Night Raiders

by James David Victor

  “You are, are you?” The man’s sunken eyes narrowed. He kept the blade at Anders’s throat but cast a look to one of his guards and nodded. “Check it out,” he said, before turning back.

  “Sounds like a ploy, policeman,” the Night Raider said. When this man called him that, it didn’t have any of the good-natured tones that Patch McGuire managed to put into it.

  Anders shrugged, as best he was able without slitting his own throat, that was. “It’s the truth. The Golden Throne wants me dead. You’ll see,” he said as the guard looked up from some device in his hands.

  It’s a data-slate, Anders realized. One of the ridiculously old-style ones that used truly ancient data-field technology. The Night Raiders must only have a patchy and sparse signal out here, but they had still managed to cobble whatever they could find to get access to the throne data-field.

  “Gerhardt!” the guard burst out, and Anders learned the bell-ringing cult leader’s name for the first time. “He’s telling the truth. Throne-wide priority-one capture alert on Lieutenant Corsigon, for treason and sabotage.” The Night Raider guard sounded incredulous. “And he’s the one who won the bloody Challenge on Hecta 3!”

  There. Anders would have smiled. That was the piece of information that he knew was even more valuable to his survival than the fact that the Eternal Empress wanted him neutralized.

  And it is the very bit of information that is going to buy Dalia, Patch, and Jake the time they need, he thought with a sort of sad contentment.

  The man knew what he had to do as he took a breath and spoke in as loud a voice as he could, so that at least some of the crowd of bloodthirsty fanatics would hear him.

  “I’m on the run, and I came out here to the Void. To the only place left where they don’t care who I was or what I did. To Bonetown. I came out here to join you. I want to challenge for the right to be a Night Raider guard!” he announced.

  Silence.

  “Well, I have to admit that you’ve got some balls, policeman,” Gerhardt, the leader of the Night Raiders, announced. “If you think that you can just waltz in here and think I’m going to give you a place in my guard.”

  “I don’t think that,” Anders announced, somewhat facetiously. “That’s why I challenge you.” He chose his words carefully, knowing the impact that they must have on a man like Gerhardt.

  Challenge you. He saw the words sink into the man’s ferocious mind, and his eyes widen in outrage.

  “You’d better pray that the rest of the raiders like your pretty little story, policeman,” said Gerhardt, leaning suddenly closer and growling into the man’s face with apparent fury. “Because if they don’t, I am going to take great pleasure in slitting your stomach like a pig.”

  And then the leader of the raiders turned and raised both hands to the baying, hungry crowd. “What do you reckon, my nasty little lovelies? Do we want this bit of scum to join us? This ex-policeman, a man who had been sworn to the damn Eternal Empress herself?”

  He’s trying to sway them against me already, Anders thought. The ex-officer wondered if he had made the wrong choice.

  No. Every second I spend making them consider me and not the broken bridge or who else might have been up there on the gantry bridge with me is a win, Anders thought, and that was why he raised his voice.

  “And the winner of the Hecta 3 Challenge!” he shouted as loud as he could.

  The crowd appeared torn, and for a moment, Anders was certain that they had to be too boisterous to hear anything he said. But then he saw some of these odd, fierce folk saying the words ‘Hecta 3?’

  The message spread between them, just like the competing war chants that Anders would hear every year as a policeman, working the crowds on Hectamon 7, as each group supported a different challenger. There were those who he could guess were on his side by the fact that they chanted ‘Hecta! Hecta!’.

  I guess they think that a fight with the winner of the Golden Throne’s greatest deathmatch must be worth watching, Anders thought wryly.

  But then there was another large faction in the crowd who favored a more direct solution:

  “Kill him! Kill! Kill!” they chanted, and it was hard to see which side was winning.

  Ever the showman, Gerhadt leaned toward the crowd, turning his head to cup a hand around one pie-hear. “I can’t hear you!” he shouted, and the different chants suddenly rose a notch.

