by Dan Schiro
After digging through his smartcloak, Orion found his datacube and wet it with a few dabs of vodka. He scrubbed the grime and crusted blood from the brass-plated device and tossed it in the air. “Search for historical, geographic and atmospheric information on planetary designation ‘Abriomere’ or ‘Tolomex,’ colloquially called ‘War Blight.’”
The floating cube’s holographic interface collated videos, maps and articles, automatically throwing them to the room’s holo-stage for projection. Hours passed while Orion sifted and sipped, sifted and sipped, Memory’s Prism absorbing mountains of information. Whatever you called the planet, it had been at the heart of a war between the great apes and the vycarts back when humans were building the pyramids. He waded through the holograms until his eyes ached, and then he finally shut everything down for the night. Yet as he curled on the crash couch to try to get a decent chunk of continuous sleep, he felt the spellblade whispering to him again.
After a restless hour of tossing and turning atop the couch and listening to Bully snore, Orion rose. He dressed in AO-branded red-and-black workout clothes and stepped barefoot into the bright corridor, blinking his eyes. He had no doubt the s’zone weapon scientist would be cross with him for waking her, but he wanted to see if she had found any useful grain of data on her second peek through the memory crystal’s files. The truth was, he needed something — anything — to distract him from the ancient manacite voice pleading for blood. After pushing the notification buzzer half a dozen times, Orion became worried that the mechanism was broken and rapped soundly on the steel door.
“Hey, Dalaxa,” he hollered. “Open up, I’ve got to talk to you.” He waited a moment before adding, “It will be quick, seriously, then you can go back to sleep.”
Orion waited another few seconds, and he heard a faint, pained groan on the other side of the door. He was about to pound on the door again when he heard a clatter and the tinkle of breaking glass. He only hesitated for a split second before he pulled out his datacube and linked to the bridge of the refurbished warship. “Costigan,” he said as the other end picked up. “I need—”
“He’s off-shift, OG,” said Reddpenning across the audio-only connection. “His lovely wife has the wheel right now. How can I help you?”
“Red, good,” Orion said breathlessly. Costigan would have probably needed her help anyway. “I need you to override the lock on Dalaxa Croy’s room, I think something’s wrong.”
Reddpenning hesitated for a moment. “This isn’t some ploy to catch her in the shower, is it?”
“I’m serious,” Orion shouted. “She’s in trouble.”
“Stand by,” said Reddpenning, her voice stern.
The door hissed open, and Orion rushed in to find Dalaxa face down on the bare steel floor next to the crash couch. Her small table stood covered in the collateral of homemade chemistry, including resin-stained bowls, boxes of cleaning chemicals, items from the commissary and a small flash-torch. Orion rushed by it all to kneel at Dalaxa’s side, his knees crunching painfully in the sticky shards of a broken vial. Orion turned her over as gently as he could, and when he saw her huge, glassy eyes, he feared he had come too late. Then she raised an arm as if it were weighted with lead, and a soft mumble tumbled forth from her twisted lips.
“Sil…”
“Hang in there,” Orion grunted as he touched a hand to her burning face. “I’ll get you to the ship med bay, the diagnostic station will know what to do.”
She gave a weak shake of her head and repeated her clumsy gesture. “Sil… i.. cate,” she rasped.
Orion leaped up and dashed to the cluttered table. He knocked over blackened beakers and upended cook-bulbs until he found a small gel bag marked with the Phuturistic Pharmaceutical logo and labeled “Silicate Plus.” He guessed it was no mistake the gel bag was already hooked up to a makeshift tube-and-needle contraption. He rushed back to Dalaxa’s side, and after a few messy attempts, the needle found a delicate vein in her arm.
A breathless moment passed, and then Dalaxa snapped up with a snarl as vicious as anything Kangor could muster. Orion sprang away and landed on his backside, and for a moment both of them did nothing but pant. After Dalaxa retched a few times, she looked up at Orion with bleary eyes. For an instant it seemed as if she might crawl toward him, collapse on him and weep. But after a few ragged breaths, she glanced at the needle in her arm and shook her head. “Made a mess of that, didn’t you?”
