by Dan Schiro
A pack of dog-like humanoids surrounded him, some on all fours, some hunched upright in the light of his datacube. The whole emaciated group, perhaps a dozen and a half again, were albino-skinned and perfectly bald, covered in veins, clusters of warts and pus-streaming sores. Each had a pronounced lower jaw and a mouth full of slavering canines, and their nostril slits twitched as they sniffed at Orion’s foreign scent. At the moment they seemed curious and hesitant, but Orion figured that wouldn’t last long for the hungry creatures. He did the math and hoped two problems could add up to none.
A deep breath was all it took to put him in the White Room. “Come on then, you ugly bastards,” he hissed as he called a long, double-bladed staff to his hand. The shadow-dwellers lashed out with clawed, three-finger hands and snapped at him with jaws like bear traps, but Orion fell into Blades of a Wheel, and his furiously spinning staff cut through them like a thresher. The abbreviated screams of the creatures rang out like a discordant symphony, rolling over the shadow-lands in a hideous song.
Some small handful of seconds later, Ruga came storming up the other side of the artificial hillock. “You should have stayed hidden, little rat,” he barked as he reached the top. “Now there’s nowhere to—”
Orion looked up at Ruga from the circle of light cast by his datacube. His double-bladed staff dripped with black blood and the shadow-dwellers lay dismembered all around him. He called his weapon back to his manacite gauntlet, the living metal raging with bright red veins. “Now I’m ready,” Orion said, smiling at Ruga. The word that felt right came to him, and he spoke it as he flexed the fingers of his silver gauntlet. “Goliath.”
A spark of pale fire danced in his palm, then spread all over his body. Orion screamed as bones snapped and reformed, tendons stretched and thickened, muscles ripped and rebuilt. In a few seconds the agony passed as if it had never been, and he stood some nine feet tall with a physique that put Kangor’s to shame. Checking Ruga’s weapon, Orion matched it with a barbarian sword of his own. Then he flexed his tree-trunk legs and leaped for the top of the heap, swinging his long, serrated blade at Ruga’s head.
The big durok managed to block Orion’s swinging sword with his own, if barely. While his opponent was off-balance, Orion struck out with a huge foot that crunched into Ruga’s ribs and sent him tumbling down the garbage heap. Orion charged down the slope after Ruga as the large durok tried to find his feet, and they met again on a long, flat stretch of shadowy landfill. This time Orion executed Furious Wind and delivered a flurry of powerful strokes that battered Ruga back. Orion felt intoxicated by some combination of his spellblade’s bloodlust, the thrill of bending reality and the sheer strength of his new body. He laughed as Ruga backpedaled, and his mind lost its grasp on the White Room, but it didn’t matter now. Ruga could do nothing but block frantically, and the look in his yellow eyes told Orion he knew it was only a matter of time before the killing stroke arrived.
As Orion was about to break through the durok’s defenses, Ruga turned and bounded away. Orion leaped after him with a wordless cry, and towers of trash crumbled as the two giants hurtled through the underworld, Orion’s datacube whizzing along to light the pursuit. After a short chase, Ruga landed with a thunderous impact at the edge of a bubbling, glowing pool. The edge of the pool crumbled into the smoking yellow sludge as the hulking durok backpedaled, and Ruga was cornered.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Orion said as he landed, his voice booming from his amplified body. “Surrender now, help us stop the Mad Thinker, and I’ll only take your arm.” He shrugged his massively muscled shoulders. “Can’t let you keep the spellblade, you understand.”
Ruga turned his two twisted horns down at Orion as the glowing yellow sludge hissed behind him. “Never,” he growled as he raised his huge sword once more. “I will gladly die fighting before I turn on—”
Before Ruga could finish his solemn oath, his body started to steam and shrink. Second by second, the colossal frame boiled away until he was nothing more than the stocky durok Orion had first faced in the warehouse launch yard. Gravity called Ruga’s barbarian sword to the ground with a yank on his ropey arm, the weapon’s tree of barbs now too heavy for him to wield.
“What was that about ‘die fighting?’” Orion said with a smirk.
