“Okay…” She waited a few seconds, until sure I would not volunteer any further information. Then, “So, what else do you need?”
“You will see soon enough. When we reach Candis.”
“Candis?”
She frowned, puzzled.
“Is that rock even inhabited?”
“Your prejudices are showing again,” I pointed out, only half-seriously.
She snorted.
“Some do live there,” I said. “Not many, fortunately.”
She nodded slowly.
“And… we can’t just zap our way there?”
“You may have noticed,” I replied, “that I cannot ‘zap’ our way everywhere, else our legs would not presently be so sore. Travel via portals requires conditions conducive to opening them, unless one wishes to exert enough overwhelming energy to bludgeon one open—something I generally prefer to avoid.”
Walking around to the front, where the ship’s long nose section angled down, I motioned again and another hatch opened, this one leading into the passenger cabin and from there to the cockpit.
“There are simply no good spots to open a portal on the surface of that world,” I said, “or even in the vicinity of space around it.”
She took all of that in, then returned to her original point.
“So what do you want there?”
She climbed through the hatch, and I followed her, closing it behind us.
“You will see soon enough,” I replied.
I took my place in the cockpit and Evelyn slid easily into the seat opposite me. She took a quick inventory of the controls and indicators and seemed comfortable enough.
“It looks close enough to a Twelve that I know where everything is,” she said with a tight smile. “I could fly it.”
I smiled back, settling into the cushioned seat.
“By all means, then,” I said.
Her eyes widened, then quickly she leaned forward and began touching control surfaces, bringing up the holo display and starting the engines.
“Not a problem,” she said, taking the unified control stick in both hands.
A faint shiver ran through the deck, and then the engines started and the craft vibrated with a steady throbbing.
I waited for her to look up through the overhead window and ask the inevitable question, and she did so soon enough.
“Do I just turn the guns on the roof, or—?”
I laughed and touched a control to my left. Above us, the ceiling retracted silently, leaving a clear pathway to a starry nighttime sky.
Evelyn smiled and pulled up on the stick.
With a sudden surge, the ship lifted cleanly up and lofted out into the air above the city.
I was impressed. She confidently and comfortably manipulated the controls as if she had spent days in a simulator. Soon enough we were in orbit, then moving away from Mysentia at a brisk pace. The blue-white marble of my adopted homeworld receded to just another sparkling point in the spackled velvet curtain of space, and I reversed the viewscreen to show the path ahead.
“Very nice,” I commented. “Very smooth.”
“I’ve been flying ships like this one a long time,” she replied. “Though it has some improvements I’d love to examine in closer detail.”
“Maybe later,” I said with a laugh.
Her hands moved to the navigational console, activating the tactical display.
“So, do you already have the course we’re taking laid in? I assume you’ll want to jump to subspace as soon as possible.”
“No need,” I said. “There are no good points for opening a portal near Candis, but I can still get us close enough for only a short trip after we arrive.”
I closed my eyes and felt the Power flowing through me. Visualizing in my mind an image of our ship, I reached out ahead of us and pressed upon the delicate folds of the universe, pushing them open.
The ship lurched violently, twice.
“Hey,” Evelyn shouted, clutching at her armrests.
“It’s not my doing,” I replied, my voice somewhat distant, my mind still largely tied up in the maneuver I had been executing.
Crimson bolts of energy flared past, disrupting the viewscreens and causing us to spin about as they crackled along the ship’s electromagnetic field. The portal I had been opening snapped closed as my attention returned to the ship and to our immediate situation. Evelyn fought with the controls as I switched one of the displays to rear view.
Another bolt impacted the ship’s defensive screens. Alerts screeched deafeningly. Sparks flew from the control panels, causing both of us to jerk our hands away.
“What the hell?” I shouted, furious.
“Someone’s shooting at us,” Evelyn replied, pointing to one of the displays. “They’re behind us, closing fast.”
A ship, sleek and smooth and gleaming silver, closed in on us. I could make out no identifying markings.
I ran through every curse word I knew, and invented several creative new ones.
“Can nothing ever go simply?” I all-but-shouted. “Does it always have to get complicated?”
We lurched again. Sparks flew from yet another panel, and Evelyn let loose a profanity I had not even thought of, followed by, “The screens will be gone in less than a minute, unless they’re a lot better than standard.”
“They’re better,” I replied, “but not that much better.”
I ran my fingers over one of the control panels, hastily initiating what repairs I could, but mainly delaying the inevitable. We had to get away, or get rid of that other ship.
“Who are they?” Evelyn shouted as she fought to bring us back under control. “And what did you do to tick them off?”
“I have no idea,” I replied, anger swelling to mighty proportions, “but I don’t have time for this.”
She ran us through a few more impressive maneuvers, none of which had the least effect upon our pursuers.
“They’re too fast,” she said. “Running’s not an option.”
I scoffed.
“Running is always an option. Can you give me five seconds without a violent shock?”