Orion gaped at her, stunned. “We need to get you to the med bay, get you in the diagnostic machine…”
“Oh, piss off.” Dalaxa flopped back against the base of the dark-gray crash couch. “This isn’t my first time to the dance.”
Orion glanced at the chemical-strewn table. “Was… was that a s’zone vision-quest kind of thing?”
“What?” She glared at him, even as she wiped at her watery eyes. “No. That was a ‘I want to get messed up and forget who I am’ kind of thing.”
“What? Why?” Orion leaned toward her. “The data you ripped from that lab could be the clue that cracks this. You should be proud of yourself.”
Now she gaped at him. “Proud of myself?” She let the words hang in the air for a moment. “Proud of myself. What I’ve done… All the things I’ve built…” She clutched her sweaty, smooth head, her slender fingers spreading wide. “I did it all because I wanted to be the best, be the smartest, be the first. I wanted to unravel all the mysteries, shatter all the boundaries. I didn’t care that I was building weapons. And now, now…” She looked up at him, trembling. “Trillions could die. Death on a scale the galaxy’s never seen, at least not since the plague wiped out the vycarts.” She cracked and sobbed, cloudy tears flowing down her face.
Orion scooted over to her, and she fell into his embrace, bawling. They leaned against the base of the crash couch for a long while. When she finally calmed, Orion wiped the tears from her face.
“You should send me back to the Maker Rings,” she said softly. “You should send me to Wormrock Pen to pay for my crimes against sentient life.”
Orion managed a gentle smile. “You don’t get off that easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“You forced me to take you down to Konnexus, and you proved your worth by getting that data.” Orion shrugged. “No one on my team can do that. So now you’re in, and you’re going to War Blight with us to find whatever’s waiting there.” He held up a finger to hush her as she tried to speak. “We’ll make this right together.”
Chapter 12
Typhus the Mad Thinker sat at his desk, clad in his full military regalia and red cape. The incandescent waves of the ether route rolled by outside his comet-like stealth ship. He had just finished his midday meal of vat-grown meat, bitter elixirs and pill supplements designed to extend the vycart lifespan beyond 1,000 years. Pushing the wreckage of bowls, plates and cups out of the way, he unfurled a cracked, yellowing scroll. Typhus had long set aside an hour to read after lunch, even amidst the battle of Stribog so many centuries ago, and with bitter satisfaction he remembered the decisive charge he had led when he had put his reading down. Today’s selection was the original writings of a grand warlord who had preceded him by 19 generations. Every time Typhus read the words written in the old warlord’s own black blood, he was delighted to find the ancient strategies and tactics held timeless truth.
Typhus’ oasis of calm evaporated when Vargas rang and entered his room. “My lord,” said the scurrying creature, his bone-white head bowed and shining. “I’m sorry to interrupt you.”
Typhus looked up from his scroll with a snort. “For you to interrupt my reading, Vargas, the reason must be cosmic.” He rolled up the scroll with a few deft movements of his huge hands and slipped it back into its wooden sheath.
“Indeed, my lord, and I apologize,” said Vargas, his hooked nose bobbing as he nodded. “On the ashes of my people, I—”
“Vargas,” Typhus snapped to silence him. His neural crown tingled with the strong emotions wafting off of the squat, robed creature. “Stop posturing and tell me the bad news.”
Vargas looked up at his master with gleaming red eyes. “Ruga Dur Rugex Cron has fallen. He’s dead, my lord.” He bowed his head again. “Worse yet, I’m afraid the warehouse has been compromised. Whatever the site could tell those who seek to stop us… it is in their hands now, my lord.”
For a few moments, Typhus said nothing. Then he squeezed the wooden case in his grip until it splintered to pieces, grinding the priceless scroll within to crumbling bits. “Who?” he growled at last. “Who killed my son?”
Vargas cleared his throat and drew a black datacube from the shadows of his robes. “This is the man,” he said as he activated a preprogrammed hologram.
