by Chris Fox
“My people were born in the stars.” The Darthien raised its hand and Nélida rose helplessly into the air. “And the stars are where we belong.” Waving Nélida forward, the Fey sliced her in half as it walked by, her lungs lacerated to the point that she couldn’t even scream as the Darthien let what was left of her drop with a wet squish onto the deck.
Cailyn's mind had gone completely blank with terror. This Fey… no, this thing, was slaughtering her squad as if they were cattle… and all she could do was watch.
Virág, even punch drunk as she was, managed to get close enough to the Fey to use her sword. The pursuing duel lasted for a sum total of three moves before the Darthien gutted her, sliced off her arm, and kicked what was left of her scornfully across the deck.
“They will see,” the Darthien said in an almost bored tone. “The Collective will see.” It reached out and took hold of Emel with its power and brought her, struggling, to face height. “That we need to be strong, we need to….” Whatever it had been about to say was lost as a puzzled expression crossed the Darthien’s beautiful face. Looking down, it saw that the blade of an enchanted sword was sticking through the center of its chest.
“Oh, who gives a shit, you blue-blooded bastard!” Ariadna near whispered into its ear.
Its features deformed as it howled, the sheer force of it knocking them all back to their knees, blowing Ariadna the furthest away.
It turned about, tossing Emel at Ariadna as if she was an armored rock. When that did not immediately annihilate her, its scream became a raw force of energy itself, tearing at her armor as if it was cloth, shredding the flesh beneath and spraying Ariadna’s blood and guts all over the forecastle behind her.
The Drive! Some part of Cailyn screamed. If the gravity drive is disabled, reinforcements can teleport in.
As the last of Ariadna was sent splattering across the forecastle deck, Cailyn started running for the quarter deck. The thing that claimed to be a Fey had reformed itself so it looked just as it had before and had started to make its way toward Emel when it caught sight of Cailyn racing across the main deck.
“Hey!” Emel shouted as she fired a single blast of plasma at the Thing. It caught it harmlessly, but turned its attention back to Emel. “It’s my turn to fight you,” she sneered with almost the same contempt as the freaky Fey had upon its own face.
Cailyn raced up the stairs that led to the sterncastle deck. Several Gol tried to race down, but Cailyn managed to trip, punch, and kick her way past them. Once up on the deck, she saw the Carolina’s gravity drive and wondered how the thing was even functioning, let alone creating an anti-teleportation field.
There were half a dozen red-skinned Gol all decked out like the ship’s engineers. Each one was working feverishly to keep the gutted gravity drive from dying or at least not blowing up, as the case may be, into a miniature black hole.
The red skins looked as if they were about to come at her, then suddenly they all dropped prone to the ground.
“Shit!” Cailyn cursed, raising her gauntlets too late before a sudden bright line of pain exploded between her back and breasts.
“It is admirable,” the Darthien said in the common speech of Pangea as it removed its weapon from her back and chest. “How you all fight against the inevitable.” Cailyn felt herself drop like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. In horror, she realized that she could no longer feel anything below her waist.
“But you are a flawed creation,” the twisted Fey said with almost a hint of pity, “of a flawed god.” As the Darthien walked past her, it dropped Emel’s headless body onto the deck beside her. “Of a flawed world that desperately needs our hand to guide it.”
Oddly, in this moment—paralyzed, alone, the blood of her entire squad splattered across her armor, with barely enough power inside her suit for even a single shot—Cailyn felt… calm.
She was going to die. She knew it. And that certainty did not bring with it the fear that she thought it should have. Or maybe it did, but it felt like a great curtain falling over her emotions. She was still feeling them, but they had no influence upon her.
In the end, none of that really mattered, because she still had a job to do.
“Your… hand?” Cailyn said, allowing her gauntleted hands to fall down onto the metallic deck. “Who… the fuck… do you think you are?” She fell forward onto her hands and knees, the power building up inside her gauntlets, helpless to release it.