She looked at me, gripped the controls with both hands, and nodded. Then she proceeded to put the ship through its paces, executing a beautiful piloting display, neatly avoiding the incoming fire.
Three seconds… Four…
My mind at peace, my concentration undisturbed, I reached out and forced a circle of blazing blue light to open directly in front of us. We hurtled blindly into it and I yanked it closed and the stars blinked out and blackness descended like a wall. The universe around us went away: poof, gone.
CHAPTER NINE
Spiraling swirling rainbows twisting and contorting one upon the other in mad embrace until they disgorged a single spacecraft, spat out and spinning madly through strange emptiness.
We had exchanged one universe for another. Shimmering violet rather than deep black surrounded us on all sides.
Evelyn peered at the displays and frowned.
“These readings are crazy,” she said. “We’re not anywhere I know.”
“One level up in the Above, if I did it right,” I replied.
She smiled wryly and nodded. Apparently, my cursory explanations of the wider universe had made some sense to her.
“I get it,” she said. “They’ll have no choice but to assume we jumped to subspace. But when they look there, they won’t find us.” She laughed. “That’ll drive them crazy—it would certainly drive me crazy. Almost as crazy as trying to figure out how a ship this small pulled that off in the first place.”
I smiled.
“I’d like to know who they were, though,” she said, looking at me again.
I shrugged. Innocent as ever, this dark lord. Of course.
And so we made ourselves busy inspecting the ship’s components, evaluating the damage to what was obviously broken and instructing the computer to find the problems that were not so obvious. Fortunately, it seemed to
be largely superficial and well within our abilities to repair.
“So,” Evelyn asked after a few minutes of silent work underneath a console, “you really don’t know who it was we were avoiding back there?”
She was not letting it go. Fine.
“No clue,” I replied, adding, “It did not resemble any ship I have seen anywhere in the Outer Worlds.”
“I agree. It could have been an Alliance ship,” she said, “though not one I’m familiar with.”
“There are some you are not familiar with?”
She frowned at me.
“There are plenty in secret development, I’m sure. I just fly the ones they give me.”
“Of course,” I said, nodding. “I forgot the deep secrecy surrounding all things Alliance.”
She rolled her eyes at me.
“Please, Mr. Dictator-for-a-thousand-years.”
“Touché.”
She bit her lip, thinking. “If it was an Alliance craft, you’d better hope they don’t conclude from this that your Outworlder ships are growing too advanced for them to keep up with. They might choose to act sooner rather than later to put a halt to something like that.”
I frowned, finding myself genuinely troubled by that. I considered a number of responses before hardening my heart and simply saying, “That is of no further consequence to me.”
She stared at me for a few somewhat uncomfortable moments, then crawled back under the console and returned her attention to repairing the ship.
I said nothing more, but did dwell upon her words a bit longer, and found they were not so easily dismissed from my thoughts as I would have expected, or hoped.
We worked for a while longer, neither of us speaking beyond the necessities of the job. After about an hour of work, the computer indicated that we had accomplished as much as we could, given that we had limited resources and were floating in the void. Most of the systems were back up and the indicator lights in the cabin were all green.
Evelyn crawled out from under another console and replaced the cover, then dusted her hands off, despite the fact that my ship was immaculately clean. The tension between us seemed to have ebbed once more, something for which I found myself grateful.
“So,” she said. “Candis. How far is that on this route?”
She moved around to her copilot’s seat and began to sit down.
“Not far,” I replied. “I will drop us back down into your universe in a couple of hours.”
“Hours?”
She halted in mid-sit and climbed back to her feet again. Looking back at me, she said, “I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to freshen up a little bit. A Twelve would have a decent galley, bunks, even a real shower. I assume you haven’t modified those things out.”
“Improved on them, actually,” I replied.
Smiling wickedly, she climbed through the cockpit hatch and vanished into the ship’s interior.
Not a bad idea, I thought. Far simpler for me, though. I settled back into my seat, closed my eyes and summoned the Power. It surged into my body, racing through my veins and crackling over my skin. Fatigue poisons burned away, along with grime and sweat and other pollutants. My hair stood momentarily on end, sparkling blue, then fell back to my shoulders, clean. My clothes shimmered and smoothed.
“Ah,” I sighed. “Much better.”
Nothing to do then but nap, as the ship drew ever nearer to my destination, and I drew ever closer to revenge and to my rightful glory.
# # #
I was awake when Evelyn returned to the cockpit and settled back into her seat. She had donned a generic, tight-fitting black flight suit. Silver lines ran along the sides of the arms and legs, and up both sides of the torso, but otherwise the outfit was unadorned. Small pouches along both legs contained a number of useful tools and other items, if I recalled correctly.
“I took the liberty of digging through your storage lockers,” she told me, indicating her new wardrobe. “Fits pretty well.”
Indeed it did. It and the others like it in the locker were designed to adjust to the size and shape of any of my crewmembers. Getting a good look at Evelyn’s particular shape in the suit, I could find no reason whatsoever to object.