Ruga called the drained spellblade back into his fire-red flesh. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, glowering. “The Grand Warlord’s plans are in motion. No one can stop them now.”
Orion called his own barbarian sword back to his gauntlet. “See, that’s the kind of thing I would love to hear more about if you would not make me kill you.”
Ruga laughed coldly, his eyes turned up as if he no longer saw Orion. “I will watch Typhus put his boot on your neck from the next world.” He turned and leaped.
“Wait!” Orion shouted, but Ruga splashed into the steaming yellow pool. The durok’s scream ripped through the shadows of the underworld, and Orion was treated to a brief instant of thrashing limbs, peeling flesh and exploding eyeballs. Then Ruga disappeared into the toxic sludge with little more than a bubble and a ripple.
Chapter 11
Unfortunately, Orion couldn’t call an aircab to get him out of the dark under-city. Using his god-like physique for all it was worth, he bounded and clawed his way up, first through crumbling ruins, then through platform support structures and finally to the level of the air traffic lanes. He perched like a hulking gargoyle on a platform fixture, took a moment to enter the White Room, and made what he hoped would be his final leap — after all, he didn’t know how much longer his goliath spell would last. Just as he had planned, he landed on the roof of a passing aircar.
“Hi there,” Orion shouted at the aging great apes beneath the cockpit bubble as they screamed and flailed. “Sorry to bother you, but I could use a bit of assistance.”
“A giant, a giant,” cried the brown-pelted woman in the passenger seat.
“How hideously bald,” screamed the roan-colored man as he grabbed the controls and swerved, trying to fling Orion off the pearl-blue vehicle.
Wind lashed Orion’s face and flattened his blond hair. He dug into the aircar’s dome with his gauntlet’s clawed fingertips, barely holding on as they careened through the headlights of an oncoming air traffic lane and narrowly missed a flashing orange Ogga Foods billboard.
“Seriously,” Orion hollered as he slapped the bubble with his left hand. “I’ll pay! A thousand creds for a ride to Tatumu District!”
The driver glanced up at him with questioning dark-brown eyes. “Two thousand,” he shouted back.
“Daggus, you can’t be serious,” shrieked his wife.
“He scratched the dome, Talli,” he yelled at her. “Someone has to pay for that!”
“Two, then,” Orion agreed. “Just fly steady!”
They made their way through the brightly lit upper platforms of Konnexus, and after a few more wind-whipped minutes, Daggus piloted them down toward the flickering yellow glowglobes of Tatumu District. The great ape hovered above the war-torn streets long enough for Orion to complete the cube-to-cube credit transfer and jump down. The aircar was already speeding away by the time Orion’s huge feet touched the ground in the resale warehouse launch yard.
His team was all there, plus the Briarhearts, Legionnaire Jabari Trax and the SpaceCorps grunts. Aurelia, Kangor and Bully loitered by the entrance to the administrative building looking bored, but Dalaxa Croy stood out in the middle of the yard with Jabari Trax, shouting orders and gesturing. The mixed bag of mercenaries and soldiers sifted through the wreckage of the cargo capsule, swept the yard for mines and trotted in and out of the warehouse entrance. All of them tensed up when he leaped down into the floodlights, but Bully sprinted toward him and sniffed, whining with worry.
“Everybody relax — it’s me.” Orion stretched out a huge hand to his dog, but the modified Cane Corso shrank back, his fleshy black brow kn
it. “I had to get creative with the Blade of the Word,” he said, holding up his silver gauntlet to the others, “but I’m fine.”
Dalaxa stepped away from Jabari Trax and approached him. “Where did you run off to? What happened?”
Orion smirked down at her stunned face. “Let’s just say there’s one less evil henchman in the galaxy.”
Aurelia and Kangor strode toward him, the Exile and the mighty vycart both grinning. “Little friend,” Kangor said, his orange eyebrows wriggling with amusement. “You were littler last I saw you.”
Aurelia laughed. “By the Jade Way, when your neck’s bigger than your head, take a day off from the gym.”
“Har, har,” Orion said. He folded his thick arms across his chest and gazed down at them, a strange sensation especially in Kangor’s case. “What’s going on here?”
