by Alex White
There were only four of them now, skulking through the shadowy engineering deck.
Blackburn sidled up to Mostafa and whispered into her ear. “We’re in over our heads. It’s time to call for help.”
“No,” she replied. “Doctor Witts has a plan. Calling for help will only expose the mission.”
“His ‘plan’ killed four of us. I’m all for getting the crystal, but—”
“No you’re not,” Mostafa said, cutting her off. “There can be no doubt, and your heart is full of it.”
“Sekhet, you’re the comms officer. It is currently your job to save us.”
“If we call in a rescue, we’ll give away the location of our salvage.”
Blackburn wrapped a gloved hand around Mostafa’s biceps. “Give me comms access.”
Mostafa shook her head. “Have faith.”
Blackburn quietly pressed her slinger to the small of Mostafa’s back, dead center. “I wasn’t asking.”
Drawing a sharp breath, Mostafa froze, even as her two compatriots walked on. Her voice quavering, she said, “You won’t get them by shooting me.”
“You always were a zealot,” said Blackburn, and struck her across the back of the skull with the butt of her slinger. She wrapped her arm around Mostafa’s neck and pointed her weapon at Witts. “Old man!”
Witts slowly turned to face her, recognition and disappointment shifting across his face in the intermittent light. He remained motionless.
“Codes or she dies,” said Blackburn.
“False dichotomy,” Witts replied, shaking his head.
With a tiny strobe of light, Klose completed his glyph and spun, planting a shot directly through Blackburn’s brainpan. Her death rattle set off her slinger, sending a round into Mostafa’s abdomen.
Mostafa went down with a wail, blood washing her front.
“Damn it!” said Klose, stowing his weapon and rushing to her side. He tore away the remains of her shirt and began digging through his pockets for any styptifoam. Finding a tiny bottle, he plugged the hole as best he could. “Doctor Witts!”
But the doctor remained where he stood, staring at her as one might regard a wounded pet.
“I’m so sorry, my dear Sekhet,” Witts muttered. “I wanted you to be there with me, at the end.”
“I can make it,” Mostafa grunted, trying to rise to her feet, but Klose held her down.
“Doctor Witts,” he said, “there’s bound to be a med bay down here, and there’s power. We can—”
“It’s kinder to shoot her,” Witts interrupted.
Klose exchanged a horrified glance with Mostafa before snatching up Blackburn’s fallen slinger and backing away. She raised her hand to stop him, sweeping her palm between him and Witts like a flashlight.
“No!” she cried. “No, no, no!”
Klose’s grip tensed around the slinger, but he didn’t fire.
“Look,” she pleaded, “I can find the med bay on my own. Please just leave me, please. I won’t slow you down.”
“I’m glad you understand,” said Witts, gesturing for Klose to follow. “We can’t risk remaining down here any longer than—”
Mostafa peered around the corner, slinger tight in her hand. A healing graft covered most of her abdomen, but a dribble of blood stained her orange pants. Witts and Klose came into range of her wrist imagers, appearing out of the fog.
Witts stood before the ship’s core, where a throbbing series of sigils formed a luminous shield around a floating stone spike. The dagger-sized rock’s surface reflected light in dazzling rainbows, as though it doubled the color of every ray that struck it. Behind Witts, Klose stood watch, slingers at the ready for any more vines.
“Look at the shield; just like the files said,” called Witts, waving Klose over to dig inside his pack. He drew out a hard case and opened it, revealing a steel-meshed mitt, covered in wires and eidolon batteries. “It’s a shame Doctor Qualls didn’t make it. This field test is as much her victory as mine.”
A woman’s voice echoed through the cavernous reactor facility, and the three explorers covered their ears in sudden shock.
“You are not an authorized user.”
Witts stopped messing with the glove and exchanged glances with Klose. “Interesting.”
Projections spun across the mildewed walls, the broken lights, the shattered computer consoles, painting the dingy wreck with a facade of sparkling white marble, glowing sconces, and chandeliers. The deck became the facsimile of a pale opera house, an arcade of fluted columns rising around them.
