerable master, there are matters which require—”
“It will wait.” Veketon stared into the clean white interior of the medical ward. Doctors cut Quennin’s slipsuit off and replaced it with heavy nano-cilia bands. Flakes of burnt flesh soon dusted the doctors and their equipment.
“Venerable master, your attention is req—”
“I said it will wait!”
“I… yes. Yes, it will wait.”
Fuurion bowed and vanished.
Veketon stepped through the medical ward’s transparent double doors, feeling a slight tingle on his skin from the active sterilization fields. He walked up to the doctors surrounding Quennin. The nano-cilia bands resembled thick white rubber wrapped tightly around Quennin’s abdomen and right arm. One of the doctors ran a small handheld sanitizer over her body, picking up the traces of blood spackled over her. When he was done, a second doctor threw a clean white sheet over Quennin’s half-naked chest.
The doctors stood aside, forming a row of orange cleansuits.
“Is she stable?” Veketon asked.
The senior doctor, notable by the black diagonal markings across her chest, stepped forward and bowed. “Yes, venerable master. We reached her in time. The repairs will take several hours, though, and she requires rest.”
“Good. Leave us.”
“At once, venerable master.”
When the doctors had left, he knelt beside Quennin. He found her hand and grasped it tightly between his.
“Hey,” he said.
She smiled weakly. “Hey.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’m floating on air. They gave me something for the pain.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Veketon brushed a few locks of her long red hair aside and rested his hand on her forehead.
“Vek, I’m sorry. I should have been more cautious.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“But it’s true. I was careless. I shouldn’t have been caught off guard like that.”
“We both underestimated them.”
“But, Vek, you… you lost the portal lance because of me. I can’t help thinking that…”
Veketon shook his head. “You’re not to blame. It was my idea to challenge his obvious trap.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“Perhaps. Is it working?”
“A little.”
“Quennin, losing the lance is a colossal failure. My failure. But the lance…”
“Yeah, Vek?”
“The lance is… it’s just a thing. It’s important, yes, but it’s ultimately just a thing. I can bear losing it. I… I don’t think I could bear losing you.”
He waited for a response, but didn’t get a one besides a slight, tired grin on her face. She looked up at him in a way that said: Keep going. You’re doing really well. Don’t let me stop you.
“I guess I finally realized this,” he said. “Even if I achieve all my ambitions, there’s no point if you aren’t there to share in the moment. Am I making sense?”
“Yeah, Vek. Perfect sense.”
Her trembling hand squeezed his weakly. He squeezed back.
“Vek, why do you think Seth didn’t attack?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. They would have killed us had they attacked. We would have taken some of them with us, perhaps most of them, but they would have succeeded in killing us.”
Quennin gazed absently at the ceiling, and Veketon wondered what she was thinking about. Or rather, who she was thinking of. He had a good idea.
“I should be going,” he said. “Try to sleep. Regain your strength. I’ll be back soon.”
Quennin refused to let go of his hand. “Vek, don’t leave yet.”
“Of course. I was— I just thought you might want to rest now. No, I’m not going anywhere.”
“I saw some of Vierj’s memories again.”
“I know.”
“It’s never happened like that before. When I’m awake, I mean. It frightened me.”
“The proximity of her children must have brought it on,” Veketon said. “It is a price you and I pay for our gifts, though I admit, you pay more often than I do.”
“It was terrifying. It was like I didn’t have control over my emotions. This deep and foreign sense of betrayal just came out of nowhere and eclipsed everything else.”
Veketon stroked her forehead softly. “Don’t worry. If these visions persist, I’ll look into ways to suppress them. I won’t let you suffer.”
“You don’t have to. I can handle this for now. We have bigger problems to deal with.”
“I’ll deal with those, too. You don’t need to worry.”
“What do you plan to do next?” Quennin asked.
“I don’t know. I need to review our options. Fuurion wanted to speak to me before I came here. I’ll see what he needs first.”
“Then don’t let me keep you. I’ll be fine, at least for a while.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” She made a subtle motion with her head, nodding for him to leave. “Go on. There are more important things for you to do than keep me company.”
Veketon kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back soon.”
He left the medical ward through the rear exit and strode briskly towards his private residence.