Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

Marcus leaned against the window. He held the ring level with his nose. “Timothy…” he said.

  Daniel said something about another, dead brother. “What?” I asked. Not that I cared.

  “Something’s—” Daniel bounced against Marcus’s seat just as the flash of light blasted around the bus.

  The bus shut off. I slammed on the brakes, but they didn’t really respond. “Damn it,” I muttered, and tried the restart the engine. The starter clicked but wouldn’t engage. We were coasting. No brakes. No engine. Steering, thankfully, still allowed me to keep the bus on the empty road.

  “Those jets must have used some sort of weapon,” I said.

  No one responded.

  “Marcus?” Harold called from the back of the bus.

  Daniel fell out of the seat and into the aisle. Marcus rolled, too, and his leg flopped into his brother’s side.

  A boom followed the flash.

  “I think we just got hit by an EMP.” Harold dropped the big gun into the seat behind Marcus’s and dropped onto his knees to check the Fates.

  What kind of electromagnetic pulse hurt Fates?

  Chapter Five

  Leif, moments earlier…

  Leif Ladonson pushed his arm into the sleeve of his Seraphim armor. The backseat of the SUV in which he sat was large, but so was he. He contorted as best he could in the confined space. He managed to pull his other arm through the second sleeve without smacking his wrist against the window.

  The armor locked onto his super-suit’s connectors. The systems synchronized instantaneously and sent the resulting “boot complete” haptic tingle first into the tattoo on his left bicep, then into his right abdominal tattoo in its normal oval swirl pattern—first over his hip, then a tightening circular pattern moving toward the tattoo’s center, which sat about three inches to the right of his bellybutton.

  Each suit had its own specific haptic response to the set of tattoos it encountered on its wearer. The correct pattern meant the suit had activated his presets and hadn’t been somehow corrupted in all the Del-centric business.

  He had that, at least.

  Leif’s suit pinged for his weapons—which he no longer carried. Most were still on the bus with Del. The rest had been taken by Penny on Vivicus’s orders.

  The suit was not happy. It, like him, felt naked without his knives, guns, and n-EMP discs.

  Vivicus had taken his sidearm. He also sat in the front passenger seat holding Stab on his lap like a little boy carrying Mommy’s purse. The Judicial High Commander drove. They’d all switched places once Vick realized that allowing Penny to drive upset the normal automobile hierarchy of seating. Penny now rode in the stowage area in the back of the SUV. She mostly sat silently with her back against Leif’s seat.

  Every so often she’d run diagnostics on the still-unconscious Nax, who lay on his back on the flattened seat behind Vick with his head next to Leif and his feet next to Penny. He’d moan every time they took a corner or hit a bump, which meant he was still alive and still processing some environmental information. The heat wafting off his skin meant his fever had returned, though.

  As long as Nax didn’t die or set fire to the SUV, the High Commander and Vivicus were more than happy to let his fever burn.

  Vick had always been an asshole. Leif’s father and aunt—with the help of Daniel, Timothy, and Marcus of the Draki Prime, and The Legion’s true Second, Andreas Sisto—had been able to keep him under control in the years before The Incursion scoured their version of the Earth.

  But The Legion of his timeline died when the world died. Keeping Vivicus under control had then fallen to Emperor Trajan, and more specifically, to the two remaining Legion members, Leif and Antonius.

  Clearly Leif hadn’t been enough to keep Vick from his dark side. Neither had Antonius.

  Leif tapped his code into the sleeve of the jacket and effectively locked out all other presets. He flipped off his boots and pulled on his armor’s pants. They synced and vibrated across his left thigh, then his right ankle, then the back of his left knee. He wiggled his feet back into his boots, then locked those down, too.

  Each of the seven suits that had come through the ground incursion carried presets for each member of the group in case of emergency transference. His would no longer cooperate. It would take him a little extra time, but he would also set it to self-destruct if the Judicial High Commander tried to take it off his dead body, the way he’d taken Kai’s.