A hologram coalesced around the crystal: a statue of a nude woman, her flesh scintillating with subtle rainbows like oiled gunmetal. In one hand, she held a spear, barbed with a luminous blue point. In the other, a man’s severed head, mouth agape, eyes rolled back. Her gleaming body partially obscured the crystal shard, the stone resting at her heart, a frosted window in front like a safety housing. The woman’s form flickered and danced with the rattling of a moldered projector.
Her lips moved, and she said, “I am Ursula. I keep the last record of the dead art. I am the unbroken chain to our Origin. What is your intention?”
“An actual Origin AI,” said Witts. “I’d always heard they gave you avatars, but I’ve never seen one.”
Ursula gave him a curious look. “Is that the last thing you’d like to say before I activate my countermeasures? Explain yourself or die.”
Witts smiled and shook his head. “I’ve come here for the shard of alchemy”—he pointed to her chest—“the one at your heart. I have a noble cause, if that helps.”
“And what would you do with it?” She placed the point of her spear against his sternum, its holographic light fizzling harmlessly away as it touched him. He craned his neck to get a better look at the tip, clearly interested in the provenance of the weapon.
He nodded. “You see, I’m going to bend our timeline into a circle. Humans live against a ticking clock—an ending universe. I’ll perpetuate humanity beyond time itself.”
Ursula stared impassively down at him, perfectly still. “The shard is not powerful enough for such a task.”
“Oh, leave that to me.” Witts checked the various connections on his maille glove. “I’ll supply the power, if your crystal supplies the means.”
From her hidden vantage point, Mostafa nodded for him, hope spreading across her face.
Ursula frowned. “None are worthy.”
Witts’s brow furrowed. “Oh?”
“None are worthy. Your explanation is wanting. You may never have the dead art, and you may never leave.”
“Yes, I didn’t think it would work, either, which is why I brought this.” Witts flicked a switch on the glove, filling its palm with a tangled cage of light. He reached for the crystal at the center of her chest.
“Do not dare to hope,” said Ursula.
A flash lit the palatial walls as Witts contacted the projection and the strange shield surrounding the crystal. He screamed, drawing back a smoking arm. The manipulator fell away, clunking to the ground and exposing a shriveled hand.
“Not just a shield, then,” hissed Witts. “A life drain.”
“You’ve underestimated my defenses,” said Ursula, clearly pleased.
Witts stared at his ruined limb in fury, and with shaking fingers brushed away some of the ashen skin. “Klose, I need you,” he called.
“I’m trying, Doctor!” shouted his crewmate, blasting at an encroaching vine as it slithered from behind one of the consoles. More drooped down from the ceiling like deadly spiders, stark leaves pulsing with red against the marble columns.
Klose fired up at the vine, and the ship used its holographic projectors to obfuscate them, disguising the vines as dripping pendants of diamonds, multiplying the decoys in a dazzling array.
“Be at peace,” said Ursula.
Klose backed against Witts, and the old man turned to his compatriot.
&nb
sp; “All I have is sorrow,” said Witts.
“We can get out of this, Doctor!” said Klose. “We just need to—”
“But that’s not the same as regret.”
Witts slashed out a monstrous glyph, rending green ligatures from the fabric of reality, sweat beading on his brow. Palm charged with viridescent fire, he seized Klose by the neck and pushed the usurer’s mark inside him, strangling a cry from his victim. Klose’s skin began to sag as Witts’s arm regrew. His victim’s strength faltered, and Witts dragged him toward the shield with abhorrent vigor.
“I am sorry,” huffed the doctor, Klose convulsing in his grasp, “that I have need of your life energies. You’ve been good to me.”
His fingers struck the heart of Vogelstrand, and she roared in fury.
“Doctor!” called Mostafa, rushing from her hiding place in a panic. “What are you—”
Klose’s hair turned stark white, falling from his head in great clumps as his cheeks grew hollow, his eyes sunken. His arms fell limply to his sides, milky eyes rolling back in his head. With a howling shout, Witts forced his entire arm inside the projection, sacrificing Klose’s life to the shield.
