Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Up close, the bridge looked like a flap that had folded down from the side of the spike like a hinged paper tab. It wasn’t particularly thick. The spike also had a wavy, ripple texture along with its dragon-skin-like lightshow. The ripples funneled heat up the side of the spike, through the occasional tunnel, and generated low growls that only made the weird-but-lovely colors creepier. The ripples and tubes continued along the surface of the bridge and would make for difficult driving of human vehicles.

  Vivicus explained the obvious. “There are turbines in the tubes.”

  Janus was probably rolling his eyes at Vivicus under his hood. “They’re part of the power web,” he said. “The system is set up to immediately compensate for source losses.”

  Solar would be out with the haze, so they powered the spikes on geothermal and adjacent resources.

  Janus placed Stab on her scabbard. His suit folded up along the scabbard’s sides, effectively making a pocket around the sword. Her hilt still poked out over his shoulder but her blade was covered and invisible.

  “Tell me,” Janus said. “Did any of your scientists figure out why the dragons only keep one of the mean hellhounds per bridge?” He pointed at the shimmering lights. “It’s sleeping, by the way.”

  The teams called this particular breed of mean ones “sweeties.” They were bigger than the bison-sized hound that they’d killed in Denver. Some were comparable in size to adult bull elephants. But these animals, like almost all the hound species deployed by the dragons, were climbers.

  They were also fast, angry, and the only hellhound species with horns.

  One horn, to be exact, except it wasn’t really a horn. It was more a half-meter long, curved dragon talon growing out of the snout of a pissed-off, glowing, dragon-elephant-evil-unicorn hybrid—and it was truly the stuff of nightmares.

  And somewhere on the underside of the bridge one was snoozing in its den like a puppy dog.

  “Would you keep a tiger in your yard?” Vivicus said. “It’s pretty clear that sweeties take extra handling.”

  A difficult-to-kill tiger the size of Del’s bus. “Is this one armored?” Leif asked. One of the first responses to the attacks on the spikes was to armor their sweeties like the giant war dogs they were.

  Janus’s seers pulsed. “Yes.”

  Antonius groaned. “The discs won’t work on an armored one.”

  “Then stay out of its way.” Janus held up his hand. “Those discs are for the airlock.”

  From outside, the bridge looked like it ended in a smooth, flat wall. But there was an airlock there, and like all dragon tech, operative systems were invisible under a layer of functional—and probably aesthetic—camo.

  These airlocks were ten meters across and fifteen tall, with control nodes four meters up each side—and way too close to the edge of the slippery bridge surface.

  Leif was to climb the wall and slap two discs onto the left node. Antonius was to do the same to the right.

  They’d blow the camo on the airlock, access the underlying systems, and use Stab to suck out the targeting data.

  Easy peasy, which was why it had never worked back in Leif’s timeline.

  The moment Janus pushed the sword into the correct connective node—the moment Stab distracted Janus by reading dragon data that might help this timeline—Leif was going to take care of the problem once and for all by taking off Janus’s head. Then he’d pull the sword and they’d all follow Del out of this war zone the old-fashioned way with no triggered spike nuking.

  If they got off the bridge. Even if they didn’t, the Dragonslayer would have the uploaded information, which meant that sooner or later, so would humanity.

  “Camo-up,” Janus said. “We go in three.”

  They sprinted across the dirt, Leif in front, gun ready, waiting for the sweetie to come screaming over the side or the airlock to open. Or the projectiles to fly.

  They hit the bridge at a full run. Suit-filtered lights and colors drifted up from the surface like muted ghosts. They made twenty yards onto the bridge—halfway—before the sweetie bolted over the edge and into their path.

  Most of the dumber hellhounds weren’t smart enough to do a good job of camouflaging. This one couldn’t keep its own camouflage in sync with the spike’s background changes and stood out like a glowing, elephant-sized, rhino-nosed swirl of evil armored cotton-candy.

  Leif moved left. Antonius right. The sweetie waved its head like a confused rhino and Vivicus shot it in the eye. The bullet clouded the beast’s armor but it only skidded to a stop more angry and riled up than it had been before.