“Ask our new friend,” Aurelia said with a nod at Dalaxa. “Apparently she’s running the show.”
“Someone had to take charge,” Dalaxa said, her hands perched on her thin s’zone hips. “These two seemed content to loaf about once the fighting was done, and the grunts needed someone to give them orders.”
“Oh?” Orion tipped his huge head down to look directly into her wide pink eyes. “And exactly what have we been ordering?”
“I had Zagzebski and Seals break into the warehouse,” Dalaxa said, pointing to a dark door on the opposite side of the yard. “The Briarhearts found a gravimetric shit-ton of discarded packaging so far.” She nodded to the burnt-out cargo capsule lying on its side with two SpaceCorps soldiers standing over it. “As for that mess, I told them to run a forensic analysis, so we should be able to find out what they were trying to ship out.”
“Sounds about right,” Orion conceded with a shrug. “I’m impressed.”
“Yeah?” A shadow of a smile came to her porcelain face as she reached into a pocket of her Union-blue jumpsuit. “If that impressed you, this will positively make you shit.” She held out a long memory crystal, the modern galaxy’s finest big-data storage solution.
Orion frowned, not understanding. “What—”
Dalaxa sighed as if explaining would be a tedious chore. “After you ran off, I went up into the lab, and—”
“You what?” Orion barked, remembering the holographic countdown set to end with great gouts of fire melting the equipment.
“I wasn’t going to hide while there were things to be done,” Dalaxa said sharply as she raised a long finger at him. “Now, if you would let me explain. I was able to shut down the meltdown protocol, obviously. Then I collated the datafeeds from the diagnostic equipment, sent them to the main computer and ripped the memory core.” She waved the memory crystal at him. “Kind of worth it, don’t you think?”
Orion laughed and gathered her up in his huge arms, forgetting his amplified size and strength. He lifted her off the ground and spun her around in a hug, laughing while she squirmed, and put her down like he was returning a doll to its place. For a moment, he thought he had made himself dizzy. Then steam billowed out of his huge body and he fell to his knees. His extraordinary mass boiled away by the second, and again the mishmash team stood and watched him slack-jawed. After a few moments, he found himself back in a more familiar frame. The others watched him apprehensively as he took a few deep breaths, and then Orion looked up at Dalaxa.
“Good work,” he panted. “Do you know what we have?”
“Well…” A chagrined expression puckered her lips. “You were right.”
“Hang around,” Aurelia said to her with a smile. “He’ll continue to surprise.”
“I was right?” Orion staggered to his feet. “Remind me about which part?”
“This place.” Dalaxa heaved a heavy breath and the information poured out of her. “I scanned through the shipping records and the material analysis files from the lab.” She shook her head. “All of those random orders — the toys, the gadgets, the machine parts, the cleaning chemicals, the household items — they were breaking them down. And it’s everything you need to make my weapons a reality.”
“Score one for arcane secrets.” Orion rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Forgive me if I’m too exhausted to do my ‘I told you so’ dance.”
“Tell him,” Kangor prompted with a lupine glare in Dalaxa’s direction.
“I’m getting to it,” Dalaxa said with a glare of her own. “I was able to capture a star-fix of the last holo-transmission before it was wiped from active memory.”
“Where?” Orion asked.
“Abriomere.”
“I told you,” Kangor growled, “the proper name is Tolomex.”
Aurelia scoffed. “War Blight suits it better than either.”
“Whatever you want to call it,” Dalaxa snapped. “We don’t have time to argue the semantics of ancient great ape-vycart pissing matches. I tracked the transmission back through the ether routes myself. It came from Abriomere, a few hours before we arrived.”
Orion perked up with a surge of energizing urgency. “If the Mad Thinker’s base is on War Blight,” he said to his team in a hushed voice, “we could end this thing before it begins.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled across the yard. “Briarhearts, we gotta go!”
Orion and his people thanked Legionnaire Jabari Trax and his weary, scuffed-up troops, and they hurried back to his Prodigal Star. They followed the Briarheart squadron saucer up to the White Heath, and soon they sat in the ship’s mess hall while Costigan and Reddpenning piloted them into the ether routes. Though the Briarhearts sat together at a long table and celebrated the successful extraction gregariously, Orion waved his small team over to a side table so they could talk privately.
