by Chris Fox
17
Simulation Theta
Skare watched the scry-screen from the command chair dominating the spartan bridge. The Dragon Skull drifted perilously close to the Ternus station, the ship so massive it could not squeeze into the largest berth.
The moment the ship connected to the station’s umbilical port, the bridge chimed and Caelendra spoke. “Pardon me, Lord Skare, but we’ve received a request for admittance from Governor Austin. He’s waiting to board.”
“Escort him to the bridge with a drone.” Skare waved absently, still lost in thought about Talifax, and what he’d managed to accomplish at Ternus. His destruction of the planet had been brilliantly orchestrated. So brilliant that Skare found it unsettling. Just how prepared was Talifax? He seemed to have an answer for everything.
It wasn’t long before Skare heard booted feet approaching up the corridor. Several moments later Austin strode onto the bridge, and to Skare’s surprise the governor was alone. Usually he had a retinue, and at least a few drones. Why had he come alone?
Skare raised a hand and waved at the quartet of techs working on the bridge. “Leave us.”
The white-uniformed techs rose, almost as one, and scurried from the chamber.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” the governor drawled. Austin gave a neutral nod as he moved to sit in one of the three chairs across from Skare. He loosened his tie, and withdrew a flask from inside his coat. “It ain’t what you think. High grade stimulants. Keep me on my feet a few hours past when I should pass out.”
Skare nodded, and rose. “I make no judgements, Governor. This war drives many of us to things we’d never have expected.” He figured that was as good a segue as he could offer, and noted the shrewd way Austin reacted to the words. The context wasn’t lost on him.
“Let’s get right to it then.” Austin’s faced hardened, and Skare could feel the anger radiating off of him. “Voria destroyed our capital. Nimitz thinks it was intentional, but you and I both know she’d never do that. This was probably an accident. She’s a new god, and so far as I know it don’t come with a manual. But whatever the reason…we can’t let this stand. My people will never forgive her.”
Skare nodded sympathetically. He returned to the command chair and sat. “It must be answered, I agree.”
“So…how do we do that? I need to give my people justice.” Austin eyed Skare searchingly, and Skare eyed him back, his expression conveying as much sympathy as he could muster. Or his best imitation anyway.
“Well, Governor.” Share mirrored the governor’s posture, knowing it would make the man more amenable, if only slightly. “You’re going to need magic. If you want to overcome Voria, it will require a counter to her immense Nature magic. You will need advanced magic of your own. You have ships infused with spirit. I would suggest obtaining a powerful source of water, and one of earth. Combined with spirit, these will grant access to Binding and Protection. Both will be key against Voria and her forces.”
Austin looked even more uncomfortable, and licked his lips before speaking. “I don’t understand magic, and we both know it. I’ve looked at your fancy circle, and I get what the words mean, but I don’t understand their practical application. If I understand correctly, earth and spirit would allow my ships to bind things, just like the Krox. That what you mean by binding?”
Skare nodded.
“And water and spirit? What would that do?” The governor took a pull from his flask, grimaced, then replaced it in his jacket pocket.
“Spirit and water form the greater path of protection.” Skare rose again, and approached the scry-screen. “Caelendra, please show simulation theta.” He turned back to the governor. “This is how you fight a god.”
The scry-screen resolved into an Inuran fleet, a hundred black ships in a spherical defensive formation. Magic flared around the center vessel, then rippled out to the others. Blue and white magic flowed from ship to ship, establishing a sort of latticework.
Krox appeared in the system, and raised a hand. He flung a tremendous ball of nuclear fire at the sphere of ships, but the sphere detonated on an invisible barrier a few kilometers out.
“Remarkable, yes?” Skare prompted as he eyed the governor. “Water and spirit would allow you to resist the assault of a god. Earth and spirit will allow you to control their dragons and their elementals.”
Austin eyed the screen thoughtfully. The sphere broke apart, and the ships converged on the god, their tendrils ripping magic from it in large quantities. A second and third fleet appeared, and the god was quickly overwhelmed.
“As you can see,” Skare explained, “your ships will be all but unstoppable if you procure the right types of magic.”
“And where do we acquire this magic?” Austin rubbed the legs of his pants, not a new habit if the wear on the pants were any indication.
“Right under our very noses.” Skare offered a magnanimous smile. “I would begin on the planet Marid. Your colony shares that world with Drakkon, the guardian of Marid. The dragon is one of Voria’s closest allies, and has no love for humanity. You could eliminate an enemy, and lay claim to the water magic you need all in one blow.”
Austin was nodding now. “Yes, I could see that. It’s our world, and the magic belongs to us. I’ll speak to Nimitz and arrange the assault.”
18
Drifter Rock
After her horrendous failure at Ternus, Voria translocated on instinct. At first she wasn’t sure why she chose Drifter Rock, a place she’d only frequented a half dozen times, but as she gazed down at the haphazard fleet around the porous asteroid she understood why.
They were the only people who still accepted her without reservation.
Going back to Shaya meant fencing with Ducius, and dealing with whatever accusations he hurled about her numerous failures. Yanthara was far too closely allied with the Inurans to be viable, and Skare would know the instant she arrived.