  “How the hell do they get those things to wear goggles?” Vivicus shot at its other eye.

  It roared and pawed at its head but the goggles did not release so it did what every pissed off rhino would do—it lowered its head and charged with its talon-sharp horn pointed straight at Vivicus.

  Leif slapped his rifle onto the magnetic holds on his back and snatched his discs from his shoulders. Antonius did the same. They hit the walls at the same time, with Janus right behind.

  Leif’s foot hit the slippery dragon camo and he kicked the reinforced toe of his other boot into the wall.

  His foot caught. He scaled the lights and slapped his discs onto the spot that, as long as this spike operated the same as the others, was the airlock’s outer controls.

  Antonius slapped his discs onto the wall. Countdown started. Five… Leif’s suit said. They both dropped the two meters back to the bridge. Four…

  Janus dropped out of camo. He stood dead center in front of the airlock, his suit flashing dragon colors and patterns, and reached over his shoulder to pull Stab from her scabbard. Three…

  Leif and Antonius backed away from the wall. Two…

  Behind them, the sweetie roared as it chased Vivicus across the bridge. Vick laughed and flashed and slapped the sweetie’s rump as it stampeded back and forth.

  At least Vick was having a good time. One…

  The discs blasted their focused n-EMP charges directly into the spike’s hull.

  The bridge groaned. The colors sputtered. And the entire light-and-camo show turned off.

  The airlock was as deep as the bridge was long, a dark, almost pitch-black tunnel leading into the guts of the spike.

  They had some descriptions from inside the dragon spaces. About how they were as utilitarian as one would expect for a colony ship. And how, like the outside, most of the tech itself was hidden behind dragon lightshows.

  But this, seeing down the barrel of the gun, was new to Leif.

  Forty meters away, the second door was as tall and wide as the first. But this door was as transparent as dragon armor.

  Six dragon soldiers flashed down there. Six massive dragons, all at least twice the size of the two Leif had grown up with, all fully armored and carrying weapons the Seraphim had not yet fully reversed-engineered when the team left their home timeline. Six highly trained aliens who, unlike the rest of their species, had no qualms about killing human soldiers.

  “We are so fucked,” Antonius said.

  Janus walked across the threshold into the airlock space. “We have three minutes before they restart the system and open the inner door.” His seers spread out in short, staccato pulses. “Antonius!” He pointed at a small mound in the floor. “There.” He pointed at another next to Leif. “There. Stomp at the same time.”

  Antonius stepped toward his mound.

  “Do it,” Leif said, and stomped down on his.

  A row of symbols appeared on the floor in front of Janus. He ran his foot across the marks as if his boot read them as Braille, then stepped back and looked up at the sky.

  “Showtime,” he said, and slammed Stab into the center symbol, but at an angle toward the open airlock.

  Stab vibrated and she glowed and… locks tumbled. Passcodes cracked. Languages broke into their component parts and Stab read them all.

  That Midnight Blade crunched all the numbers. She brute-forced and sh
e learned from that brute-forcing with such speed that she danced around every protective measure the spike threw at her. And she sang out to not only the dragon systems, but to all the other systems she knew across all the timelines she’d touched. To the Dragonslayer and, Leif felt, to her version of the ship, an alt-‘slayer from farther away in the multiverse curlicues than his home timeline. To the suits. To Leif’s haptic feedback systems, his filters, and his heads-up display. To everywhere and everywhen, and…

  To the Tsar’s ring. She was singing to Maria Romanova.

  All the power system data, maps, technical specs, operations—all the systems she danced through, all the security she cracked as if she already knew the passcodes—every bit of the data flowed through Leif’s communications systems as lights and colors.

  He barely saw anything else. Barely registered where he was. They were drowning in dragon color and meaning and he could barely breathe.

  Antonius buckled over and held his head. Janus pulled back his seers as if to protect himself.

  Leif had his chance. He pulled his rifle off her magnetic holster and aimed at Janus’s head.