“I am the shard of a god,” the Darthien said, moving silently around her. “I am one of many.” Cailyn gritted her teeth as the freak of a Fey took aim at her neck with its sword. She pulled her left hand up in what appeared to be an attempt to stand but she ended up just hanging there, propped up on one hand. “I am the future of your people, the savior of your world, and bringer of your species’ redemption.”
“Fates, damn it!” Guardian Safira cursed. “You talk too much.” Cailyn released the energy from her suit into the floor beneath them. The fingers and palm of her gauntlet started to glow red with intensity and Cailyn heard herself cry out in pain as her hands burned.
The glow from her gauntlets radiated through the metallic floor and caused it to first bow and then ooze down into the quarters below.
The Darthien cursed in its strange language before losing its footing upon the sagging floor. Cailyn was under no illusions that the melted metal or radiating heat would hurt it, but it did distract it just long enough for Guardian Cailyn Safira to take aim with her left gauntleted hand and fire.
What happened next she would never be able to put into real words. Not really.
The plasma hit the drive. It imploded, but the Darthien, in an obvious attempt to save its own life, conjured… something. Something powerful. And bright. It seemed to be made up of everything the void was not. Time itself slowed and she saw the Darthien walking down a grand hallway, its arms outstretched in supplication.
“I am sorry,” it said without words. “You were right.” Somehow, Cailyn knew that it was escaping. Not just justice, but death itself. “I want to come home now.” The realization that the Fey was about to be welcomed home enraged her.
She screamed a thousand screams and reached out with not just her burned hands but with her very soul.
“Please take me back…” the Darthien wept. “I am so alone… I….” A look of disbelief crossed the twisted Fey’s face. Looking down in astonishment, it found Cailyn’s burnt and charred hand gripping at its heels for all she was worth.
“No.” The voice boomed through the enchanted hallway and now it was the Darthien who was screaming. Cailyn watched in horrific satisfaction as it was stretched, torn, and annihilated before her eyes.
Addendum:
Guardian Safira was found floating within the void in the approximate position where we believed the PSS Carolina should have been. Her entire suit had melted onto her, but by some miracle, her life support enchantments were utterly undamaged and she had about a day’s worth of power left inside her suit. That is approximately about the time it took for us to find her.
She was rushed back to the city of Beteru on the first moon of Pangea, Impah, for immediate medical attention.
I am told she suffered a severed spine, third degree burns over sixty percent of her body, and possible serious brain damage. She currently remains within a healing circle under constant observation. Since she was found, she hasn’t regained consciousness. A mentalist was brought in to figure out what happened, but the memories he pulled out of her must have been damaged during her injuries, because they made no sense.
Our best diviners had scrutinized the area of the void where she was found, and they have collaborated her memory of destroying the gravity drive, which would account for the PSS Carolina’s disappearance. At this time, it is believed to have been utterly annihilated by the drive implosion. Though as to how Guardian Safira survived such an implosion is at this time unexplainable. It is possible that once Magi Safira has recovered enough to re-enter c
onsciousness, that a second investigation of these events might prove to shed some light on what happened.
Second Addendum:
I was unsure if I should include this, but along with the melted armor that Guardian Safira was found imprisoned within, there was a second glob of deformed metal. When broken open, it revealed a very strange impression of something that matches very closely to the Darthien described within her memories. Though no other evidence was found within the glob, it should also be noted that Guardian Safira's left hand had been melted into the glob and an impression of her fingers was found inside it, at just the spot where you would expect a creature’s heel to be.
End of Report
Tech, Lies, and Wizardry
J.S. Morin
Black Ocean Prequel
Carl Ramsey tipped his chair back and downed a long swig of Mars-brewed ale. It carried a name brand but was probably a cheap knock-off to justify the price. It fit the place. Voices droned on all around, but no one could make out much beyond their own table. Overhead holovids showed six different team sports, three combat exhibitions, and over a dozen forms of racing suited to wagering, each broadcast along with its own audio feed. If that weren’t enough, a bland, modern electronic soundtrack played, just in case anyone could hear themselves think. Stomper’s Pub was no place for a thinker.