Then darkness fell as Ursula dissipated, leaving Witts holding the coruscating shard.
“Doctor Witts…” Mostafa sank to her knees, eyes wide in horror as the vines descended around them.
The stone fit Witts’s half-withered hand like a dagger, facets flashing ominously in the emergency lights. He stabbed it into his exposed throat, forcing it down his neck in a spurt of blood. It dissolved into his flesh, charging his veins with vile energies and lighting his pupils with arcane fire. Then the stone was gone, and the doctor was whole again.
Klose coughed and sputtered on the ground, his ruined body still reaching for Witts’s boot. “Y-you…”
The usurer’s mark once again appeared in front of Witts, though he didn’t trace it. It simply popped into being in response to his will. The doctor turned the sigil this way and that, inspecting the spell—then he twisted it into another shape entirely, its color going black. It multiplied into four other glyphs, each peeling away to become its own spell. He swiped his hand once at Klose’s body.
His fellow expeditionary shattered into thousands of rose petals, scattered by some unseen wind. One of the vines lashed out, and Witts struck it away with a bare hand, blasting it to ash. With another sweep of his fingers, all the vines above blew apart into flakes of white carbon, falling upon them like snow.
Mostafa stared at him with quivering lips. “Why?”
Witts turned to her, bloodshot eyes burning with a dead, oily black fire. He reached down to the nearest console with a mason’s mark, and the gilded bits began to melt. A tangle of other spells followed, coalescing and linking together, moving through one another. Every scrap of gold in the room fell from fixtures, molding, arches, and tiles, flowing together and weaving up Witts’s legs. Mostafa yelped as strands of dripping metal fell around her like snakes. Glittering cloth stitched into robes, and Witts touched them with the painter’s mark to make them shine in emerald and sapphire. Razor-straight golden feathers sprouted along his shoulders, and a stylized eagle’s head formed over his eyes.
Other glyphs resolved around his fingertips, lengthening his bones, wrapping them in cords of muscle until they were nightmarish claws. He grew in his regalia, hunching over her as though she were a delicious meal. His usurer’s marks returned, and he flexed his arachnid fingers with a hungry gaze.
“You have given me everything but your life. A final sacrifice, if you please.”
“Why?”
“Because it tidies things up, Sekhet. I’m moving on to the next phase, and it’s easiest if I start fresh. The Mostafa fortune was extremely helpful.”
“But I’ve been faithful.”
His face darkened. “And I’ll memorialize that faith.”
She lowered her eyes, and he came forward to wrap her in a deadly embrace. Her slinger flashed as she shot him in the knee.
Mostafa’s fearful face filled the imager, sweat dripping from every pore.
“Don’t come looking for me,” she said, flinching as some cacophonous screech like rending metal filled the microphones. “I’m sending this because you deserve to know I’m dead. You were right, and I’m sorry. I never should’ve left.”
“Who are you calling?” came a monstrous voice. “You’ve signed their death warrant, too.”
Mostafa’s bones began to twist.
“Okay,” breathed Boots, staring into the agonized features of the frozen woman. “That was a thing we watched.”
“We’re dead,” said Cordell, walking around the massive, twisted nose. “Did you see that spell he cast?”
Boots shivered and shook out her hands. “Which one? That big usurer’s mark, or—”
Malik folded his hands behind his back, stepping away from Sekhet Mostafa’s glowing image. “The four spells. They were instantaneous—no tracing. That’s the mark of a godlike glyph. Just like Izak Vraba’s in the Masquerade.”
“Or Dwight Mandell’s in the Harrow,” Boots added. “Kin, scrub back to Klose’s death and freeze.”
The room raced and reoriented, flowing through static to the moment Witts transformed Klose’s body into a shower of flower petals. Four glyphs encircled the doctor, his brow impassive as Klose’s body began to split like dried earth.