  How is anyone to make a choice out of that cacophony? Anders thought. It would surely come down to Gerhardt’s decision, and, as the bell ringer and the leader of the Night Raiders looked back at him strapped to his chair, Anders’s heart fell when he realized precisely what he was about to decide.

  Gerhardt had an evil grin on his face.

  He’s going to just kill me, because he hates the Golden Throne that much, Anders realized. He saw the man straighten up from his theatrical pose, but before he could bellow his judgement to his adoring fans, he was interrupted by another voice.

  “I’ll fight him!”

  Anders frowned, turning to see who had spoken.

  It was the guard called August, similarly shaven-headed as Gerhardt was—as all of his chosen guards were, Anders noted. He had clearly won the last battle and did not appear to even have a scratch, bruise, or a scorch mark on him from those burning longswords. The man’s eyes met August’s, and Anders saw the cold, uncaring determination of a professional. Strangely, it reminded him of the Challenge on Hecta 3 as well, where the other challengers had almost all been surviving returnees, which meant that they were professional killers.

  Suddenly, the majority of the crowd changed their tune when they realized it might be their murderous darling who would be fighting. “August! August! August!” the cry went up. Apparently, the appeal of seeing one of their own fight an ‘upstart’ like me is too great an opportunity, Anders thought.

  He wondered if that meant that he was winning, if he was buying more time.

  But I had wanted to challenge Gerhardt himself! Anders soured. Instead, as he looked at the very self-contained, quiet, and clearly capable man, Anders thought that he had a much harder fight on his hands.

  Well… The lump in his throat grew. It’s not like I haven’t fought before, right?

  16

  Sanctum

  Dalia squinted and tried to ignore the distracting thoughts in her head. She was currently at the back of the small group, with one pistol ready in her hand and charged, in case any of the raiders had managed to spot them and found a way to follow them.

  In front of her was Jake, and leading the way was Patch. Dalia had never been in a stranger situation in all her life, following an eccentric twenty-something human talking about highly dangerous and clearly unstable technologies, with a human teenager for company.

  The door had opened not into another series of gantries and hallways—thank goodness—but instead into a maze-like network of small steel rooms and corridors. Dalia presumed that this was some equivalent of a service or repair network, as the little rooms had worktables and occasional windows that looked out over much wider rooms.

  “If those areas down below are hangar bays and ship construction yards,” Patch muttered over the suit communicator, “then up here is where the engineers gathered…”

  How interesting. Dalia grimaced, but held her tongue. None of this is getting us anywhere closer to saving Anders’s life! the Ilythian thought as once again, Patch led them through a small steel room, with benches and lockers where the repair-humans or mechanics or whomever they had been must have stored their equipment.

  Nor are we nearer to finding the field ansible. She could have growled. The only saving grace to their journey was the fact that it seemed as though the Night Raiders hadn’t exploited this area as much as every other. Either that or they had seen some need to keep the metal on the tables, floors, and wall-units. Everywhere else in the hulk that Dalia and the others had seen had become a patchwork of partly-stripped and repaired hull parts.

  What do
I care what they are doing? Dalia growled, kicking the leg of one of the tables as they hurried out into the narrow steel corridor that was the only exit, following Patch’s sensor array.

  Dalia was about to suggest to Patch that they had better hurry up, then she paused and bit her lip.

  “Calm yourself…” she muttered under her breath to herself, imitating the tones that her mentors might have used back on Ilythia.

  This flight of strong emotions wasn’t doing her any favors, she knew. As an Ilythian agent, she had been tutored on the ways that emotions could be both a benefit and a distraction in the field, and right now, her anger was threatening to unravel their entire mission if she let it.

  It wasn’t that the Ilythians were an unemotional people. Far from it. They were a race who reveled in emotions.