Typhus stared at the face of something that resembled a shaved great ape, extraordinarily ugly, with mismatched eyes and a smirk that begged to be punched. “A single man?” he muttered, lips curling back to bare his teeth. “A single man killed my son?”
Vargas nodded softly. “He has a spellblade of his own, my lord.”
“Who is he?” Typhus’ lips curled back, baring his sharp white fangs. “What is he?”
“Playback,” Vargas said, raising his reedy voice to activate a montage of holographic images. “He’s a human, my lord, a hideous race of piss-ant upstarts. He calls himself Orion Grimslade Three.” The hologram between them showed a security recording of the human, one of the Green and — was it possible? — another vycart fighting their way out of an alley against a gang of attackers. “Is that…?”
Again Vargas nodded with only the slightest of motions. “A living, breathing vycart. It would seem so my lord.”
“Interesting.” Typhus seethed quietly for a moment. “How could this human kill Ruga, a warrior I trained myself?” A growl rose in Typhus’ throat. “Who is he, Vargas?”
“Nothing more than Parliament’s pet, my lord,” scoffed Vargas. “The kind they send to clean up their messes.” He tilted his hairless head and offered a bit of a shrug. “Nonetheless, a pet with a spellblade. We know the power of that well, though it could not save poor Ru—”
“He will die.” Typhus rose to his feet with hot breaths whistling through his nostrils, his black hair rising along the back of his neck. “As will all who stand with him.”
Vargas scurried aside as the towering vycart stalked out of his spacious quarters, his red cape flowing behind his long strides. As Typhus started down the wide, military-grade corridors, he encountered the ex-SpaceCorps soldiers, pirates and mercenaries he had hired to man his stealth ship. The hardened men and women wore thin, gunmetal-gray collars as part of their service agreement, and they stopped in their tracks when they saw him, bowed their heads and raised their fists to honor him. Yet despite each reverent display that said, “my fist belongs to you,” Typhus shoved them out of the way as he passed. He carried on like this until he reached the elevator to the crew deck, and there he saw three figures standing and talking. Two were disgraced mystskyn SpaceCorps officers he had taken on months ago. The third was a freyan woman who visited his bedroom when he called upon her. The two lizard-like soldiers snapped into salutes when they saw him, and the cinnamon-winged freyan quickly went back to running her long sonic scrubber over the steely floor.
“What’s this?” he raged as he stormed up to them. The mystskyns kept their eyes on the floor, but the woman made the mistake of looking up from her work, and Typhus turned his wrath on her. “Why did I pull you out of the rubble of your backwater colony? Do you think a few nights in my bed makes it acceptable to loll about, flirting with these scaled dogs instead of earning your keep?”
“M’lord,” she whispered without glancing up again. “I’m sorry—”
“So, you admit your slovenly ways?” Typhus bellowed.
“No, I—”
“And now you contradict me.” His voice fell low, and the freyan’s wings trembled as she clutched her sonic scrubber. “My new order will not have room for those who don’t earn their keep, or for those who contradict me.”
Silence reigned for a few seconds, and the manacite veins lining Typhus’ ancient neural crown blazed white-hot. The woman looked up with pleading brown eyes, but a thought wave from Typhus’ crown reached the collar around her neck and activated the slim explosives stored there. The bang sounded no louder than a firecracker, but the explosion turned the freyan’s head to a slurry that spattered Typhus and the two mystskyns. The headless body kept its feet for a long moment, its wings twitching madly. Then the knees folded and the blood-spurting corpse collapsed on the sonic scrubber with a clatter.
After licking a drop of blood from his snout with a flick of his rough tongue, Typhus turned his glare to the mystskyns. Still the ex-corpsmen held their salutes. “Fetch someone to clean this up,” he growled at them.
“But m’lord,” the taller of the two mumbled. “She did the cleaning up…”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Typhus activated the mystskyn’s collar and closed his eyes against a fresh fountain of blood. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the remaining man quaked with an unsteady salute, and so he executed him as well. The two mystskyn bodies joined his still-warm paramour with a pair of thuds, and Typhus reached for his cape. He wiped clean his wolfish face with slow strokes, and the blood disappeared into the rich red fabric.
