“Leave now? Aw, c’mon, Colonel,” she whined. “This is really amazing. The portal is shining like the sun now. And Singh hasn’t ordered us out yet, so I have to assume that whatever he’s going to do, he’s not ready to do yet.”
Tamerlane took this in and felt himself growing ever so slightly concerned. Shouldn’t Singh have already booted the others out? He’d thought the man had clearly understood his orders. Frowning, he eased back on his ship’s accelerator. “Maybe I should come back,” he told Dalton.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” Dalton quickly replied. “If you’re ordering us out, I’ll get us out right now.”
Tamerlane started to agree with this, but then he hesitated. He was starting to get a bad feeling, and he had no clear idea why. “No, no,” he said, “stay there for now. Tell me what’s happening.”
“Singh’s done with whatever he was measuring,” Dalton reported, clearly enjoying her new role as play-by-play announcer. “Now he’s back down by the base, working on something. The rest of us are just standing around, enjoying the ambiance of the place. It’s so nice,” she snorted. “Maybe I should build a house here someday.”
Tamerlane laughed. He was coming to like Dalton. To like her a great deal, and more every minute.
“Hey, what’s that?” Dalton was saying. Tamerlane snapped back to reality, hearing the surprise in her voice.
“Something wrong, Lieutenant?” he asked over the relayed link.
Dalton didn’t reply. She was obviously addressing Singh. “Hey—where did you get—hey, that… is that really what I think it is?”
“What’s going on?” Tamerlane demanded, growing slightly concerned—and frustrated by his inability to see what was transpiring in the cave. He didn’t like surprises, particularly at sensitive points in a mission, and particularly from his own team.
A pause, and then Dalton finally answered. Her voice was full of puzzlement and wonder. “Singh just pulled a sword—a golden sword—out of a box he had here.”
“In front of you all?” Tamerlane snapped, surprised.
“You—you knew about it, sir?”
“Just a minute,” he told Dalton. Accessing the Aether link, he recalibrated for Singh.
“Lieutenant,” he called. “What are you doing? You weren’t supposed to let the others see the sword!”
No reply. The link felt dead.
“Singh! Can you hear me? Are you receiving?”
Nothing.
Frustrated, Tamerlane switched back over to Dalton.
“What’s happening there, Lieutenant? What’s Singh doing?”
“I—I have no idea, sir,” she answered. “He won’t talk to us. He’s moving all robotically, and he’s got the sword, and—” She hesitated, then, “No, Reilly—stay back from him. I don’t like this. Something is wrong!”
Tamerlane was growing increasingly frustrated. “Dalton, what—?”
She screamed. Even piped across the relayed Aether link, it was blood-curdling.
That was enough. Tamerlane spun his ship around and pointed it right back where he’d come from.
“Colonel,” Dalton said, her voice shredded by horror, “Singh just killed Reilly.”
“What?”
For a second she apparently couldn’t speak at all. Then, “Cut him down with the sword, right here in front of us!”
Tamerlane’s mind reeled.
“Colonel—it’s like he’s possessed!”
Tamerlane was at a loss for words. All Singh was supposed to do was use the machinery to fully open any naturally-existing portal they could locate, and then throw the sword through it. As strange as that sounded—and it struck Tamerlane as very strange indeed—those were the orders handed down directly to Tamerlane from the highest levels of the Imperial government, following his successful theft of the sword from the vault on Candis. It was all top secret, of course; nobody outside of Tamerlane and Singh, aside from the Emperor himself and his closest advisors, even knew the sword’s whereabouts at all. And so the other soldiers present on this mission were not supposed to see anything. But Tamerlane had taken that to mean, “Shield them from seeing the sword and what becomes of it.” There had been nothing in the orders about actually eliminating any possible witnesses.
Another thought struck Tamerlane then. Was Singh trying to steal the sword for himself? Could that be possible? Where would he go with it? How could he get it off the planet? Was someone else in it with him?
Panic began to grip Tamerlane’s heart. He shoved the accelerator of his shuttle almost all the way forward. “Shoot him, Dalton!” he barked. “Just shoot him!”
“We’re trying, sir! Nobody’s pistol is working! By the gods—” Silence again, enough to make Tamerlane want to scream. Silence that extended for several more excruciating seconds. Then, “Westerfeld rushed him and now he’s dead, too,” she murmured, her voice sounding softer now and very far away. Tamerlane suspected she was going into shock.
He slammed his fist down on the console.
“Dalton,” he called, “get out of there. Now! That’s an order!”
“He’s doing something, sir,” she replied, apparently ignoring the colonel’s words. “He’s standing in front of the portal. He’s got the sword—sir, I think it really is the Sword of Baranak. I think he had it all the time! Is he the one that stole it? How? None of this makes any sense to me.”
“Dalton, don’t worry about that now. You’ve got to get away from him. I’ll be there in a minute—I’ll deal with him. Get back to the ship!”
Dalton ignored him, if she was even hearing him anymore. “Now he’s raising the sword, holding it up over his head. And now—what’s he doing? He’s throwing it through! Sir—he just threw the sword through the portal, into whatever dimension lies on the other side.” Her voice grew stronger, louder, as she called to the man. “Why did you do that, Singh? What are you—?”
