A Kind of Peace

by Andy Boot

  These small air attack vehicles could have easily wiped out the teams if not for the fact that they, too, were under attack. Varn attack craft kept hot on their tails, not allowing them to sweep the ground forces as they were forced to engage on two fronts.

  It would seem that, temporarily, the primary target had been sidelined, if not forgotten, as the old enemies had easily fallen into old patterns of warfare. Sooner or later though, one side would triumph in the field.

  Simeon pleaded to the Gods for a weapon. They answered this easily enough: the land around was littered with corpses, many of which still held the weapons they had so ill-used before their deaths.

  Getting hold of one of these was, however, a problem for which he could not foresee even the Gods providing an answer.

  Who needs the Gods when you have a Mage?

  Ramus-Bey had calmed his fears. His frailties, both physical and otherwise, had been dismissed as superfluous. He had dug down deep within himself, and now felt that he had reached that place he had been but a few times before. That small island of calm that housed his true self, the man who had set out to attain knowledge, to attain control not over others, but over himself.

  This was the man who could change things, who could stop the wasteful and disgusting battle that raged not just about them, but in the hearts and minds of those who had directed matters to this point.

  He touched that within himself that had been lost for so long. He was not just heart, not just mind. He was the balance of these and in the exercise of that balance laid the knowledge of what was true. Not absolute truth, for that may not exist, but the truth of what was the right thing for him, when he used all of himself to make a decision.

  He must stop this senseless waste by drawing on that power that he held within himself. He must bring it to the fore; harness, unleash and direct it so that the fighting would cease.

  All doubts that he held about himself and his ability to do this must cease. It had been many anums, but he had not lost the skills.

  Focusing his mind on his objective, and making a series of complex passes with his hands and fingers that externalised the tendrils of power that snaked from within his subconscious, he sought to bring his power into play.

  The land around them shimmered and boiled. For a fraction of a moment, the rock became liquid. It passed beneath all those present in the area, just that touch too fast, but enough for them to register that it had been there. The colours, shapes and contours of the land blurred into an amorphous mass for an equivalent length of time. Again, not long enough to truly register, but enough to cause in all of those present a feeling of mild nausea.

  Along the length of the trench, where Simeon, Jenna and Bey himself were these feelings were intensified. Both Simeon and Jenna threw up, unable to stop the pitch and yaw of their stomachs. An intense heat that made their clothes smoulder at the seams seized them.

  When Simeon had gulped down hot, fetid air, gasping to stop the reflux, he raised his head again, daring another look over the lip of the trench.

  He gasped again, but this time from a sense of profound shock. In front of him there was a large gap in the landscape. The rise and fall of a mountainous crop that had formed a barrier between the city of Ilvarn and the scrub area where they had pitched battle was gone. As simple as that. It was no longer there. In the blinking of an eye, millennia of rock had simply disappeared. In the distance, he could see the strange mix of old and new within the city, small air ships buzzing like flies around the constructs.

  Between here and there lay nothing. Not in the sense that it was a void, but rather as though a giant hand had descended and scooped out the mass of rock like a child would scoop a handful of mud, leaving a deep pit and little else.

  The ground forces were no longer paying the trench any attention. In awe, their attention had been taken by the strange sight that lay in the direction they had come. Overhead, the battleships and the smaller attack craft had stopped their dance of death. The larger craft were stilled, while the smaller craft now sped towards the giant pit, crossing time and again over it as they attempted to make sense of what they could see.

  In the eerie silence that had descended over the plane, Simeon heard a small voice.

  "Not exactly what I intended, but a reasonable start."

  The warrior turned and saw that Ramus-Bey was standing, his head over the lip of the trench, surveying his work. Simeon started to run towards him, feeling as though he were moving in slow motion. He almost fell, and his momentum carried him into the Mage.

  The pair of them stumbled, tumbling over each other onto the floor of the trench.

  "A fine way to treat your Mage," Bey murmured. There was, within his tone, a hint of the bombastic assurance that he had held when first Simeon had met him. Not something, the warrior felt, that would be of much good to them right now.

  "You did that?" Simeon managed to croak out in a dry voice, his throat ravaged by the heat.

  "I did," Ramus replied, drawing himself out from under the warrior and rising to his feet, dusting himself down. "And I'd remind you to have a little more decorum in how you treat the premier wizard of Bethel!"

  "Who could have got his head shot off as he wasn't taking precautions, and Gods alone know it's big enough right now..."

  "I have not been called upon to practice for many annums, as you well know, and under the circumstances..."

  "It hasn't done anything yet," Simeon barked. "It's only going to be some bastard good if it gets us out of here! As it is, it damn near finished us off."

  "You forget yourself," bristled the Mage.

  "No more than you," retorted the warrior. "We've still got to get out of here!"

  In the silence that had followed the Mage's charm, Jenna had been quick to recover. Thrown from her feet by the lack of equilibrium, she had rolled onto her knees and retched bile on to the hot earth. Deep within her, some instinct for preservation had told her to ignore the feelings that wanted her to roll over and cry from the pains that wracked and spasmed her body. A nasty voice in her mind wanted her to welcome the Varn and Bethel forces, to ask them to terminate her and put her out of her misery. It nagged, and she wanted to obey if only to shut it up and give her some peace.