“Four spells,” said Cordell, shaking his head. “That’s impossible.”
“Look at this…” Boots stepped up to the figure of Witts, banging her knee on one of the projection-concealed mess hall benches.
“Please use caution, Lizzie,” said Kin. “As I said before, the projections will obscure—”
“Yep. You called it. Hit my leg,” said Boots, stifling a pained noise. “As I was saying, look at this.” She pointed to tenebrous strands of energy connecting all four glyphs. “They’re working in concert. So not only can Witts instantly cast them, he can chain them together. Kin, identify those marks.”
A chime. “Those are the sculptor’s mark, the weatherman’s cantrip, the mariner’s mark, and the embolist’s mark.”
“Reshape the body’s water into flowers, rupture it, then blow it away,” Cordell said. “This bastard has a flair for the dramatic. Could’ve just blasted the poor guy with a fire spell.”
Boots peered at the multicolored lights, instinctively avoiding the spells’ target. “I feel like it was a test of the shard… thingy. This probably lets him cast any mark, even the weird ones.”
“The ‘weird ones’?” Kin repeated.
“You know,” said Boots, “like Vraba’s shadow demon thing.”
“With major-league warship amps,” said Cordell. “Imagine a ship-to-ship action against him.”
Boots glanced at her worried companions. “I’d rather not.”
They stood in contemplation of the terrible power in their midst, none of them wanting to speak. Boots crossed to Sekhet Mostafa and looked her over, observing in fine detail the horror on her face. Whatever had caused her to sign onto Witts’s expeditionary mission, this wasn’t it.
“Kin,” she said, “do these files have any location tags?”
“I’m sorry, Lizzie,” the AI replied. “Those are part of the corrupted file headers. Impossible without the aid of a top-flight datamancer, and even then, I do not give that person good odds.”
Cordell winced.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Play the last video file. The one where she’s running.”
The mess hall shifted and reoriented to Mostafa, stumbling through a field of tall grass.
“Freeze,” said Boots. She rested her hands on her hips, tonguing the inside of her lip as she surveyed the scene. “I think we can find some clues here.”
“What kinds of plants are these?” asked Malik.
Kin chimed, “Those are Tethe
cor Hardy Grass, a terraforming breed likely to be found on eight thousand two hundred and forty-six worlds.”
“Doesn’t narrow it down much,” grumbled Cordell. He shook a flavored toothpick out of a pack and chewed on it for a second, then with clear disappointment, flicked it away. “Any records of the Rangan mission, or the Vogelstrand?”
Kinnard gave off a little query tune. “Negative, Captain Lamarr. Not upon cursory search. Querying the Link through encoded Compass protocols yields a similar result. In addition, I was unable to find any of the mission patches from—”
Malik narrowed his eyes. “Kin, we didn’t ask you to query the Link. It’s a security risk. Please don’t do that unless we tell you to.”
“Acknowledged.”
Boots chewed her thumbnail. “You think Compass is monitoring our comms when we use their encryption, sir?”
Malik nodded.
“So…” said Cordell, stretching his back. “I’m guessing that the Taitutians have some records of this stuff. We could head to the Special Branch Archives there.”
“And probably get whacked,” Boots added. “You remember the last time?”
She shuffled forward to the image of Witts, taking care not to bang her legs on the table, and curiously passed her hand through his face. It would’ve been nice to plunge her fingers into his eye sockets and squeeze. Lacking a serious advantage, a fight with the man himself would last all of two seconds.
“What I wouldn’t give for a few unobstructed kilometers, Aisha, and a sniper engine,” said Boots.
Cordell smirked. “I expect you’ll give the next five to ten years of your life in the hunt. We’ll get him, Bootsie.”
“If I might make a suggestion,” said Kin. “We should rendezvous with the Fifth Fleet. Capital ships will have a direct line to the Special Branch Archives, as well as top-level clearance. You can do your research and make a handoff to Special Agent Weathers at the same time. It’s simple efficiency.”