Tamerlane’s singleship had just passed over the horizon to the point that he could see the mountain and cliff face. Lightning was flaring out from the cave. The larger Donbas was a tiny silver sparkle resting nearby, illuminated by the horrific discharge.
“Dalton!”
A flash, blindingly bright.
The explosion ripped the top off the mountain, sent Tamerlane spinning nearly out of control, and annihilated the Donbas and everything else in a two-mile radius.
2
Major Niobe Arani slipped from shadow to shadow in the night, her target never leaving her sight. The man she followed wore a black cloak and hood, and he hurried along through the deserted backstreets of the ruined city with a definite purpose—a purpose Arani suspected she knew very well. She adjusted her night vision implants while trying to ignore the reeking smell of smoke and death all around. As soon as the target rounded a corner, she rushed across the street to the next point of concealment, keeping her target always in view. Her slender, lithe figure was almost invisible in the gloom, her silky black hair blending into the darkness along with the rest of her.
Along the way she had to sidestep chunks of rubble and debris that filled the street. The bombing, followed by the long ground campaign, had ultimately pacified this rebellious city on a fringe planet—Trezibond, she thought it was called, but wasn’t sure—in an insignificant corner of the Anatolian Empire, but at tremendous cost to its infrastructure. In short, it had been bombed nearly back to the Stone Age. And even after that, General Nakamura still believed elements of the enemy’s forces remained in place—though mostly gone to ground.
That was where she came in. Niobe Arani was a Special Forces agent with the First Legion, highly trained and highly skilled at surveillance and covert action. Where an army had perhaps failed to clean up all the bad elements of this world, it was hoped agents like Arani could root the worst of them out on an individual basis.
So she hurried along, keeping to the darkest corners, at least one eye always on the target. And after nearly half an hour of tailing him, she was finally rewarded for
her skills and her persistence: the target seemed to reach his destination.
The man in the black robes stood before a narrow door set into a nondescript gray concrete wall. It appeared to be the side entrance to a warehouse complex of some sort. Arani suspected it was much more than that.
The door slid silently open and the man passed inside. It closed behind him.
Arani transmitted her current position and situation to her commanders via an encrypted Aether link, just in case the automatic tracking wasn’t working or was being somehow blocked—as unlikely as that was. Having done so, she held her position and waited for confirmation from the higher-ups.
Two minutes later, she was still waiting.
Arani frowned. While it had been understood up front that Aether communications were to be kept to a minimum, just in case the enemy had some way of listening in, they should have at least acknowledged her transmission, if only with a single tone at the prearranged frequency. But—nothing.
Normally—ideally—her job would be over now. Having tracked her quarry to his destination, which she hoped was a high-value target as well, she should have been able to sit back and watch as the army came rushing in, armed to the teeth, to capture all the bad guys in this cultist cell and drag them all away for interrogation and incarceration.
Instead, she found herself all alone in this crater of a city, swimming in darkness, with likely very dangerous individuals only a short distance away. Dangerous individuals who might well be blocking her communications with the rest of the team this very moment, she realized. Who might well know she—or at least someone—was observing them.
The mission parameters had been exceeded, she understood then. Nobody had ordered her, on her own, to go up against a dangerous cell of terrorist cultists. Time to go. She would make her way back out of this section of the city and look for the first army patrol she could find—she’d tell them where her target had holed up, and then try to figure out why her link to the rest of her unit had been cut off.
She never got the chance to do any of that.
When she turned to head back up the street, she ran headlong into two figures in black who were lurking just there. They had been sneaking up behind her but apparently had not expected her to move so suddenly, and they both stumbled backward a step.
Shocked for an instant, Arani recovered quickly and sprang into action. She leapt up and delivered a sharp kick to the chin of the nearest figure, then turned her landing motion into a tuck-and-roll that caused the second figure’s punch to miss over her head. Swinging around, she kicked out and took that one’s legs out from under him.
Springing back to her feet, she immediately started to sprint away from the two attackers—but another shape suddenly appeared in her path. It was too late to stop; she tried to dodge to her right but the new figure moved like lightning. It shot out a hand from within dark robes and grasped her in an iron grip, nearly yanking her off her feet. Before she could counterattack, the first two caught up and took her one by each arm, pulling her back, as the third figure released her.
She struggled but couldn’t break their grip. Angrily she glared up at the big shape as it turned to regard her.
“You’d better let me go,” she hissed. “I’m with the First Legion—and they’re on their way now.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“What?”
The larger figure reached up with rugged, powerful hands, and now she could see under the hood.
A silvery mask glinted there; a mask inscribed with incredibly complex, sweeping black lines and blasphemous shapes. His voice was distorted to the point that it scarcely sounded human.
Arani’s eyes widened slowly. Her legs grew weak. She gasped.
It was the mask of a high priest of the death cult of Vorthan.
The masked man laughed softly, then motioned toward the door. He started that way, and the two goons in black dragged Arani along behind him.