  “If I don’t open our path to the ship, we all die.” Janus pointed at the far airlock door.

  Leif curled his finger to squeeze the trigger.

  Nothing happened. The gun didn’t respond. Neither did his suit. His displays hadn’t changed. Nothing indicated new damage or external control. Yet he was frozen.

  Antonius straightened up as if fighting against his own body.

  Janus had control of all their suits. “Antonius touched the implant in the back of Daniel’s head,” he said.

  He’d infected Daniel?

  “Do you think your reboot fully cleared out my instructions? Or that I couldn’t facilitate other overrides? I infected that little shit’s implant and used him to spread the code to you!” he yelled. “I am Marko Kruger!”

  A wave of navigational data flowed from Stab. Three-dimensional and five-dimensional star maps washed through Leif's sensors and he felt the cold of the void. The heat of the stars. Speed. Velocity. Stories. Colonies.

  Janus spread his arms wide and laughed. “Thank you, universe!” He waved his hand at Leif. “Kill Antonius.”

  Leif’s suit retargeted. “Override!” he yelled. “Over—” His rifle fired three rounds into Antonius’s belly.

  If his suit was still in full armor, he’d survive. Maybe. If he got medical attention. If they got him out of here.

  Janus pulled Stab from her dragon stone. He touched the flat of the blade to his hood, then looked over his shoulder, and pointed. “Now kill the girl,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Del, moments earlier…

  I looked over the edge of the crater at the shadows and billowing heat. If the dragons had hit magma, they’d capped it, at least in the visual spectrum. The heat rising from the pit was enough to make me pant and want to pull off my clothes.

  “Goggles,” Daniel said. “Both of you. For the dragon dazzle.”

  I pulled my goggles over my eyes, as did Nax. They were polarized, though not particularly dark, but they did cut through the bright shine given off by the dragon machinery.

  Nax dropped his pack. “Are they on the bridge?”

  Daniel shook his head. “They will know the moment I use my seers.”

  Nax checked his weapon. “Can you feel the sword?”

  I closed my eyes. She’d called to me under Blucifer. I’d known she was in Nax’s vehicle. “Come on, baby,” I muttered. “Time to dance.”

  She was here, out there, on the bridge. I pointed. “They’re—”

  A burst of white light so bright it overpowered the polarization on the goggles erupted off the bridge as if someone had turned off the dimmer.

  I yipped and turned away. “What the—”

  A huge, squat hellhound climbed up over the side onto the bridge. It refracted like the dragon we’d met at the bus—like it wore armor. It waved the huge, long, curved, probably razor-sharp horn on its snout like some sort of over-sized cuttlefish-rhino.

  “It’s got a talon on its nose,” Nax said.

  “Did they armor a hellhound?” I asked.

  A bullet hit its eye.

  It was definitely wearing armor. And the Seraphim were already on the bridge.

  “Janus is distracted.” Daniel touched Nax’s arm. “Now or never.”

  “Stay close.” Nax stepped out from behind the wall and I knew he’d activated his abilities. He looked the same to me. Daniel, too. But I knew. I smelled it in the air.

  “Once we get past our friend, don’t worry about us,” Daniel said. “Don’t look back. Run as hard as you can and get Stab.”

  “I—” What was I supposed to say? That’s stupid? No one has the element of surprise with Janus? What about the evil rhino?

  I didn’t say any of it. I ran next to Nax.

  We covered the cleared area in front of the bridge and jogged onto the surface, keeping low and moving around the giant dragon-rhino’s enormous and plump back end. Nax kept his rifle up in case the rhino-beast turned. It sniffed a few times but didn’t react to us, and we jogged by.

  Maybe this was going to be easier than—I jogged right into an invisible body. One that grabbed me as I yelped and almost fell on my ass.

  The dragon-rhino bounced around like a ball rocking back and forth on the bridge’s ridges. It dropped its head and sniffed at the ground.

  “Morons,” the invisible body holding me said.

  Nax coughed.

  “Better cut it out, Lesser Emperor,” the body said. “The suits have filters, remember?”

