Alliance
Page 5
The angles of reflection revealed the direction of the swung club. It gave Anguhr just enough information to move in the fraction of time he was blinded. He lurched to avoid the blow. The Phase Titan scored only a glancing strike on Anguhr’s shoulder. Anguhr knew the Titan’s arms griping the club would meet his body at a certain point. This was where he applied his fist.
The Ethereal and Light Titans helped Phase recover to its feet after being struck. The three Titans glanced at the running Anguhr, and then each other. They remerged with a flash of fire. A red gauntlet grabbed Anguhr’s club and the Fire Titan ran after him.
Anguhr recovered sword imbedded on the ground. He saw the old colony ship’s hull and looked at its surrounding city. Beyond it was the sound of battle as his demons engaged the large Ru’cenorain army. The aliens attempted to fight and shift tactics as the battle intensified. He admired that, but more so his horde who owned the sky and the ground. Proxis owned space. More enemy ships flashed into falling debris. The battle would be finished soon on both fronts. He never felt competition with his horde, but his own battle was ongoing. The demons may see victory before him. He turned and saw the charging Fire Titan with his club.
Another, new thought occurred to the General. In the past, the nearby city would be an inconsequential to his campaign. It would be a casualty on a world soon destroyed. Now, he wondered if such a small world would be willing to accept becoming part of the empire he had yet to realize. His demons may control the battle, but he and the Fire Titan could trample the city while fighting. He turned to his charging foe and brandished the sword they fought to own. The Fire Titan slowed, and returned the saluted with the burning club.
Anguhr hurled the sword overhead and back to their initial battlefield. The Fire Titan looked up at the flying weapon with bewilderment. Anguhr’s right fist struck its eye-sphere with a powerful blow. The flaming, red globe snapped almost completely to the center of the Titan’s back. It dropped the club and staggered. Again, Anguhr ran to get the sword.
Anguhr stood ready to swing down the sword as the Fire Titan returned. It halted and then levitated the club in front of it and extended its hands. The air rippled as spherical waves of force flowed from its palms and enveloped the burning club. Anguhr felt vibrations down through his boots. The improvised weapon crushed into a jagged ball that kept glowing brighter. The Fire Titan created unilateral pressure field to compress the strange matter and energy within the club into an ever-smaller point. It began to tremble from containing the power in the sphere between its hands. Anguhr understood what his foe undertook and swung the sword to strike before the end effect was realized. He is reaction was swift, but too late.
The Fire Titan opened an aperture to release the intense force directly at Anguhr. It slid back from the sudden thrust. Anguhr took the brunt of the pent-up force. It blasted him up and back into his impact crater. The sword slashed the thin air along a similar arc.
The Fire Titan savored its successful blow against the General. It strode to the crater lip to finish Anguhr and retrieve the sword. The dim sky became darker. The Fire Titan realized they should not see their own faint, curved reflection above them. Unless it was reflected in the fused, glassy surface of the impact crater that swung down on them with great force.
Anguhr slammed the small hemisphere of solidified rock and dust onto the Fire Titan. The surface of Tectus shook anew. The Fire Titan rose from the shattered debris as pieces launched into the air on impact now rained back down. The Titan’s unified mind reeled as it staggered backward. Anguhr picked up a massive crater shard and hurled it against his stumbling foe. And then another.
The Fire Titan picked up a fused block nearly on instinct. It began to compress the rocky debris to repeat its success with the club. The mass melted between its palms. Without any ethereal energies within the block, it compressed into a ball of plasma. The Titan turned to face Anguhr. The black blade punched through the plasma and then its burning, red chest plate to pierce the unified heart of all three Titans.
Arcane steel, arcane science, and arcane form all added to one death. Anguhr tore the sword free from the Fire Titan, and swung it high to cleave his enemy in two. But the single body fell. Its heat and energies cooled. Anguhr stayed ready if the body split into its constituent entities, but what hit the ground was one gigantic corpse.
