by Spoor,Ryk E
By the time the two of them had reached the command deck, all four elements of the attack fleet were less than fifteen hundred kilometers out. “No attacks yet. The six ships have formed into a tight group at the calculated junction point of the four elements when Claws and Mouth close.”
“Understood. All weapons are prepared?”
“All weapons prepared, all defenses active. We—”
A signal from the fleet broke in. “Detecting an anomaly on our bearing—”
A second ship. “—metallic echo from debris—”
Alztanza went rigid. “Shear off! Shear—”
Detonations erupted from the speakers, explosions whose sound would quickly cut off. On the display, the multiplicity of images from the fleet showed explosions throughout all four of the assaulting forces.
“What—”
“Mines!” Alztanza said, his voice wavering in disbelief. “Mines distributed and concealed long before our arrival in a pattern that saturated our formation!”
“How many—”
“Reports are still coming in. But Daj …Daj, this means they knew we were coming!”
“A scout we missed—”
“If so, it was a scout tens of thousands of kilometers out, that returned and left no trace! This minefield wasn’t put up in a day and a half!”
“Three hundred ninety-seven ships destroyed,” reported Fleet Operations, in the dispassionate tone required of such reporters. “Fifty-three additional vessels significantly damaged.”
Four hundred fifty vessels—nearly one tenth of the assault force—destroyed or damaged before we could fire a shot?
“Open fire and advance!” Alztanza ordered. “Observers watch for additional mines—although that was likely a timed detonation of all mines they had laid. Concentrate fire first on the mobile forces, and—Homeworld’s NAME!”
Dajzail felt himself sag to the deck in disbelieving horror.
From every one of the human vessels, from the huge Sky Gate fortresses, from emplacements on the distant Sphere’s ground, and from four distant locations in the sky itself—intolerable spears of brilliance lanced out, and where any of them struck, one of the Molothos vessels vanished in a blaze of light.
For an instant he and Alztanza were frozen, unable to comprehend what they had seen. Some of those attacks were from thousands of kilometers away. Beyond any distance of any weapon ever fired in the Arena!
The impossible fires streaked out a second time; one of the ships not thirty kilometers away went up in an explosion whose echo shook Claws of Vengeance seconds later.
That broke his paralysis. “This is Leader Dajzail. Fleet, free to operate in Seventh-Seventh forces. Reserves, we are already in range of this new weapon, so retreat may be impossible. We will not desert our forward comrades. Seventh-Forces Nine through Thirteen, close and support.” He glanced at Alztanza for confirmation as he continued, “Evasion and countermeasures as Ship Masters deem necessary. Primary targets are ten ships, the six already at the Sky Gates and the four which have revealed their presence with this new weapon. All ships, free to fire at will.”
He observed a third salvo of the new weapon, but now what he saw gave him new heart, especially as one of the six defending vessels shuddered under a fortunate strike by a Molothos missile. “This super-weapon of theirs is powerful, yes—but it still has to be aimed and fired, and it can—and does miss. They have limited emplacements of this weapon. We still have overwhelming force on our side, and they are not invincible.”
Dajzail leaned forward and let his furious war-screech echo through the fleet. “We will destroy their pathetic fleet, and when we are done we will sift the ashes of their fortresses and arm our fleets with their own weapon!”
Chapter 47
We underestimated him.
DuQuesne had rarely felt such an overwhelming aura of danger and power as was radiating from Vindatri, and never before outside of Hyperion. The First. First Shadeweaver? Damnation, how old does that make him?
Another wave of that dark power surged towards him, and he barely shattered it with one of the strongest mental bolts he could muster. It’s like fighting Fairchild when Mentor’s opposite numbers were backing him! Except Fairchild didn’t have blasted magic tricks in addition to his mind!
Wu Kung somehow tore his way through shields of gloom and deception and caught Vindatri, clawed hands grasping, the cloaked adversary weaving, blocking, but unable to evade the greatest warrior of Hyperion, the two of them disappearing, chasing each other in another duel of flashing steps that made a mockery of distance.