  However, as all Ilythians were PK-sensitive, with the ability to read and transmit emotions through touch, Dalia was only too aware of the danger that powerful emotions could have on her ability to do what needed to be done, and when. She tried her breathing exercises once again, slow in breaths, and natural out breaths.

  “He’s still alive, you know,” said a quiet mutter from in front of her. Dalia hadn’t realized that she had closed her eyes until she opened them again and saw that Patch had paused at the end of the corridor, attempting to use his node to hack the controls of the next door.

  “Anders. The policeman. He’s alive.” It was Jake who had said the words, and he was looking up at her with his large and shadowed eyes, which always had that edge of wary caution to them.

  I guess that you earn that look if you are stolen from your natural birth parents and forced to grow in a containment tube for a large part of your life, Dalia thought.

  “Thank you for saying so, Jake.” Dalia even attempted a sort of smile, though it was hard. He was still young, after all, as well as being a powerful PK. She couldn’t let him realize what was surely already happening or about to happen to their friend Anders. “Yes, I am sure that a man as resourceful as the lieutenant is alive,” she murmured.

  “No, you don’t get it.” Jake frowned and shook his ragged, dark brown hair. “I know he is alive. I can sense the fact that he is alive!”

  “What!?” Dalia blinked several times. This was…unexpected. How could the boy have hidden these powers from them for so long? The Ilythian knew that PK abilities in both humans and Ilythians, although they could be finessed and targeted with the right mentors, very rarely developed or changed.

  They are genetic markers, after all, she had always understood. She knew that there were telekinetic, somakinetic, clairvoyant, and clairaudient PKs out there—as well as many more different sorts of psychic abilities—but generally, a PK never exhibited a range of powers. Just the one that they had from pubescence.

  Which was why it was so rare to find an Ilythian with anything other than touch-clairvoyance, Dalia had always been told. As her race had a built-in predisposition to sharing their memories through touch, they never displayed any other PK power.

  But now, the boy is suggesting that he has touch-clairvoyance as well as some sort of non-local clairvoyance? Dalia was alarmed.

  “Jake, this is important,” Dalia said urgently. “How long have you been able to sense people? How much can you read?” She frowned. Her extensive training to become an agent meant that she was expertly schooled in Golden Throne demographics. She knew that the chances of having just one human PK with two abilities meant that Jake was one in several million.

  “Uh, I don’t know…” Jake screwed up his eyes. “I never tried before. I just…know.”

  Dalia nodded. “I see.” He was young. He had never had any of the mental training that she’d had. As Patch was still working at hacking the door, Dalia took the opportunity.

  “Jake, take a deep breath and take my hand…” She slid off the glove that shielded her pale skin from any unwanted psychic overflow. “I am going to teach you how to center yourself.” The Ilythian knew that there wouldn’t be much that she could teach the young boy, but she figured that it would be more than he’d ever had before.

  Jake looked suspiciously at the Ilythian for a moment, and then nodded.

  “Barehanded,” she said as he raised his hand, still garbed in the flexible encounter gauntlet.

  “But it’s not safe—” he whispered.

  “Trust me,” Dalia attempted to reassure him. “I’ll be fine.” She held her hand steady in front of him, and Jake took a deep, shuddering breath before releasing the seal on his own glove and taking her hand.

  Pain!

  Dalia hissed as a tide of dark and horrid emotions shot through her.

  Anger. Screams. Wails of anguish. It was unrelenting and unstoppable, and Dalia felt like she was drowning in its awful grasp.

  How could one young human boy contain so much horror? She struggled against the storm. But the obvious truth was that he couldn’t, could he?

  This isn’t coming from him. She found a small island of reason and sanity in the morass. PKs were like sponges—they drank up everything they came into contact with, just like Ilythians would do, were they not trained. The only thing that saved most PKs from going insane was the fact that their abilities were bound by their flesh.

  But not for Jake. The Ilythian struggled to find her own center, that spot in her heart that was always calm and always removed from every other part of her environment. Distantly, she was aware of Jake’s hand that she held onto tightly.