Anguhr saluted his dead foe. The sword was his, again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Proxis flexed his talon-like right hand as if to claw the fiery air of the bridge. The Ship Master did not fret, but he did yearn. He sought a fight that was, so far, denied him. Many warships engaged him, but the largest one kept its distance. Proxis derived its name from intercepted transmissions: Sword Wing. Proxis’ ship had no name. Through all its campaigns, it never occurred to him, or evidently anyone, to call the ship anything other than the ship. To his knowledge, no hellship ever bore a unique appellation. On the center screen, an alien cruiser flashed from existence. The thought of ship names also perished as Proxis fought on.
The Sword Wing’s commander was either canny or a coward. Proxis assumed no fearful warrior could command such a ship. The surviving fleet disengaged their direct assault and moved behind the planet to assume a new formation. They would likely form a concave phalanx over the opposing hemisphere and continue to fire with the planet as a shield. The most obvious countermeasure would be to energize the main batteries and annihilate the hemisphere. The planetary debris and liberated magma would engulf the enemy ships. The hellship’s missiles and secondary weapons would then blast survivors into smaller bits of the new asteroid field.
However, this planet appeared geologically inert. The cold, inner core scanned as a far greater percentage of the planet’s mass than the accumulated crust of interstellar dust and transient elements and minerals. Such an attack would be less spectacular. And, as Proxis had noted to himself, Lord Anguhr was on the surface and would be displeased with the sudden vaporization of his battlefield. This enemy’s greatest challenge lay with the Sword Wing. Anguhr had given Proxis approval to engage at will. Blowing apart the massive ship would have to be sufficient entertainment for the Ship Master.
Proxis read the vast data streaming across screens and into his mind. Sensor waves of ethereal and temporal physics detected the Sword Wing at the hellship’s antipode around the planet. The large warship compensated for the small variance in gravitation the hellship caused. Its computational and navigation capacity were impressive. More interesting was that the planet’s vector also appeared to adjust. Other undetermined forces mitigated the tidal effects of the two massive ships on the planet. For a world that appeared to be dead mass, it was an enigma.
Such puzzles were of smaller interest to a creature born for battle. Proxis noted anomalies and assigned them to files for future consideration. At the moment, he had a war to wage. The ship was his to command. Though he did not think the word, Proxis enjoyed his freedom. Most demons used weapons as soldiers to fight in space and other physical and exotic environments. Ship Masters employed the hellship’s vast arsenal. They were the living interface of a weapons system built to challenge stellar empires. To ensure Ship Masters’ devotion beyond programming, their breed had vestigial thorns where their fellow demons had full wings. It mattered little to Proxis. Most demons felt sensations from hard vacuum to cyclone winds but thought little of it. Proxis could feel the pressure of a distant gamma burst or the quantum spin of single hadrons across the entire ship.
The ability to process many streams of data also allowed Proxis to consider other vectors of thought not purely of combat. While his chief desire was exceeding to his General’s commands, this occurred more often since the rebellion. Proxis found his stream of consciousness traveling in oblique directions from the current task. This could occur even when elements of the task were attempting to kill you. Nevertheless, his adept tactics and the ships firepower never revealed the drift.
Even now, the oblique notions persisted. It ofte
n occurred to Proxis that he was the last of his kind. The horde followed the rebel, Lord Anguhr. His fight was their own, even if it was against their creator and Hell itself. Anguhr earned their allegiance beside them on the front. He did not demand loyalty as a distant, wrathful godhead.
For even the least introspective demon, the fact that Anguhr had destroyed the other Generals and their hordes proved loyalty to him was also survival. Yet, what of existence beyond Anguhr’s victory? What was survival, now? Demons knew no existence beyond constant war. Yet the war’s purpose proved false.
The force that began and drove the fighting, the Dark Urge, was herself defeated. It might seem inevitable that Hell’s fall would be demonkind’s end. Nevertheless, Proxis attacked a fleet and stalked its flagship. For now, life went on as usual, though the future was still an enigma. Existential questions slid back into mental shadows as an enemy frigate turned to fire a broadside. Proxis focused. The frigate flashed into a fireball.