Ariane was rising once more from where Vindatri’s last hurricane-storm attack had sent her, and her blue hair rose in the blazing aura of energy she called forth from the Arena’s secret heart.
Ariane, we need a strategy!
A mental grin. I know, but while we’re working it out, we need to keep hitting Vindatri. And I’ve got a few new tricks, I think.
How? He didn’t finish—
Luck, Marc. I’ve got to trust to luck that my guesses, my inspirations, are going to be mostly on the money. If we’ve got the Blessing of the Arena …well, we sure as hell need it now! As Vindatri crashed to the floor so violently it bent under him, Ariane raised both hands. “Twin Sevenfold Path!”
A cone of rainbows, rippling colors in succession almost too fast for even DuQuesne’s eyes to register, enveloped Vindatri and he convulsed, let loose a cry that echoed with pain and joy and hatred and love. Ariane kept the spectral energy flowing, teeth gritted and eyes wide, stopping only as Wu Kung plummeted from above, driving his staff hard into Vindatri’s back.
DuQuesne half-expected, and hoped, to see that blunt shaft drive straight through the Arena’s archmage, pinning him to Halintratha’s deck like a bug to a collection; instead Vindatri merely gave a grunt of agony and splayed out his arms in a halfhearted gesture of defiance.
Halfhearted or not, the wave of freezing, flaming shards of steel that exploded from the deck was almost enough to finish DuQuesne instantly; the mental power of someone designed to be the ultimate product of humanity—both within and without Hyperion—barely blunted the impact; he flung up his arm barely in time and felt ice and fire impaling him across half his body.
Get up, get up, dammit, you sorry excuse for a superman! He heaved himself back up, yanking out the remaining splinters, just in time to see Vindatri roar out an incomprehensible phrase that sent Wu Kung streaking across the room like a meteor, to strike the huge picture-window dead-center; the crystal-clear window cracked and then detonated into flying glassy fragments as Wu Kung hurtled out and into the dark Deeps beyond.
“Wu!” Ariane shouted, half-turning in that direction.
No! He’ll be fine. Focus, Ariane. I need you to work with me, channel your strength through me, a mental bolt with both our wills driving it!
He suddenly felt her mind, angry but clear, certain and stubborn, filled with a fascination for this world that was still alive, still there, even in the midst of this battle, and he found himself laughing for a moment. She is everything I thought she was.
And you, Marc, are everything I hoped you would be. Let’s take this guy.
We’ll sure give him something to remember, by every one of those rows of apple trees!
Their combined wills hammered like falling asteroids against Vindatri’s mindshield, and the alien would-be god staggered backwards.
But…
But he’s getting stronger, Ariane’s mindvoice said grimly. We’re cranking up the power and he’s running right along with us!
DuQuesne felt icy fingers trailing down his spine. Is he …still just testing us?
“A …most substantial …effort, DuQuesne, Captain Austin.” He glanced sideways. “And Wu Kung.”
Wu had reappeared at the window, literally riding on clouds beneath his feet. “I am not so easy to get rid of!”
“So it would appear. Yet there are so many more ways to try!”
His o
utflung arms sent a circle of pure white energy expanding outwards, and DuQuesne braced himself against the tremendous impact; it half-stunned him, like a boxer being struck a blow that could have knocked him out but missed by the merest fraction of a centimeter. But even as he registered the fact that the others, too, had somehow stayed standing, he smelled a hint of something sweetish.
He stopped his breathing reflexively, his air-passages sealing themselves as a ghostly memory of someone shouting “Vee-two gas! Get tight!” echoed back from the past that had never been. Gas! Ariane, Wu—”
Sun Wu Kung had lost his battle in Hyperion when his adversaries had chosen gas as the final weapon, and DuQuesne felt the remembered horror and shame reverbrating through Wu as he tried to fight off the effects. Ariane had thrown up one of her spherical shells of protection, but it had merely sealed her in with the gas that was already around her. DuQuesne saw her starting to sag, and Wu’s charge towards Vindatri was sluggish, uncertain.