Virkon might tolerate her presence, but their welcome would be chilly at best, and violent at worst. Either way she’d be embroiling herself in a mess.
That left the most lawless station in the sector, one that had horrified her when she was a young officer, but gradually become a second home. Voria willed a missive to Pickus—just a message, not a request for communication. She didn’t really want to deal with her crew or her followers. Not just yet. She needed to be around people who wanted nothing. Well, nothing except swindling her in a trade, maybe.
Voria teleported inside the asteroid’s hollowed-out interior. Tunnels crisscrossed the entire thing, but they provided countless boltholes for drifters to scurry into if any military vessels or pirates showed up.
Hundreds of mismatched ships were parked in between brightly colored tents, and the haphazard marketplace extended across the interior. The low hum of conversations were welcome, and Voria lost herself in it as she threaded unerringly toward a specific stall.
Quite a few drifters, most clutching pints of beer, gawked at her as she passed. She’d muted the glow as much as she could, but there was no denying the luminescence. Shayans weren’t unknown here, but they were rare enough to be worthy of comment. Most drifters knew that Shayans glowed if they drank lifewine, so she hoped that was what they assumed.
It didn’t take long to reach the familiar green, blue, and red tents where Beadle ran his brewery. The very place she’d acquired the beer that had saved Bord’s life. A steady flow of drifters, and a few humans, clustered outside the stall. Both Beadle and his wife were working the line and taking orders, and Voria stole a moment to watch them work.
She towered over the drifters, which made her presence impossible for someone as perceptive as Beadle to miss. The drifter froze when he saw her, and gently doffed his battered cap, which he pressed to his chest.
“As I livenbreathe, if it ain’t the lady o’ light herself.” Beadle executed a perfect bow from the waist, which caused most of his patrons to turn and face her. “Gaze in wonder, lads. You’r
e in the presence of a living goddess.”
“Put yer jaw backin yer mouth, hoosband.” Beadle’s wife sidled up and planted both hands on her hips. “I don’t like the way yerstarin, goddess or no. You’ve got a wife, and dontchu forget it.”
Voria threw her head back and laughed. Something in her, a wound she’d been carrying, scabbed over in that moment. The pain lessened. There were still decent people in the sector. People who weren’t trying to use her for their own ends, or to eradicate everything.
“Hello, Beadle.” She approached the counter with a smile, and the crowd parted before her. “How has business been?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain.” He offered a gap-toothed smile. “Did you come for more beer? Didn’t know gods could hold their liquor.” Voria assumed it must have required supreme effort of will to make his speech understandable, and appreciated the gesture.
“Quite the opposite.” Voria folded her arms and looked to Magda. “I’m here to bless your beer. All of it.”
Perhaps using the immense power she’d been given for something so trivial was negligent, but these people had stood by her. They’d stood by the sector. Even now, drifters were cleaning and repairing the parts of the Spellship that humans largely avoided. They worked tirelessly, and didn’t complain. Yet they were disparaged across the entire sector as thieves and wastrels. She wanted to show them that a god believed in them.
“Whatcha gonna charge feraldis?” Beadle’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, while Magda merely raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing.” Voria folded her arms, and savored their expressions.
“Don’t make no sense,” Magda muttered. “Who goes around givin’ stuff fer nothin’?”
“A goddess,” Voria pointed out. “Your magic originated from Shaya, and I have come to reaffirm that magic. I’ve come because the drifters are the truest children of Shaya. Because you are still fighting and helping, and trying. And I want to reward that.”
Voria raised her arms and wove water and life together. A potent wave exploded from her in all directions, the magic tailored to only target beer. It clung to casks, pints, and jugs, and the vats where it was brewed. The magic altered the beer, and gave it the ability to heal. Voria gave those potions all the potency a goddess could muster.
“And what do you except us to do now, lady?” Beadle blinked up at her in awe.
“Make a profit.” She smiled, and for the first time enjoyed her godhood. “Go out into the sector and sell that beer. Sell it to people in need. Sell it to people fighting with us. Help them, and get rich doing it.”
Beadle’s eyes went watery, and then a ragged sob escaped. “Yer da most beautiful—”. Magda elbowed him in the ribs. “Second most beautiful thing I’ve seen in all my years. We ain’t never gonna fergetcha, lady. In fact, we’re gonna start praying. You joost see if we don’t.”
Murmurs of agreement came from all around her, and Voria realized that she’d finally done something good. Something pure. The drifters were a balm on her soul, and more. Seeing them here, resolute and proud, gave her the strength to continue.
19
Operation Reclamation
Fleet Admiral Nimitz was now the highest ranking military officer Ternus could presently field. Not because he was the best. He knew he wasn’t. No, because he was the best of what was left. All the better men were dead.
The last of those men had died in his sleep the previous evening. Fleet Admiral Kerr had leaned a little left for Nimitz’s tastes, but he’d been a fine officer with a brilliant tactical mind. His death, especially when the man had been in such apparent good health, had shocked the senior officers.
Nimitz didn’t like the circumstances surrounding Kerr’s death, either. It happened less than twenty-four hours after he’d publicly chastised Skare over his callousness. Kerr had been a vocal opponent of the Inurans for a long time, and his death was certainly convenient.