Technically, Proxis had two superiors. Obviously, Anguhr was the horde’s military leader and lord. The Field Master was the horde’s second in command. Solok now held this position. He was elevated to the post after the loss of Uruk. Proxis had never known another chain of command before then. Uruk was born to the Field Master post. Now Proxis watched Solok grow into the role. He had proven his battle skill against an enemy greater than every alien force: General Ursuhr’s horde.
Solok sought the thrill of physical combat and, like Anguhr, he lead from the front. That was a useful trait for Proxis. He could rely on Solok following his lead by appealing to Solok’s aggression. Proxis saw such angle as the demons on the planet and Lord Anguhr vanquished their chosen targets. Proxis wanted the Sword Wing. He could urge Solok to redeploy in support of tactics that would force the enemy flagship into direct combat.
“Field Master, I, Proxis, request your assistance.”
“Is the ship in danger?” Solok’s rasping bark entered the bridge.
“Of course not,” Proxis said then adjusted his tone. “Congratulations on killing the enemy armies. I now ask that you redeploy as a massed front outside the atmosphere. The enemy will think it an attack on their fleet. Though they may need a moment to realize we attack their warships with warriors, they understand we were demons.”
“I see your point, Proxis. And your plan. You wish the fleet to engage us as you attack their most massive ship. Good hunting, Ship Master!”
“And you, Master Solok. Lord Anguhr will be pleased at your success.”
“Of course.”
A smile that would terrify sentient life, as it was designed to, curled on Proxis’ thorny face.
Though he had four eyes, and his top two were quite large, Roelar could not read data or react as fast as Proxis. Nevertheless, he was a premier military officer among his kind. The demon tactic seemed odd at first, but his assessment was accurate. He turned from his screen and faced Buran.
“Admiral, the demons are redeploying from surface engagement to massed formations. The vectors indicate an extra-atmospheric heading.”
“They are leaving Tectus?” Shock spurred Lieutenant Chelnar’s break with disciplined silence.
“They have defeated all surface and suborbital forces,” Roelar answered with a stern stare of all eyes. “They redeploy to press the attack.”
“But to move on our fleet?” Chelnar dared continue. “They are only soldiers. Flying ones, but—”
“Demons.” Buran said, and then drew a deep breath. “Their concentrated firepower is a threat to our smaller ships. As are their claws and willingness to bite through reactor bulkheads.”
Buran drew a breath as if to speak, but then halted his command as if reconsidering his thoughts or hearing another voice.
“Break orbit.” Buran finally said. “Keep our main batteries in line with the approaching hellship. Maintain equatorial alignment, but increase distance along the extended plane from surface by one hundred and twenty-five quadrills. Order the fleet to converge in strike-shield formation 100 quadrills from surface along same vector.”
“I see Admiral.” Roelar said with satisfaction. “The demons will be lured to attack the formation. Then we can destroy them with our superior weapons as they engage the smaller ships.”
“I like the idea, Roelar. Yet I have another.” Buran’s tone was darker.
Bahl’s forces had emerged. In terms of galactic conquest, it was a small yet still strong army. The last of the varied warriors stepped through the gateway and out of the void to set foot back on damnation. Inaht looked at the field of giants, now less fearful of the greater power that drove them into flight and then to hide as parasites on its toxic face. Most were surviving Khan warriors. Some of the disparate forms challenged them in size. Others challenged each other in strangeness.
Several wore combinations of forged and living armor, such as the Drokatt who offered physical might and fire support from their cyclopean heads and searing eye beams. Although the Drokatt were social among the many aliens, most did not want to linger too long in their gaze.
The Bandors acted as both mobile armor and living artillery. The necromancovore species ate and employed magical energies. Their principle method of attack was to hurl their spearhead-shaped, monoclonal children as phased projectiles. The armadillian hulks could bud off many offspring as weapons along their ventral spines. However, they had not seen battle for eons and their children were now very old and largely self-aware. The parents would almost certainly need to shed them and begin a new generation of weapons if war called.