DuQuesne felt his own body starting to slow down. Dammit; it’s a contact poison, through the skin, not just an inhalant! But even as his body was shutting down, he realized that his mind was as strong and active as ever.
Well, I will be damned. Even that part of Second-Stage training works here; no drug or intoxicant, howsoever powerful, can affect the workings of a mind at that level. Thanks, Mentor—wherever you are.
He allowed himself to collapse slowly to the deck, slightly ahead of Wu Kung, without showing any sign of the fully-active mind still within the inert frame. My best chance yet.
“Well fought, all of you,” Vindatri said quietly, as even Wu’s tail finally slid into complete limpness. “Yet even within combat there can be subtleties, and you forgot that for one who can control the various aspects of reality, even the very air can be a weapon. Against one sufficiently prepared, of course, this is of less use, but with the right …enhancement from the power, it can overcome the defenses of your medical nanotechnology.”
He glided forward, moving now with the same unnerving smoothness that Amas-Garao liked to affect, and lifted Wu Kung, studying him. “Unique. As with all of you. I will learn more from the three of you, I think, than I have learned in millennia.”
Then, DuQuesne spoke into Vindatri’s mind, learn THIS.
The mental bolt he threw then would have staggered Mentor himself; though the vast majority of its power was in pure telepathic fury, there was enough physical mindpower to catapult Vindatri thirty meters and more across the floor. He tumbled limply to rest, a doll cast aside by a child.
DuQuesne focused, both on his nanos and on the imitation of Hyperion’s power the Arena granted him. Come on, come on, burn this crap out, I don’t think even that is enough to finish him. He’d felt resistance, a hard core as obdurate as adamant, at the center of Vindatri’s mind, and it had not cracked under that assault.
As he felt the gases’ effect fade, he switched his focus. Still shackled. That’s almost killed me more than once in this battle; my psionic defenses wouldn’t have been crap in this fight if Telzey and Locke hadn’t taught me how to channel the physical power too. But for this I can’t use brute strength…
He remembered, and for once allowed the memory its full force. Here it’s just as though it was real. It is real. I have to believe it, accept it…
A wise old face before his, pale green skin with a huge white square-cut beard and flowing white hair framing it. “As you know, matter and energy are but two sides of a single coin. Manufacturing the ultimate form of matter is merely a process of structuring energy. But the mind, too, can control energy…”
He focused on the shackles. Believe. What that old Norlaminian said, what Mentor taught me, believe it. Sense of perception, focused down to the level of the fifth order…
And suddenly he could see it—the structure of the Coherent Quark Composite itself, a glorious, interconnected, almost infinite netlike matrix, a webwork of energy that somehow held itself frozen in crystalline perfection. It would take incredible energy to shatter those bonds, and doing so would probably shatter even ring-carbon enhanced bones.
But if you could unravel it …just along the narrowest of lines…
Wu’s fingers twitched, and then he rolled slowly to his feet. “I …am not …so easily finished,” he grated out.
“And,” Ariane said shakily, “I’d almost cleaned it out when I fell down.”
DuQuesne felt a broad grin on his face as he rose—the last, instead of the first, of his friends to do so.
Vindatri wobbled, but he, too, was rising.
DuQuesne flexed his arms—and the CQC shackles fell away, cut in razor-fine perfection on both sides. The others stared, but Vindatri froze in utter consternation. Wu, Ariane, are you ready?
What’s the plan? Wu asked, as Ariane muttered a word he heard as “heal” and he suddenly felt stronger.
In a single mental image he showed them, the actions, the thoughts, the motions. And the three of them moved as one.
Ariane ran forward, summoning and then reinforcing her shield, enclosing all three of them. Vindatri’s defensive ward, too, was up, but his eyes were narrow and his stance less certain and arrogant. DuQuesne shielded his friends’ minds from sparkling lashes of deception and ensnarement, and Wu sent a veritable cannon of spirit energy forward, striking like the hammer of the gods.