  Or perhaps he should reach over the seat and snap the High Commander’s neck and deal with the problem once and for all.

  The Commander glanced over his shoulder. His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything, nor did his seers shimmer through the air like viscous, electrified honey.

  Leif “heard” seers the same way as every member of his family, every Fate, Shifter, and Burner on Earth, but he also “saw” the most powerful ones, and the man who in his timeline had been known as the Judicial High Commander was the most powerful of all.

  He wasn’t the High Commander here. Leif needed to remember that. Here, he was just Janus, the Fate Progenitor.

  The SUV bounced over a pothole and the Lesser Emperor rolled toward Leif. He groaned again, and Leif checked his breathing. His inhalations were still shallow, but they were steady.

  The outskirts of the city rolled by. It had been three decades since he’d been in a version of Denver that hadn’t been leveled by dragons, and picking out landmarks took a bit more concentration than he expected.

  Up front, Janus and Vivicus played elder-godling twenty questions. Vick wasn’t Janus’s twenty-three centuries, but he was close. Leif was only ten centuries old. Penny was the baby in the SUV at a century-and-a-half.

  “How many Emperors here?” Vivicus asked, as if it mattered.

  Janus sniffed as if the thought of any Emperor triggered some sort of shit-smell synesthesia in his Progenitor brain.

  He took a right onto some random Denver street. “Three, plus the Tsar.”

  Vivicus seemed more amused than a man simply orienting to this new world, something Leif needed to do.

  He’d continue to tell himself that. He wasn’t oriented yet. He didn’t fully understand the new rules. He had too many gross details to sort through before he could invest in the fine.

  Vivicus was engaged in his own version of sorting, which explained the twenty questions.

  “Let me guess,” Vivicus said with the glee of a four-year-old talking about dinosaurs, “Hadrian’s dead.” He wiggled like that four-year-old.

  If Janus was annoyed by Vivicus’s excitement, he didn’t show it. “Nope,” he said.

  Vivicus guffawed. “We have Pertinax in the back seat.” He pointed over his shoulder. “Trajan’s in charge.” He said it as if Janus had already answered that question. “So Hadrian’s running the civilian operations? Seriously?”

  Janus stopped at an intersection. His future-seer pulsed once, then he took a left. “Most of the Southern Hemisphere survived here. New Zealand immediately stepped up to coordinate refugee movement efforts on the Pacific side. Norway stepped up in Europe and Russia in the rest of Eurasia. Kenya has taken point in East Africa and Senegal in the west. It’s Argentina and Peru in South America.” He started up the SUV again. “The Canadians and the Mexicans aren’t too happy Praesagio Industries and Trajan have already taken control of what’s left of North America.”

  “Normals are still in charge?” Vivicus guffawed yet again.

  “Trajan has Hadrian playing good cop to Pavlovich’s bad cop. The Southern Hemisphere governments that need lessons in cooperation deal with the attack dogs. Hadrian’s friendly strong-man hand versus a not-so-friendly Pavlovich fist will do the job quicker than sitting in a circle and talking about everyone’s hurt feelings.”

  Leif’s time with Pavlovich’s daughter had been, for Leif, decades ago. For this version of the world, not so much. But the year and a half he’d spent with the brilliant and beautiful—if messed up—Daisy Pavlovich was not i
mportant.

  Nothing was important anymore. Every world had ended and he was in an SUV with the man who was arguably the most powerful of the Progenitors—and the only man capable of double-ending a world solely to save the next.

  Or so Janus said. But Janus liked grandiose talk. Mostly, it made him seem bigger than he actually was.

  They passed a sign saying they were coming up on a freeway entrance, and Janus semi-shrugged as he switched lanes. “The entire planet is frightened of the Russians. Always has been. Always will be. And now a Russian-American is in charge, so not only is the Russian Empire terrifying, they’re now extraordinarily confusing. Trajan’s putting that fear of the unknown to good use.”

  “Ah,” Vivicus said. “So Dunn let Marcus Aurelius die here? He’s our Civilian High Commander.”