What Stomper’s lacked in genteel refinement it made up for in discretion. The blaring noise, the distracting holos, and the dim, smoky atmosphere made eavesdropping and surveillance difficult. But while plenty of visitors to Orion Space Station Echo Nine came to Stomper’s to lose a tail, meet with covert operatives, or transact illegal commerce, most came for the barbecue chicken, which claimed to be the best outside the Sol system.
“Lousy, lying sons-of-bitches,” Mort grumbled, dropping a bone onto his plate. The old wizard wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and his hands on his jeans. “This stuff’s processed. Look, all those bones are identical.”
Carl gave an easy chuckle. “Seriously… you expect these guys have a real smoker back there? This station isn’t made of oxygen.”
“They’re really not bad,” said Roddy. “Just wash ‘em down.” The laaku sat in a booster chair to be on his companions’ level. Descended from chimp-like ancestors, his furry species were quadridexterous. Roddy was taking advantage of that marvel of evolutionary biology to shovel chicken wings into his mouth while two-fisting cans of Earth’s Preferred, a beer so reviled that it wasn’t even commercially available on its eponymous world.
A clawed paw extended a raw wing in Mort’s direction. “Want one of mine?” Mriy asked with a fanged grin. Her azrin people were hunters, evolved from the jungle cats of their world. She popped the uncooked wing in her mouth and bit into it with an audible crunch of bone, then picked her teeth with a claw.
“You chuckleheads aren’t worried?” asked Tanny, the fifth of their group. She held out a chronometer that showed the time at 19:21 Earth Standard. “He’s twenty-one minutes late now.”
“He’s a kid,” said Roddy. “Probably stopped him at the door and his ID didn’t scan out.” He laughed at his own joke, a high-pitched, in-breathing shriek reminiscent of his earth-born cousins.
“If Charlie can’t fake an ID that’ll get past the door of a dive like this, he’s not worth waiting for,” said Carl. “Besides, there’s a lot to see this side of the Black Ocean. When’s the kid ever been off Mars?”
“All the more reason to go looking for him,” Tanny replied. “We’re on a time table, and every minute is cutting into it.”
“Got almost two hours,” Carl countered with a shrug that tipped his chair precariously.
“Maybe we can find someplace else to eat,” Mort grumbled.
Tanny pushed back her chair and stood. “I’m checking with station security.”
Roddy coughed and spluttered his beer. “Seriously? You remember why we’re here, right?”
“Yeah, but he’s still my cousin. Something’s not right here.”
Johnathan A. Jones, Male, 19, multiple stab wounds, condition: stable, 2 assailants at large.
The security report was terse, professional, and had all the information Tanny had needed to track Charlie down at the station’s med-bay. He was traveling under the Johnathan Jones alias and neither the med staff nor station security had flagged any irregularities in the ID. Station Echo Nine was in a rough-and-tumble part of the sector, with open carry of blasters and limited navy presence, but it was linked to the ARGO medical omni. For Charlie to have passed a routine DNA screen was a good sign that his identity fraud was up to par.
The rest of Charlie, not so much.
He was awake and alert, in no visible pain—the wonders of modern medicine. But his torso was clamped to the table with a sterile barricade that covered him from ribcage to pelvis like he was a construction site.
“Hey, Tania,” Charlie greeted her when she and Carl squeezed past the departing med staff. The clean, sky-blue uniforms looked out of place on a station where dark and tough were the bywords of fashion. Tanny with her marine patches on her coat and Carl’s battered leather jacket looked just as out of place in the white-on-white everything in the med-bay.
“The hell happened to you, Charlie?” Tanny asked. “And I haven’t heard anyone call me Tania since I enlisted. It’s Tanny these days.”