“As you can doubtlessly imagine, I am well aware that the First Legion is in this city,” the silver-masked man told her in his highly-distorted voice as the other two set her up on the rough stone altar at the center of the room and began to tie her down flat upon it with smooth, synthetic ropes. “And I have every confidence that we are mere moments away from your fellow soldiers crashing our party. They are quite welcome.”
Arani was taken aback by this. She had no idea how to respond. These terrorists were looking forward to the Legion breaking in and arresting them? How could that be?
Her eyes flashed beyond the robed and hooded figures that loomed over her; quickly she absorbed what she could see of the room they all occupied. It stretched for twenty meters in every direction and the ceiling was so far above them that she could barely make it out in the dimness. A haze of smoke or fog hung over everything, as well, obscuring her view.
What her eyes settled on next sent chills through her.
The big figure—the leader—saw where she was looking, and saw her reaction. He laughed softly. “So—you recognize the symbol of our lord, then?”
An iconic image about two meters wide and slightly taller hung on the wall directly in front of her as she was presently oriented. Its border gleamed gold; its interior was a swirl of red and black. A flame seemed to dance, hologram-like, across its face.
“Vorthan,” she hissed.
The big man laughed again. “Yes. Our Lord Vorthan. The god who died and will live again.”
“Not likely,” Arani spat. “He was dissolved—dispersed by the powers of Heaven. The Lord Lucian—”
“The criminal Lucian is long gone,” the masked man snapped. “That treacherous monster will never again work his deviltry on humanity.”
Arani couldn’t help but gasp in incredulity at this. “Lucian was the treacherous monster? Are you serious? You—a Vorthan cultist—have the gall to—”
The other raised one hand to halt her. “Clearly we have differing views. That is to be expected. But this is probably not the best time or place for a theological debate.” He gestured all around. “Your opinions aside, the master is returning. And you will be a small part of making that happen.”
“What do you mean? I’m not doing anything to help you.”
“Oh, indeed you will.” He stepped back, and his grin was visible through the mask’s open mouth. “For you see, we believe that an offering of blood and death will effect our lord Vorthan’s return to this universe.”
Arani blanched. “Blood and death?” She looked down at herself, lying prone on a rough-hewn altar, and began to understand. Panic flirted with the edges of her mind. She took a couple of seconds to compose herself, to settle her thoughts. “So,” she asked, “just how much of that ‘blood and death’ to you believe it will take to bring him back?”
“We have no idea,” the masked man answered, his grin still evident. “So we will simply continue to try—to create plenty of both—until we finally succeed. However long it takes.”
Arani tried to swallow and found she could not.
“So,” she croaked, “what are you planning to do? Drive a ceremonial dagger into my chest? Does it matter if I’m a virgin or something?”
The three all laughed. “Blood is blood,” the masked man replied. “Death is death.”
Arani balled up her fists in frustration.
The leader looked away for a second, likely hearing something over a closed network, since Arani found the Aether still blocked from access. He nodded, spoke a few words very softly, such that Arani couldn’t hear them, and then looked back down at her. “The army has arrived,” he said, appearing well pleased. “Time for my associates and me to get clear.”
Arani processed this. “Get clear? What do you mean?”
The other two turned and darted out of the room, vanishing through a shadowy doorway. The masked man started to follow them, then stopped and regarded her one last time.
“Blood and death,” he said. He turned so that his back was to her, reached up, rem
oved the mask, and tossed it aside. And then he was gone.
And Arani understood.
Desperately she tugged at the ropes that bound her to the altar. She redoubled her efforts to access the Aether link, cursing meanwhile her decision not to carry a standard communicator with her. The Aether being jammed, she had absolutely no way to contact the rest of her team.
Seconds ticked by. She grew increasingly frantic—not just for herself but for all of them. She had to get loose. She—
The ropes. She strained to raise her head and shoulders far enough to see her arms, and when she did she saw something that gave her at least a sliver of hope. The ropes were synthetic smart ropes—and military-issue, which made sense, given what she’d witnessed thus far.
Quickly she issued a mental order to her Aether link to override the external repeating signal she’d been attempting to send to the Legion—that was hopelessly jammed—and switch to internal systems. That granted her access to a very limited range of tools she could command mentally, but one of them was a subsystem that lined the sleeves of her black uniform: the system allowing her to manipulate military-issue smart rope.
A second later the order she gave had been relayed through her uniform and directly to the ropes where the two touched. The ropes obeyed; they instantly expanded, releasing her.
Arani sprang to her feet and leapt from the altar, then sprinted across the room to the door the cultists had used moments earlier. As she went, she couldn’t help but laugh defiantly: their plan would’ve succeeded if only they’d bothered to roll up her sleeves!
As she passed through the doorway and down a hall that led back out onto the street, she switched her Aether link back to external communications. This time she saw that the other members of her unit were close enough that the connection could overcome the jamming signal. She practically screamed over it, “Arani to Unit One! Danger! Do not approach the building! Pull back! Pull back!”
She smashed her way through the outer door and stumbled out into the darkened, rubble-filled street. There she ran headlong into a dozen black-clad soldiers coming from the opposite direction, converging on the building.
The Shattering: Omnibus Page 4