  Breathe. Here I remain. Here I always remain. She repeated the mantra that every Ilythian was taught. That no matter what calamities, hurts, physical, emotional, or psychic imbalance was occurring, this place always existed. Beyond emotion, and beyond suffering.

  Here. She felt her mind and heart steady, and the storms of terrible, howling pain and anger whirled around her like she was in the becalmed eye of a storm. They were made up of myriad voices. A hundred thousand voices. Again, Dalia had to wonder just how Jake could contain such a multitude.

  Where was this coming from? She quested out with her own PK abilities, strengthened through the alien-to-human skin contact they shared.

  Fury. Torment. Once again, she was buffeted by the storms and almost had to retreat into herself… But no, she wouldn’t this time. The Ilythian reminded herself the calm center was already, and always would be, there in her heart. She told herself that she was not going to be washed away by these emotions because she always carried it with her.

  It has to be coming from the Night Raiders, she thought, but they hadn’t seemed this deranged, had they? These were not the thoughts of sane people, people able to pilot their vessels and drones. These were the emotions of those totally given into frenzied madness.

  “Dalia?” she heard Jake’s voice both through her pointed ears and their skin-to-skin psychic connection. There he was, she had found him.

  Dalia had never found an adequate description for what it was like inside her PK abilities. It was a collection of impressions, thoughts, rolling, amorphous feelings, as well as images. Right now, the image that she found was of Jake, looking just the same as he did before her, but with a whirling storm of black and red around him.

  “Jake. Breathe. I have you.” She moved her mind closer to his, hoping that the calm she contained would radiate out to him.

  “It’s…it’s too much… How do you stand it…?” the boy was sobbing.

  “You learn,” Dalia said sternly, but not altogether unkindly. She breathed deep into her chest, and once again tried to radiate a calm certainty. “Listen to me, Jake. You are yourself. You are yours,” she tried to impress upon him the piece of Ilythian centering-logic.

  “I don’t understand…” The mental image of Jake shook his head as the very real flesh and blood person that she held the hand of did the same. The black and red torment contracted closer around the them both, making Dalia want to scream and howl herself, but she didn’t.

  “It’s simple, Jake…” She struggled against the tide
. “All of this flowing around you, through you? This isn’t you. This isn’t Jake. It doesn’t feel like your mind and your thoughts, does it?” She took him, step by step, toward the realization.

  “But it’s so strong,” the youth whimpered. “So loud…”

  Dalia saw why the youth always had shadowed eyes, and why he was always sullen and surly. He had only barely been clinging on to his own personality.

  “It doesn’t matter how loud it is!” Dalia said fiercely as the whirlwind of terrifying and terrified emotions drew closer. “Pay attention, Jake!” she said, her hand on his now in a vice-like hold. “This is not happening to you. That is why it hurts. Everything is happening at you.”

  “So?” the young human wailed.

  Dalia remembered to breathe before continuing. “So, that means if this isn’t you, then the you that you really are—your mind—is safe. Is sacrosanct. Is a sanctum. It doesn’t matter what these emotions are, or how strong they are, you are always, and forever, your own!”

  She tried to put the concepts into as human-like understanding as she could. It was easier for Ilythians, who grew up with a philosophy that was very different from that of the Golden Throne.

  Something she said must have worked, because the tides of terrible feelings started to draw back and grow quieter around them.

  Thank the stars for that! Even the highly-trained Ilythian agent did not quite know just how long she could have held on under that onslaught.

  “Breathe, Jake…” she reminded him. “Breathe into that place that is always yourself, and no one else. Find your center.” Which was unnecessary, really, as the boy was already here, wasn’t he?

  But the mental image of the youth took long and slow breaths, and with each one, the tide and storm of emotions swept further and further back, until it looked to be a distant threat on their imaginary horizon. A constant threat in all directions, Dalia noted, but now, it was a distant one, nonetheless.