  But her instinct to live was greater than that. It pushed that small voice to the furthest reaches of her consciousness and made her haul herself to her feet.

  Breathing deeply through her nose, she clutched at the wall of the trench, almost willing the world around her to stop spinning. She was facing away from the Mage, and she heard his words, though not their meaning. They came to her through a haze as though they were meaningless syllables. But enough for her to realise that she must take action.

  Looking up above the trench, she beheld a sight much as Simeon was seeing, but with one difference. While the warrior could only see the astounding result of the Mage's actions, Jenna's instinct for preservation drew her attention to two things. First, that the ground force surrounding them at a distance was similarly in awe of the missing mountains; secondly, that there were a number of discarded weapons lying around the battlefield.

  If she was quick, then perhaps she could take advantage of these two things.

  Adrenaline and the desire to stay alive overriding all else, she hauled herself over the top of the ridge, Varnian clothing ripping on the jagged rock. She was glad. Her short Ensign's tunic was better suited to what she was about to do.

  Keeping low, discarding the rest of the Varn clothing as she went, Jenna half-crawled, half-ran across the open ground that lay between her and her objective. A pulse cannon and blaster were within reach, if she ignored the corpses that surrounded them and the lack of cover.

  What did it matter? If she had stayed in the trench, they were still trapped. As for the dead, they could no longer threaten her now that they were with the Gods.

  She picked up two small cannon and three blasters, being careful to disentangle the webbing of the cannon from the corpses of t
he previous owners without attracting attention.

  With the weapons gathered to her, she paused to look up. The ground forces were still drawn to the gap in the mountains, and the air forces were too concerned with recce'ing the area to spare a glance for one, lone figure.

  Thanking fortune for favouring her thus far, she began to move back towards the trench. With every step she felt her heart pound, her stomach turn. Even with the weapons, because of the way in which she carried them, it would have taken her too much time to open fire should anyone spot her. She would be dead before she had a chance to squeeze the trigger.

  She was aware of the trench behind her, and slid gracelessly down the wall to the floor, collapsing in a heap. Back in relative safety, she felt euphoric. She wanted to laugh out loud. In the heat of battle she had captured weapons. And while she - a mere holoship Ensign - had been doing this, the almighty Mage and his bodyguard had been arguing like women over the last prime cut in a meat market.

  What, she wondered, would they do without her?

  Simeon checked the small cannon, handed one to Jenna. He did the same with two of the three blasters. The third he checked, then offered to Ramus-Bey. The Mage shook his head.

  "I cannot accept that."

  "Take it," Simeon insisted. "Call it a precaution."

  "Call it whatever you wish," Bey muttered as he grudgingly took the small arm. "I shall not use it. I will not."

  "But someone might believe you would, which may make them think twice. Call it a deterrent."

  "They called me a deterrent... look where it has got Inan," Bey said bitterly.

  "Time enough for that later," Simeon said gently. "The most important thing is that we get out of here with you in one piece. Question is, how?"

  "And how soon?" Jenna added. "Ground and air forces are static while they try and work out what's going on and what they can do about it, but that won't last long."

  "Should be simple enough. If he can do that," Simeon gestured vaguely in the direction of Ilvarn, "then he can charm us back to Belthan."

  Bey grimaced. "Ideally, I could... but that result wasn't what I intended, exactly. So how much trust would you truly like to put in arriving back in one piece?"

  Despite himself, Simeon grinned. Something of the old Ramus mixed with the new. Power and humility together. It was going to take a little getting used to.

  "Fair point," he said. "I'm too young, she's too pretty, and you're too important to be killed. We need another plan. Though it's not much, I think I might just have one."

  Orders had come through comm-receivers. Stop gawping at the carnage caused by what was assumed to be magic, and concentrate on the objective. Ramus-Bey must now be considered more of a threat. If magic had caused the mountain to move - and scans had revealed no tech traces - then the Mage was using his power. The consequences could be dire. Varn knew they could not counter with their own Mage for fear of retribution from other nation states. They had to prey on his poor physical condition to eliminate him.

  The ground teams were clustered around the trench. Although at some distance, they were in range for their pulse cannon to effect damage.

  While they peppered the area around the trench with pulse fire, Simeon and Jenna used their purloined weaponry to return some of that fire, hopefully deflecting the ground crews from measuring perfect aim.

  Ramus-Bey sat on the floor of the trench, once more centering himself. He would not terminate these warriors, as they were only men and women who were fulfilling the duty laid down for them by their nation state, but he would remove them from the field of play.

  A reasoned thought. Skeins of energy played out as passes of the hands and fingers, and...

  The ground crews were gone. The firing ceased.

  "Where..." Jenna began.

  Bey grinned. "I wouldn't like to say exactly. Probably Ilvarn - maybe some swamp in the south if I got it too wrong. But safe enough."