  And a good man. Leif had long suspected Trajan held something over him though, because Marcus Aurelius hadn’t killed the other Emperor in ritualized Roman combat.

  The old-school Romans walking around did like their grudge matches and the defending of their “civilized” honor.

  Janus took them out onto the highway. “She tried. She tried with Antoninus Pius and Lucius Verus. Never Nerva, though. At the time, none of us knew we were dealing with the men history would call the Five Good Emperors, though I had an inkling.” He shrugged. “I’d lost Stab by then and hadn’t been in much of a frame of mind to help, and saving normal Roman Emperors was never as easy as it seemed.”

  “She never asked me for help,” Vivicus huffed.

  No, Vick’s mother had pretty much cut off interaction with her craziest son. She, like every other human on Earth, preferred her other offspring, the more-stable, less-bloodthirsty First Enthraller, Andreas Sisto.

  Andreas had died protecting Leif’s father during The Incursion on their version of the world.

  Janus’s seers blipped again. “Andreas didn’t make it here, either,” he said.

  Leif had held a speck of hope that he’d see the man he thought of as a brother once again. Marcus Drake survived here. Why not Andreas Sisto, too? But the universe was as cruel and vicious as it was wondrous.

  Vivicus frowned as if annoyed by the Fate Progenitor’s ability to answer questions he hadn’t asked, which was as ridiculous as his own child-like glee for asking those same questions.

  But Vick’s responses were well-traveled through the maps in Leif’s mind.

  This version of Janus shouldn’t feel new, yet something about how Janus’s seers had blipped felt… different. Leif had been raised by Fates—Daniel and Marcus mostly—and when they used their musical future- and past-seers, they made chords, harmonies, and motifs that repeated depending on the purpose of the question asked, not the question itself. They often manifested as patterns of ascending and descending colors.

  And Janus’s seers had just hit a familiar chord progression.

  Leif kept his mouth shut. He kept a veneer of uncaring on his mind, too, because that made it less likely a Fate would do the work necessary to outflank him. And if there was one thing he’d learned from his father and his aunt, it was that you couldn’t surprise a future-seeing Fate, but you could, if you were careful, disguise the possible paths forward in such a way as to keep a Fate from understanding their significance.

  And the fact that he might just be recognizing a flavor in Janus’s seers was a path he wanted to keep to himself.

  Leif pulled his glove onto his left hand, then set it on Nax’s forehead. The Lesser Emperor’s vitals rolled out over his sleeve display, but he tapped the corner of the image and pulled up his retinal display instead. Unlike when he’d helped Nax when he was Del’s hostage, he had no desire to publicly show his suit’s information feeds.

  “Where are we going?” Leif asked. Nax’s vitals showed elevated blood pressure, temperature, histamine levels, white blood cell counts, and other indicators. His body thought it fought an infection even though the Burner factors floating in his blood were much too small for his immune system to find, much less attack. Nax, though, was a Shifter.

  Special Medical from Leif’s version of the world had long understood the interactions between Shifter and Burner factors. They combined in a way that made them biologically detectable, whereas Burner plus anything else did not.

  Leif shot another round of Burner suppressors into Nax. “To trigger the Final Protocols, the Dragonslayer will need targeting information.” No new-space travel without a fixed point at the other end. They had locked onto the shard of this world’s original Midnight Blade when they opened the ground incursion that brought them through, and even that had been iffy. There were harmonics at play, and applied n-theory physics that made quantum field theory look like children’s arithmetic. None of it had been certain—not when dealing with the fundamental probability of the universe—yet it was what they could do with the available technology.

  The whole “board the Dragonslayer and initiate the Final Protocols” pipedream required several steps, the first of which would be providing the ship with the information it needed to send those protocols to the correct destination—the dragon homeworld.

  There was also the possibility the Dragonslayer wouldn’t cooperate. That her AI would re-establish itself and put an end to all of their last-ditch efforts to reverse the dragons’ terraforming of Earth.