“Well, there’s no ‘Charlie’ here either,” Charlie said. “I’m John, remember. And even if I wasn’t, professionally I go by ‘Chip.’ I was on my way to that shithole bar we were supposed to meet at—do you know they’re only 37% rated on Rintaki’s List?—when I ran into a couple guys.”
“A couple guys…” Carl echoed. He could see where this was going. ‘Chip’ was baby-faced and smart-mouthed, a world-beating combination for making friends among grizzled spacers.
“Yeah, I kinda turned to slip past ‘em, you know, like anyone my size does in a crowd,” Chip said, twisting as much as the med-bay equipment allowed to demonstrate the motion. “One of them sticks a shoulder out and levels me. His buddy picks me up by the collar—I mean right off the floor!—all apologizing and shit. Offers to give me a hand and drags me into a side corridor; my toes are barely touching ground. First guy makes off with my stuff and the guy dragging me hits me in the gut and drops me. I tried to yell after them, but that was about the time I noticed I was bleeding out. Screamin’ my girly ass off took priority from that point.”
“… and now you’re here,” said Carl.
“Yup,” Chip agreed. He patted the machine concealing most of his body. It made a solid thump. “Until this thing clones and installs me a new pancreas and spleen, I’m stuck here.” He giggled. “Something in there’s got to be pumping me full of neural blockers and anti-psychotics, because I’m not worried at all.”
“Well, that’s great…. Where’s your rig?” Tanny asked. “You stashed it somewhere secure before heading to meet us… right?”
Chip held up his hands and smiled disarmingly. “I swear, it was my next stop.”
“Shit,” Carl muttered.
“I know…” Chip said, his face wrinkled in concern. “I even had a wedding present for you in there.”
“That’s sweet, Charlie,” Tanny said.
“Chip,” Carl reminded her.
“… but we need that rig. Any idea where those guys ran off to? Could you ID them?”
Chip shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I’m in no shape for this business tonight. I’m out two days, they told me.”
Carl gave Tanny a worried look. “Lorstram’s not going to be cool with this.”
“That’s your department,” Tanny replied. “We’ve got under an hour and a half, no gear, and our hired tech is missing a spleen.”
Chip held up a finger. “And pancreas,” he added cheerfully.
Carl nodded to himself. “I got this….”
They met in a side corridor just outside the med-bay. After a perfunctory run-down on Chip’s health, they tur
ned to business. Mriy kept her back to the conversation as she watched the entrance, baring her teeth at anyone who looked too interested as they passed by.
“Okay, here’s the way I see it,” said Carl, keeping his voice low. Roddy, Tanny, and Mort leaned close to listen, and one of Mriy’s ears swiveled back toward them. “Chip’s stuff is here somewhere. Those meat casings that rolled him wouldn’t have any use for the stuff, so it’s probably at a fence or used equipment depot. Roddy, I want you to track it down.”
“Right, boss,” Roddy agreed.
“Mort, I want you tagging along to look out for him,” Carl continued. “I know this tech stuff isn’t your style, but a lone laaku asking questions is liable to run into the same kinda trouble Chip found.”
“No one will lay a hand on him,” Mort assured him.
“Tanny, Mriy, you girls are going hunting for the lowlifes who did Chip,” Carl said. “Timing’s tight enough on this. If we need to cut and fly, I don’t want to have to leave Chip here with those guys still loose.”
“Last thing we need is station security after us,” Tanny protested.
“Then don’t get caught,” Carl snapped. “Doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just make sure no one finds them for a few hours.”
Mriy turned her head and gave a nod. “Quick deaths. Quiet. Not a problem.”
“Good. We meet back at the med-bay at 20:30. Chip’s going to play his part, even if he doesn’t know it yet.”
“You going to visit Lorstram?” Tanny asked, her expression grim.
“Unless any of you lot want to volunteer to switch places… yeah,” said Carl, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He looked from one to the next, giving each the opportunity to jump in and offer to explain to their employer why the job was hanging by a spleen. There were no takers.