  Vivicus. He wrapped both arms around my chest and picked me up off the bridge’s surface.

  I almost screamed. I almost panicked. But something about how he held me felt different, odd, like the tension inside his suit was more than the tension holding me.

  The lights on the bridge shut down.

  The rhino-beast snorted and pawed. Reds pulsed along its sides from its neck to its tail, then reversed and traveled backward all the way across its head to the tip of its horn.

  Vivicus pressed the side of his face against mine. “He knew Leif was going to try to stop him,” he whispered. “He overrode and networked our suits. And now you and I get to distract the beastie, luv.”

  Daniel whipped around. He hadn’t heard Vivicus but he knew. He leaned toward Nax.

  They vanished.

  “Leif and Antonius?” I asked.

  “They’re guarding that damned sword.” He whipped me around so we were looking down the bridge toward the closed airlock at the end. “One on each side of the door,” he said. “He’s looking for the correct place to plant his Midnight Blade.”

  I knew Nax and Daniel were listening. I knew they were still close enough to understand that Vivicus, for all his psycho horridness, wasn’t happy. Overriding his suit must have been the final straw.

  “Go!” I whispered, hoping that Nax and Daniel would take advantage of the opportunity.

  The rhino-beast roared and stomped. Reds, oranges, and blues pulsed and spat along its hide and horn.

  “I hate the mean ones,” Vivicus said. “Don’t move, sweetcheeks.” He let go. His suit clicked. And he whipped a knife at the rhino-beast’s neck.

  He hit flesh. The beast screamed. It reared up onto its back legs, flailing its massive, taloned front limbs in the air and vomiting colors as it backed toward the edge of the bridge.

  Vivicus swiped for me. His hand grazed my shoulder in a twitchy, fighting way, as if he wasn’t trying to grab me, but his suit was.

  I took off toward the thirty-foot-tall gate at the other end of the bridge. I didn’t dare look back. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the door. Leif was there. Antonius, too. And my sword.

  Where are you, baby? If I concentrated, if I thought about getting Stab and nothing else, I wouldn’t think about the rhino. I wouldn’t think about how Janus overpowered three Seraphim and slaved
their suits. Get the sword. Stop Janus from opening a ground incursion and triggering the Dragonslayer into nuking the spike. And…

  Janus slammed Stab into the bridge. A shaft of new-space power blasted into the sky.

  He laughed.

  He was about to start the war and he didn’t care.

  “Stab,” I whispered. “Please don’t open the incursion to the ship. Please.”

  The shaft of energy from the sword to the sky pulsed like a tornado. It whipped and coiled but it did not pull away.

  I hadn’t stepped in front of the most powerful Fate on Earth and stopped him from running over my timeline. I’d let him connect with the massive, monumental tool in orbit so that he could skip out on our world and move on to the next.

  It was too late. Even if I did stop Janus from opening his incursion, the dragons would retaliate in ways they had not in other worlds, or so far here. With this attack, we guaranteed extermination.

  “Stab…” I whispered. “Please don’t.” What else could I do? I had to appeal to a sword’s better nature.

  She answered. No, new-space answered.

  The ghostly shine of the dragons’ technology shifted toward the storms and tornadoes of new-space. Their colors muted but their movements left trails in the air. Janus was sucking in energy the same way he had been while we were in Maria’s cage—like a black hole. Lines of power stretched out from him like magnetic lines, except these attached to three other bodies.

  Leif aimed his rifle at me. His feet shifted and he jerked his shoulders—because he was fighting the suit. He had to be fighting the suit. He wouldn’t willingly try to kill me.

  “Leif!” I screamed. I cringed. One shot from a Seraphim gun would be my end. Head, heart, belly, it didn’t matter. They’d come to this world prepared and I was about to splatter all over the dragons’ pretty lights.

  “Stab!” I yelled. “Release the Seraphim!” Please, I thought. Please just this once let the better angels do their jobs.

  Nax appeared no more than three feet from Janus, rifle up and firing into the Fate Progenitor’s chest.