Moments later, Typhus reached the crew deck and barged into the dim private quarters of Pozoia Tofana. The beautiful, deadly temba nubu sat meditating on the floor of her room, incense drifting up from a pair of sticks in front of her folded legs. Typhus saw that her space had grown garish with trophies — rings, necklaces, articles of clothing, personal curios — taken from the many hunts he had sent her on to sharpen her skills. She gazed up at him with her tail taut behind her, her thick tiger-striped fur rising to stand on end.
“Your moment has come, Pozoia,” he growled.
Chapter 13
Orion made sure he reached the bridge of the White Heath before his team this time, mostly by waiting until he was outside the door before he called them up for briefing. Costigan and Reddpenning sat at their respective co-pilot and pilot stations as they rocketed through the ether, and Orion busied himself checking the route tracker to see how close they were to their destination. Aurelia, Kangor and Dalaxa trickled in, and soon Reddpenning counted down to their return to material space.
“4… 3… 2…” She threw the lever to disengage the manacite drive.
A planet — some called it Abriomere, some called it Tolomex, most called it War Blight — appeared on the viewscreen, and everyone’s breath seemed to catch at once. Countless carcasses of spacecraft and the rubble of a shattered moon drew a thick ring around the gray-brown planet, the remnants of a 10,000-year-old vycart-great ape war preserved in timeless vacuum. Solar-powered orbital weapons still fired occasional beam-bursts down to carve smoldering scars into the dead soil, and through the hazy atmosphere, the automated weapons of war were hard at work after millennia. Huge earth-mashers churned along on geothermal engines, cutting trenches that could have erased cities. Heat-subtraction bombs covered portions of the cracked landmasses with immortal glaciers. Infernos consumed other corners of the battered globe, their sprawling flames burning with limitless nano-chemical heat. Orion decided that if there was a hell, it had nothing on War Blight.
“Red,” Orion said as the others gazed at the abused planet, “can you pinpoint the source of the transmission?”
She shot a sneer back over her shoulder, her braid swinging. “I said I could, didn’t I?”
Costigan chuckled. “If my lady said she could, you better believe it, OG.”
“No need to defend my honor,” she hissed at him as her fingers danced over the control dash in front of her. “Just give me a minute.”
“What a savage plac
e,” Aurelia said as she stepped up next to Orion. “Can you imagine the battle?” She smiled coyly. “It must have shaken the stars.”
“It well might have,” Kangor grunted. “Millions died, and in the end, the manacite springs both sides wanted were destroyed forever.” He shook his head.
“And Typhus made his base here.” Orion stroked his chin for a moment. “Why? What’s the advantage?”
Dalaxa cleared her throat. “On the most basic level?” She leaned against an interface terminal along the curved back wall, looking tired and shaky from her rough night. “No one would look for you there.”
“It must be more than that.” Orion turned to the scientist and narrowed his mismatched eyes. “Does seeing this,” he said as he flung a hand at the viewscreen, “bring back any memories?”
“It’s still so jumbled, so fragmented.” Dalaxa put a hand to her temple and squeezed her large eyes shut. “It’s possible I was only conscious for my interrogations. I only remember Typhus, and that crown of his glowing while he picked at my mind.”
“Found it,” Reddpenning said with a snap of her fingers. “Got a lock on the source of the transmission.”
Orion strode down to the lower tier of the bridge, stooped his tall frame and peered over her. “Well done, Red,” he said as he clapped her on the shoulder.
“What did I tell you?” Costigan said, a smile spreading across his thick face.
“Don’t try to take credit for this,” she sniped at him.
Orion stood straight, clapping his hands once. “So, what can you tell me about the lay of the land?”
“So needy,” sighed Reddpenning as her fingers tapped at the controls again. Holograms materialized over her control dash, a mishmash of topographic maps, thermal scans and dimensional renderings with scrolling text boxes next to them. Reddpenning’s sharp eyes flitted over the information for a few seconds, and then she frowned. “Well… shit.”