“Good,” I replied, forcing my attention to the absence of insignias and rank markings on the suit. “No need to announce your loyalties and your employers to the people we are about to meet.”
We had only a few minutes to wait until I felt the time was right to open another portal for the ship. I sipped at some tea and watched the shifting colors within the holo display, trying to gain a more complete sense of the texture of space around us.
“Thanks for the use of the shower,” she said after a few moments.
I blinked, pulling my attention back from the swirling depths, looking over at her. The transformation was remarkable, now that I looked for it—as if her very spirit had been laundered along with her body. I suppressed such thoughts immediately and instead asked, “How was it?”
She grinned and tousled her bobbed blonde hair.
“I’m clean. Clean!” She sighed. “It was way overdue.”
“Indeed.”
Her grin becoming a grimace, she shot back, “Hey, I wasn’t the only one doing all that hiking and climbing and stuff, you know.”
She looked at me then.
“You’re clean, too. When did you—?”
“I have my ways,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
I held up a hand.
“It’s time,” I said.
I sat up and reached out with the Power, harnessing that mighty energy and using it to punch open a portal, ripping a passageway through from this level of the Above back down into Evelyn’s native universe. Passing through that great sapphire circle in the sky, we emerged into the universe we had departed, with great haste, some hours previously. The blurred, dingy sphere of Candis, remote frontier planet of the Outer Worlds, hung in the distance, outlined against the blackness of space.
“Nice work,” Evelyn noted, studying the blue-gray orb on our displays. “Now what?”
“Now we land, and we secure the other half of what I need.”
“More guns?”
“Not precisely, no.”
The remainder of the trip took only about fifteen minutes, given the performance capacity of my ship, and soon enough we found ourselves swooping down into the atmosphere of Candis, streaking high over icy and barren landscapes.
Evelyn peered at the displays and frowned.
“Nice place. For an uninhabited wasteland, anyhow.”
“It is inhabited,” I replied. “In its way.”
She glanced over at me, curious.
I had turned the controls over to her again, glad to have someone else to do the piloting. I keyed in a set of coordinates and told her, “Head in that direction, and when you pick up the beacon, follow it in.”
“Beacon?”
“To the settlement.”
“Settlement?”
“You will see soon enough.”
Shrugging, she returned her attention to the controls and to the tundra-like landscape flowing by beneath us.
As she flew us along, I closed my eyes and let my mind drift back over all that had occurred since my return to the Golden City. In our constant state of flight since our release from the dungeon, I had scarcely had time to examine the big picture; to see what patterns might emerge from the disparate clues I had discovered along the way. What did I know, and what had I guessed at, so far?
During my absence, someone had killed nearly three-quarters of all the gods of the Golden City. Perhaps a god or gods did the deed, or perhaps some other force was involved. I had dismissed the possibility that the Dark Men I had previously encountered could have been solely responsible. Those mindless automatons seemed, from my limited observations, to be only instruments at the service of some greater power. Likely one of us. And while they were powerful and dangerous and admittedly I had no idea of t
heir numbers—I had encountered three, or perhaps only two, personally—I found it nearly impossible to believe they could have killed seventy-two gods by themselves. We are simply too smart, too wily, too experienced, for that many of us to be defeated by dumb, brute force. No, the Dark Men could not be the ultimate answer. One of us, or someone very like us, had to be behind it all, pulling the strings.
Assuming the culprit still lived, and was indeed one of the gods, that left twenty-eight suspects. I knew I was innocent, at least of those crimes, even if no one else believed it. So, twenty-seven. I still did not know the identities of the other survivors, beyond those I had recently encountered. Turmborne, Vodina, Arendal, Baranak, Alaria, Malachek, Vorthan… I turned their faces and their Aspects over in my head, sifting through what I knew and what I suspected concerning each of them. Which of them was capable of such an act? Arendal was cold-blooded enough, but from his words and his behavior during our encounter, I doubted him. Baranak was powerful enough, and Malachek was smart enough. Yet neither had anything to gain from committing mass murder, as far as I could imagine. In fact, both had much to lose; each of them, in his own way, lived off of the impressions he created in others, of being the strongest and the wisest, even among the gods. But then, how could any of us have gained from this? What motive could there possibly have been?
A degree of technical expertise had been required, as well, I reminded myself. The Fountain had been shut off, weakening each of us to the point that death had become possible. Who could have found a way to do that? Vorthan the engineer, certainly, if anyone could have. Yet Baranak could easily enough have manipulated him or someone else to do the deed, either on a pretext or through simple threats. Was Baranak actually a monstrous puppet-master, manipulating the Dark Men and the gods alike toward his own ends, killing all who threatened his position, and using me as the scapegoat, the fall guy? A part of me wanted very much to believe this, did believe it. But doubts still gnawed at me.
Perhaps they were all guilty. Maybe all the other survivors were part of some conspiracy, and I was the only remaining god outside the cabal, expendable. Not a comforting thought, and not one I wished to dwell on for any length of time; at least, not yet.
Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (The Above Book 1) Page 16