“I still cannot believe it’s him,” Kangor said as the strategy session quickly found its way off track. “To think that the Grand Warlord’s been alive all this time... it can’t be him.”
“It is absolutely, 1,000 percent him,” Dalaxa said, scorn dripping from every word. She abandoned her fork into her Ogga Food tin with a disgusted clank. “And even if it’s not, does it matter?”
“It matters,” Kangor growled. He picked up the thawed haunch of raw meat he had taken from the White Heath’s freezer and tore off a hunk with his claws. “It matters to me.”
Aurelia took a sip from her goblet of honey wine, the only dinner she cared to have. “I’ve seen stranger comebacks in my time,” she said with a smack of her lips. “Typhus was quite a specimen in his day.”
Orion speared a hunk of flash-cooked steak and paused. “Aurelia,” he said as he narrowed his blue-and-green eyes, “I will kill you if I find out you and Typhus the Mad Thinker were lovers 700 years ago, and you’re just telling me now.”
“Nothing like that, unfortunately,” Aurelia said with a droll smile. “We fought on different fronts when the Dark Spacers came, and he was but a pup then.”
Orion shook his head and fed the morsel of gray meat to Bully under the table. “Look, all of this has nothing to do with anything. If we’re going to take the fight to him tomorrow, we have to remember we won’t be fighting just him. We’ll be fighting War Blight, too.”
“Tolomex,” Kangor said under his breath.
“Whatever.” Softening his face, Orion leaned back in his ridged chair. “The point is, we should all get some rest. We’ll be pulling out of ether in 11 hours, and we have to be ready to go.”
They finished eating, took the gravity lift to the crew deck and followed stark steel corridors to their block of rooms. Kangor disappeared into his chamber to brood without a word of goodbye, and Aurelia sauntered toward the sound of Briarhearts starting a card game down the hall. Before Orion and Dalaxa went into their side-by-side rooms, the s’zone flashed the memory crystal at him.
“I’ll check over these files more closely before I sleep,” Dalaxa said as her door hissed open. “Perhaps I missed something.”
; “Thank you, Dalaxa.” Orion opened his own door and shooed Bully inside. “And well done with that.”
“Don’t hug me again,” she said with a scowl. “I hate hugs.”
“Sorry,” Orion shrugged. “But it makes me think I should add a science nerd to the inner circle. Might come in handy — as long as I don’t give them a pulse pistol.”
“Did you just turn a compliment into an ‘I told you so?’” Dalaxa’s sculpted face twisted with a scoff. “You may have fewer social graces than I, human.” She stalked inside, and her door whooshed closed behind her.
“Come get me if you find anything,” Orion called after her.
The lights brightened automatically as Orion entered his dim quarters. The windowless square space allotted to him on the White Heath came nowhere near the luxury of the sephilon queen’s pleasure yacht, nor was it as spacious and modern as his quarters aboard the fallen Star Sentry. The room offered little more than a functioning holo-stage, a firm bed, a crash couch and a few bolted-down chairs around a small table.
Yet the room did have an officer’s minibar, and that was enough for Orion at the moment. After dropping his smartcloak to the floor and climbing out of his kinetic bodysuit, he poured himself a tall glass of apple-based freyan vodka called Low Hanging Fruit. His shaky hand carried a deep drink to his lips, and Orion finally let his body relax after the arduous day. Yet in the dim silence of his room, Orion’s spellblade whispered to him. The living metal had been denied Ruga’s blood at the last moment, and Orion could feel it crying out for satisfaction. He took another deep drink, hoping to silence the ancient manacite symbiote and sleep.
At a rustle, he turned from the liquor cabinet to see Bully maneuvering in a slow circle on the bed. “You’re tired too, huh boy?” Orion chuckled as the dog settled into a wrinkly mound of flesh. “Really, go ahead,” he said as the dog’s ice-blue eyes shrank to sleepy slits. “Don’t let me stop you.”