  "Nice sentiment, but we haven't got time for that," Simeon said, looking up. "It's only going to be a short while before the confusion clears and they realise what's happened. Then we'll have a full-scale air attack. We can't defend against that."

  Bey assented. "I know."

  He went into himself again. Jenna threw a questioning look over his head, directed to Simeon. The warrior shrugged. He had no idea how long it would take. They would just have to hope.

  Above them the battlecruisers began to shift from their holding patterns, aloof from the action of the smaller attack craft. Each side had held their giant ships at a distance, unwilling to risk any more engagement until the battle lower down had been resolved. It was apparent though, that the loss of the ground forces had filtered through, and the battle cruisers were moving to engage and provide heavy-duty cover for the smaller craft, which began to disengage from their own offence/defence patterns, swooping in arcs that would bring them in for ground attack passes.

  "You think he's going to get this right?" Jenna asked.

  "What choice have we got?" Simeon shrugged. He looked up, beyond the rapidly - too rapidly - approaching small craft. The Varnian battlecruisers were gaining ground. "It's not like he could miss all of them surely?"

  "Gods! No-one could survive that," whispered Commander Tilan Vash, officer-in-charge of the battlecruiser Illyd.

  His helmsman had, under his watchful eye, piloted their ship at the head of the fleet, approaching the battle area in a flight pattern designed to cut off Bethelian battlecruiser paths to the air attack squadrons below them. There were a dozen cruisers left afloat, two more than in the Bethel fleet. That should be deterrent enough.

  Like every other Varnian Commander, he had been a little stunned to see the Bethelian air attack craft turn and, instead of trying to deflect the Varn squadron from their path, join them in blasting the ground in and around the trench where their Intel told them that Ramus-Bey and his - well, kidnappers or rescuers, depending on which newscasts or military channels you believed - were holed up.

  The squadrons pulled up, and the dust and smoke began to clear. What had once been a trench was now a blasted plain. Uneven, irregular rises and crops of rock and soil were now flattened, melted and blasted into a flat expanse of nothing. Whatever had been down there had been eradicated.

  Helmsman Cavlar whistled. "They were all blasting, sir. What's that about?"

  Vash shook his head. A life-long warrior in the air fleet, he believed implicitly in following orders and to trust in his superiors. He couldn't for the life of him imagine how they would explain this, but he felt sure that there must be a reason somewhere behind it.

  "Tyra, get Ministry One on the comm, see what they want us to do now that the enemy seems to have been eliminated," Vash murmured.

  Comm Officer Tyra hit the comm-send sensor, preparing to deliver the message. She was stunned to silence when a strange hand gripped her wrist.

  "I wouldn't, if I was you."

  Vash and Cavlar spun round, reaching for their blasters.

  "I really wouldn't do that, either." They were greeted by a second, female voice, and the sight of three battle-scarred individuals. Two of them - the woman, and the man who gripped Tyra's wrist - were holding blasters, with portable cannon strapped across their shoulders. The third individual - a wizened, tired looking old man - was staring distractedly around him.

  "Quite pleased with this," he sniffed. "I never knew that a flight deck was so small. Could have done a whole lot worse, all in all."

  The man laughed. "Don't be too pleased, this is only the start."

  Vash could contain himself no longer. "Who - who are you?" he spluttered. "How in the name of the Gods did you get on my flight deck? And what in the name of the sacred places do you want?"

  The tall man smiled, gently helped Tyra from her seat and directed her across the deck to where Vash and Cavlar were standing, and then sat down at her comm-station.

  "I should have thought that the answers to all three questions were obvious, Commander. But t
he only one that really matters is the last. You, my new and trusted friend, are taking us home."

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Year Zero - Period Three

  "You realise, of course, that once we break formation every ship in the fleet will realise that something is amiss?" Vash said with a self-satisfied smirk. "Your plan will never work."

  Simeon sighed. "You saw those mountains vanish, right? You turned round to find us standing here when we weren't there a moment before, right?" He paused, waiting for Vash to cautiously assent. He continued: "Well, if that can happen, what's to stop us pulling this one off?"

  Vash said nothing: he could see a flaw in the warrior's reasoning. Why did they need to commandeer a ship when they could do all of this? But he had one simple rule that had kept him alive to this point: never argue with a man who was armed, especially when you were not. It hadn't let him down yet, so he was going to keep trusting in it.

  He indicated to Cavlar that he was to follow their instructions. With a further gesture, he also indicated that there were to be no attempts at deception. He recognised Jenna's Ensign uniform, and even though holoships were thought constructs, they worked on the same piloting principles. Any attempts to fool them, and they would soon be discovered.

  Strangely, as the warrior directed Cavlar to turn the ship, Vash felt himself relax. There was nothing he could do, so he decided to sit back and see exactly how they planned to pull this off.

  Ilvarn - The Ministry

  An emergency meeting was in session. The Chief Minister and his executive were seated around the conference table, a bank of holo-monitors suspended over the centre, offering them views from the air fleet, the ground forces, Intel satellites, and newsvid coverage from around the globe.