The three of them separated to take Vindatri from three directions at once, but somehow Ariane’s shield split with them, and DuQuesne felt his grin widen viciously as he saw disbelief in the hooded eyes of their enemy. Now all three were protected in their own shields, and DuQuesne kept up a ceaseless barrage of mental attacks, preventing Vindatri from making any but the most cursory attempts to control or mentally assault his other friends. We’re just about evenly matched there, looks like. But that means he can’t afford to focus on anyone but me with his mind-powers.
Wu Kung kicked, punched, and slammed his staff against Vindatri’s defenses, and each blow carried the force of a falling redwood. Ariane sent storm and fire and ice and wind and lightning and the power of earth like an avalanche of the elements, piling up ruination and devastation against the First Shadeweaver’s shuddering defenses. They’re still getting stronger! Maybe he is too, but there’s three of us, and together I think—I really think—we’re starting to outpace him!
With what terrific mental effort DuQuesne could only guess, Vindatri managed to focus long enough to disappear. Is he running? I don’t know if we can afford him escaping!
But it appeared Vindatri felt he could not afford to lose this battle—and, DuQuesne thought, he was probably right. They’d learned an awful lot about Vindatri, and if they managed to beat him and escape, that mystique he talked about would come apart if word ever got out. The dark-cloaked figure sent a rain of red firebolts screaming through the entire volume of the room, causing their shields to waver on the edge of dissolution.
Ariane shouted out something new, an invocation with words like galzeldis and ottilra, and a column of blue-white fire ripped through Vindatri’s shield as though it wasn’t even there, struck him so hard and with such clawing, savage fury that part of his robe was shredded, and sea-emerald blood trailed behind.
“Ruyi Jingu Bang!”
From halfway across the room the Monkey King’s staff extended, a spear a bowshot long, and sent Vindatri spinning, the so-called god having barely evaded a direct strike. DuQuesne found himself staring. That staff can’t…
And then he realized that by telling Wu he was what he believed, Wu Kung had simply believed that this was really his real staff …and it had become so.
Spheres of black metal formed around the three, and DuQuesne found himself in blackness. But he could sense the interior of the sphere was filled with vicious spikes, and it was contracting…
Still, it couldn’t block his mind, and so he went for Vindatri’s thoughts, directing bolts and beams and needles of mental force to slow and weaken Vindatri’s will. The sphere fell apart; a
s he emerged, he saw that Ariane had somehow burst hers apart from within, while Wu—unsurprisingly—had simply punched his way out.
The room was a complete shambles now, and the combatants were now ducking and leaping and taking shelter around and behind sheared and ripped deck-plating that rose a dozen meters into the air, leaping over holes that dropped away to other decks below, sending debris of all types at each other. DuQuesne felt even his muscles starting to give the first warnings of fatigue. Dammit. We’re slowly pulling ahead, but if he can manage to outlast even one of us, he’ll get the upper hand, sure as water’s wet.
And then a voice spoke in his head—but not a telepathic voice at all.
Doctor DuQuesne, can you hear me?
Orphan? Yeah, I read you, but we’re still in this little discussion with Vindatri.
A mental buzzing laugh. Indeed, and I am convinced that the noise of your “conversation” can be heard on Nexus Arena itself! Halintratha shakes impossibly beneath your feet.
DuQuesne parried another mental assault, then visualized a focused, flaming needle of psychic energy stabbing, piercing, ripping through shields; Vindatri withdrew his attacks, threw up multiple courses of defense, even as Ariane and Wu hit him from both sides at once.
So if I might, please, could you take the conflict outside?
DuQuesne felt an eyebrow raise, then he grinned. Gotcha. I think. Hold on!
He switched back to the mental links he had forged with his friends. New plan, people—hit Vindatri hard in that direction!
Ariane’s puzzlement was clear on the sideband, but she showed no hesitation, and Wu Kung simply laughed. It doesn’t matter to me which direction I hit him from!
DuQuesne sprinted forward with all the speed his Hyperion body could muster, just as Vindatri was recovering from yet another blow from Wu. Focusing all his mental force on his fist, he penetrated the First Shadeweaver’s wavering shields and then swung, a massive uppercut driven by every muscle from the tips of his toes to the clenched fingers as they drove straight up into Vindatri’s chin.