He rose from the captain’s chair, which wasn’t entirely accurate since the ships didn’t have a full bridge crew. It was just the chair. Nimitz approached the viewscreen, or whatever the magical equivalent was called, and spoke to the ship’s computer, or fairy or whatever powered these blasted things.
“Caelendra, display the tactical disposition of the confederate forces on the edge of Malgoro Crater.”
“Of course, Fleet Admiral Nimitz,” a cultured voice replied. Was it supposed to sound like his wife?
The screen shifted to show a topographical map of the crater. A full brigade of Marines, veterans of New Texas every one, were assembled around three dozen hovertanks, the finest the Inurans had ever produced.
As impressive as the ground forces were, they were merely bait. The real offense came from the sixty black ships lurking above the ever present cloud cover. Once the head dragon engaged, they’d converge and destroy it. That would allow them to purify the Catalyst at their leisure, and thus satisfy the first phase of Operation Reclamation.
It was a simple plan, but through his four decades of command, Nimitz had learned that simple was almost always best. Simple left little margin for error, and your biggest risk was applying the wrong strategy. Complex plans had many points of failure, and could come apart for a variety of reasons.
In this instance, Nimitz wasn’t really certain what he was dealing with. He hadn’t been at the Skull of Xal, but he’d seen the footage. The demon that dwelled inside had torn those ships apart, and he didn’t want to see a similar situation here.
They possessed some immediate tactical advantages, of course. There was no cover for the drakes, beyond the fog covering their blasted swamp. The lizards couldn’t do anything about orbital bombardment, though Nimitz suspected the big dragon could probably put up one hell of a fight against their air.
“Colonel Brommel,” Nimitz rumbled into the comm, “begin your advance into the swamp. If it slithers, flies, or hisses I want it dead.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman replied mechanically. She wasn’t terribly imaginative, but she made things dead better than any other officer. Still, dealing with Brommel always troubled him. She was more machine than man, which wasn’t any better than practicing that demonic witchcraft the Shayans were into.
Nimitz watched as the brigade fanned out into the swamp, each regiment forming a pincher as they approached the coordinates of the Catalyst. Thanks to Voria’s incursion a year earlier, they had all the telemetry they needed, which would make the next part that much easier. At least something good had come from that botched op.
The brigade made good time, but it took several hours for them to reach the outskirts of the Catalyst. Nimitz spent that time gripping the arms of his chair and brooding. The same thoughts kept circling. He was out of his depth. He didn’t understand the forces at play, but there was something intrinsically wrong with using these ships.
If magic was evil, and Nimitz knew to his core that it was, then how did they justify harnessing it? Because they knew that if they did not, their civilization was gone. No one knew the way back to Terra. Either they made it in this sector or they perished.
He leaned forward in his chair as a dense fog began rolling out of the center of the swamp. It was obviously a defensive measure. “Caelendra, why am I not seeing thermal signatures in that fog?”
“It is possible that there are no life forms,” the pleasant voice came back, “but I believe it more likely the fog is magical in nature, and is designed to cloak enemy units.”
“All vessels,” Nimitz rumbled as he pressed a button on the chair’s arm console to switch to a fleet-wide channel, “prepare for orbital bombardment. Concentrate your fire on the area between our units and the fog.” He tapped another button to turn off the fleet wide. “Caelendra, prepare nukes one through four please.”
Her pleasant voice offered a caution. “As a warning, irradiating this area will have significant consequences to all life within this valley. I estimate with 84% accuracy that it will be uninhabitable to human life for many decades.”
“Noted. Do it, Caelendra.” Nimitz leaned back in his chair, and cursed the necessity for war. This valley was prosperous, and a tourist hotspot to boot. There weren’t too many planets left, and irradiating one of the good ones didn’t sit well. But when one was dealing with a god, they simply couldn’t take chances.
Several glowing projectiles streaked from the base of the ship, and they were rapidly joined by nukes launched from the other vessels. All sixty loosed four each, and their spread pattern meant a dense overlap. Anything vulnerable to nuclear fire was about to get a face full of it.
The projectiles hit the swamp, and the viewscreen went white. It took several moments to return to normal, and when it did the fog was still there, though every tree, rock, and plant had been incinerated. “Order all Marines to take their radiation treatment and then enter the fog.”
He wished they had some means of penetrating it. Maybe that required fire magic. He had no idea how their dark sorcery worked, but that seemed a likely way to counter magical water.
The Marines started into the fog, and Nimitz keyed in the sequence to ride piggyback on Brommel’s helmet cam. The colonel trotted through the fog in her silver power armor, the analog equivalent to the spellarmor that Ternus had once been so envious of. They’d definitely narrowed the gap since then.
Brommel set a ground-eating pace, and led her men deeper into the fog. She vaulted suddenly, twisting to allow the camera to catch the charred remains of a forty-meter snake. She passed another, and another. Very nearly everywhere she passed was covered in the creatures.
“Looks like we did for a significant chunk of their army, sir,” Brommel’s dispassionate voice came over the comm. “Proceeding to checkpoint alpha.”