Among the giants, Aekos was unique. Drifting near him was another singular presence. The black swarm was composed of the smallest combatants, the Celeriora. Collectively, they were the last battalion of their kind. The swarms fighting style was to fill the voids of any enemy with countless, little, but active jaws. Ironically, they offered themselves as food after mating to limit the size of their swarm.
Inaht was glad her inner energies meant she never felt hunger. The close presence of the Bandors, Aekos, the Celeriora swarm, and stranger allies and former enemies never troubled Inaht. One thing found on Hell radiated an aura of darkness that reached through her helmet, inner light, and touched her mind. Inaht worried the sensation was not merely psychological.
Bahl called the thing the hostage. It could not move on its own. It had no defenses, at least none shown since its capture. It was considered not fully alive or dead. Inaht doubted it had any true tactical or strategic value, because the Dark Urge had shown she was ultimately a pitiless force whose only emotion was to shown greater and greater rage. Inaht felt that if the hostage had any value in combat, it would only be a moment of shock from its existence. Such shock to the Dark Urge might buy one more second to escape. Inaht argued to kill it, for certain. Its corpse would hold that same shock value. Bahl said it was worth more alive, or at least not a true corpse. But to be a corpse, you needed a fully formed body. This thing was somewhere between an idea and a monster incarnate.
The hostage was massive and needed porters. Four warrior Khans did the dread task. They carried it between two long, octagonal shafts thrust between thick, dust-imbued strands and stretched, gauzy strips that wrapped the thing. The gauzy bands obscured the embryonic form inside an ovoid mass. The shafts had been torn from a field of arcane alloy that once flowed and solidified into massive columns similar to basaltic rock. Any natural rock was consumed or melded with stranger substances long ago when this world became a planet-sized machine. Bahl and Inaht found the hostage among a drift of jagged sand soon after their arrival.
Inaht nearly smiled when she recalled the suppressed horror when she told Aekos what the strands and gauze likely was: giant spider silk. The silk covered a semi-transparent but resilient membrane. Its skin was tough enough to endure exposure to Hell’s naked wastes. Inaht often dared herself to touch it. She never had.
On its own, Inaht thought the hostage looked as a large, oval piece of waste or the part of a distant car
cass that bobs above the waves on an ocean world. Between the shoulders of her four, gleaming warriors, the hostage could be mistaken for a sacred relic, or some biological ark. For Inaht, if artifacts did not explode, emit focused radiation, or power weapons, then they were useless unless their destruction or capture dispirited and weakened the enemy.
The hostage did strike at Inaht’s psychology. It was an artifact of either love, or domination. She thought that if it could think, it might consider itself the incarnation of betrayal. Nothing was sacred in a galaxy at war. That was acutely true on the home of the war, Hell.
The four warrior Khans set the hostage down. All nodded to Inaht. Once she was once an empress who led devoted legions. Now she guarded a thing with misgiving. Alone, she could act out her desire to kill it. She grasped her sword.
Something moved!
Inaht tensed and stared at the hostage with both hands on her sword grip. The thing was still. She peered into the exposed areas. Dust fell from a crease in the silk near the carrying poles. Inaht relaxed and stepped back.
Eyes saw dust fall through gaps in the silk, but stayed focused on Inaht. The eyes watched through transparent, unfinished eyelids within the membrane. Embryonic muscles stayed tense. The mind attached to them was fully formed. And awake. It relaxed as Inaht stepped back.
Pain. It was not a sensation Uruk had considered. It was a sensory input to adjust an attack. After the battle, pain was gone. Few wounds left scars. Few battles caused pain. In his current fight, Uruk struggled against physics and not a living opponent. He endured pain and an inner dialogue about its benefit or encumbrance. Out on the hellship beams and surrounded by auroras both natural and numinous, he fought alone. Nevertheless, the ship and Uruk appeared united in effort. Both needed to climb against powerful forces to reach their goal: survival.