  Twenty-seven years of trips up to the ship, of righting her systems and exploring what memory wasn’t damaged, and not once did she indicate she was processing information in a way that would suggest some type of ethical interest. Yet after the Atlanta incident, there’d been chatter among the Fates about the AI. That the ship, even with the damage she carried, was in pain. She was “calling out,” they said.

  The calling out explained Del’s interaction with the ship. Maybe the AI wasn’t as broken as his timeline’s engineers thought.

  Not that it mattered. In his timeline, humanity didn’t have a target for a true counterstrike anyway.

  Which meant they were going to do what they had planned to do before their Trajan sent them through the ground incursion to this timeline.

  They were going into the heart of the problem.

  “We’re going to Tokyo, aren’t we?” Leif said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Janus. “We’re going into the Tokyo Spike.”

  Chapter Six

  Back when Leif had realized that this world’s Philadelphia Parrish wasn’t the crazy psycho he’d chased in his home timeline, he’d had a moment of hope. He’d thought that maybe, perhaps, possibly, this time the suicide mission wouldn’t be needed. That this time, he would be able to do his job.

  “Any word out of Japan yet?” Leif asked. It had taken almost seven months before they’d gotten intel out of their version of Tokyo.

  Janus drove toward the giant, satanic blue mustang, the iconic one that even in their world had managed to survive the dragon terraforming spike that had punctured Denver. Janus slowed the SUV, and pulled off the road just beyond the stallion’s hooves.

  “What’s left of the North American news media has culled cell phone images,” Penny said. “It’s there.”

  The Tokyo Spike was the largest, most active of all the dragon terraforming spikes spread across Asia and Europe. It had also been the first to strike the surface of the Earth.

  His Praesagio cracked transmissions, languages, and enough data to begin figuring out how the dragons controlled the hellhounds—but never astronomical information. Never caught any dragon talking about their homeworld.

  But the data was there, inside the remains of the dragons’ ship—inside the central hub of the biggest, hottest spike drilled into what used to be downtown Tokyo. Or so said the Fates.

  And who was Leif Ladonson to argue with Fates?

  Before Del stole the Dragonslayer, they’d had a plan: They’d old-school fly into Tokyo. Cut into the spike with new drilling tech created by Special Metallurgy. Steal the necessary targeting data from the dragon’s core systems. Activate the Final Protocols.


  Time jump via an incursion and stop the invasion before it started and no other action would need taking.

  Even during training, Leif had thought it a pipedream. But the desperate did desperate things.

  They hadn’t brought the drilling machines with them to this world. They had brought the science, which wouldn’t help Janus now.

  Not that he needed the drills. He had a super-sharp computer as his talisman. Stab could hook into the systems and steal the data at the same time it sliced and diced the spike’s defenses.

  The Midnight Blades were Praesagio’s all-purpose, two-for-one espionage tools.

  About half a mile up the road, the white tent-like structures of the Denver International Airport’s main terminal rose out of the gravel and snow. Power hummed off the building, and even inside the SUV, the undeniable din of aircraft set the entire area vibrating.

  If this timeline was running the same emergency protocols as his had right after The Incursion closed, all remaining airliners were now being retrofitted for search, rescue, and troop transport operations into Asia, Europe, and the East Coast of North America. There would be no more commercial flights—not with the skies full of hostiles. Escaping Denver via the friendly skies wasn’t possible, so there weren’t a lot of cars around.

  There weren’t many near the statue, either, as if the locals had an unconscious desire not to ride out the end of the world under something as brightly blue and shimmering as a dragon.

  “Why are we stopping?” Vivicus said. “Aren’t we going to steal a plane?”

  Janus stared dead-eyed at Vivicus. “I have Stab, my dear First Morpher.”

  Vick blinked.

  It dawned on him what Janus meant.

  He held Stab away from Janus like that would matter inside the SUV. “Oh no you are not!” He pointed out the windshield at nothing in particular. “Use those goddamned seers of yours! Do you have any idea at all what you could trigger? Huh?”

  Vick did. Leif did and Penny did, too.