The Weapons of War

by Dan Schiro

  “I know,” Crag barked, striking his staff on the ground to raise a puff of beige sand. “I know, and this is the path I have chosen. I have passed on my knowledge to you.” He muttered as he tensed his fist and looked at his glittering tattoo. “Now it’s time I pass on all I have left, the only way I can.”

  “I don’t understand, Crag.” Orion squinted as a gust of wind raised a brief tempest of dust. “I’m ready to receive the spellblade, but—”

  “Receive,” he snorted, spinning his staff as he circled Orion. “A spellblade cannot be given, boy. It must be taken.”

  “Don’t be a dick, Crag.” Orion shook his head, unable to accept the implication. “Is this another one of your tests?”

  Crag started toward him with a menacing frown. “Everything’s a test, boy.”

  “I won’t kill you, Crag.” Orion threw down the staff and stood flat-footed. “I just won’t.”

  “You will,” Crag shouted as he clouted the side of Orion’s head with the staff.

  Orion staggered back, his ear stinging. “Crag, I can’t!”

  “You must.” He spun the staff and struck Orion again, this time bloodying his sun-cracked lips. “Take the final step. Become who you are.”

  Orion spat, the moisture disappearing into the desiccated sand of the mesa. “Crag, there must be another—”

  Crag struck with the speed of a snake, the blunt bottom end of his staff whipping up and slamming into Orion’s groin. “That’s where humans keep them, correct?” he barked. “If you have anything of what makes a man at all.”

  Orion fell to his knees in wheezing agony, veins bulging on his forehead. “Forget it, old man,” he gasped. “Keep the spellblade, if that’s the price.” Again Crag spun the staff and stuck, hitting his jaw with tooth-rattling force. “Go for it… hit me… that won’t change my answer…”

  “Pathetic.” Crag stood over him, casting two short shadows in the twin suns of Khanpara Guha. “It’s no wonder your mother didn’t want you. You ruined her youth, you ruined her art, and when she tried to end it all, you ruined that too.” He laughed cruelly. “Perhaps she’s not crazy at all. Perhaps she’s altogether too sane.”

  Orion’s fingers groped through the sand while Crag Dur Rokis Crag glared down at him with merciless spite. As soon as Orion had his discarded spear in his grip, he swung and swept the durok’s feet from beneath him. Orion leaped up, animal rage walling off the pain of Crag’s precisely inflicted injuries, and turned the sharpened end of his staff down at his mentor’s throat.

  “This is what you wanted, right?” Orion shouted. “You wanted to make me kill you, right?!”

  “That’s it boy,” Crag crowed as he slapped the staff away, rolled and sprang to his feet. “It’s a weapon of blood. It can’t be given, only taken!”

  Orion came at him with a flurry of spinning strikes, and though the wizened old assassin blocked each shot, it drove him back toward the mesa’s precipitous edge. They fought until the durok was forced to hold his ground, and Orion disarmed Crag with a flick of his staff that sent his teacher’s weapon soaring away toward the wasteland below their mesa. Crag Dur Rokis Crag opened his arms wide for the killing thrust that Orion knew — even deep within the dream — he must deliver. Then, unexpectedly, the durok spoke.

  “If only it were this easy to defeat me.” His voice was different, and his eyes were white-blue.

  Orion hesitated, lowering his weapon and backing away. “No, that’s not right.” He was meant to plunge his sharpened staff through Crag’s chest, and the durok’s last words should have been lost in that horrible dying gurgle. “You’re not supposed to say that,” Orion whispered.

  The thing that wasn’t Crag laughed and transformed before Orion’s eyes. He grew to seven feet tall as dark hide and patches of black fur replaced deep-red durok skin. His ragged clothing vanished, replaced by military regalia and a long crimson cape. Finally the face changed, a snout bulging forth and wolfish ears replacing broken horns. A spidery crown glimmering with a manacite inlay appeared, and Orion realized he faced Typhus the Mad Thinker.

  “Surprised to see me?” Typhus growled as he stalked across the mesa toward Orion.

  “No,” Orion said, shaking his head as he staggered back. “I was hurt, this… this is all just a dream.” Setting his feet, Orion tossed away his spear. “None of this is real.”

  “Are you sure, human?” Typhus said, stepping close to loom over Orion. “It feels real, doesn’t it?”

  Orion smirked. “I’ll wake up any—”

  “Everything is real, you soft creature.” Typhus gave Orion a shove that sent him sprawling back in the dirt, the impact painfully real in his tailbone. “The Engineers’ tools work in strange ways, as you well know,” Typhus said, tapping a clawed finger to the neural crown on his head. “As you stand in the doorway between life and death, it seems I can reach out and… touch you.” The dark vycart leaped, his cape streaming behind him as he aimed his big bare feet for Orion’s chest.

  Orion rolled away as Typhus slammed to the ground, missing him by millimeters. He scrambled to his feet, suddenly clad in his smartcloak and kinetic bodysuit, and summoned his spellblade gauntlet. “I’ll face you here,” Orion said. “I’ll face you anywhere, on my worst day. Let’s finish this.”

  Typhus spun on him and laughed. “Not now, human. But your time is coming.” He raised his monstrous hands, flexing them. “I simply came to let you know — what you’ve done changes nothing.”

  “Oh good, a speech.” Orion sighed. “Let’s have it, then.”

  Typhus chuckled grimly, his huge fists balled. “You have taken three children from me, human. I plucked them from the gutters of the galaxy, shaped them, gave them a cause, and you murdered them.”

  “You can’t call it murder when I was protecting billions of innocent lives.” Orion pointed a silver claw at his adversary. “You did that. You got them killed.”

  “Know this,” he spat. “Their deaths change nothing.”

  “Ah,” Orion said with a roll of his eyes. “Here comes the meat of it.”

  “Nothing,” he bellowed. “Their sacrifice will only fuel my war. I will bring the Union to justice for what it did to the vycart race, and I will hunt you down wherever you run, wherever you hide.”

  “Run? Hide?” Orion shook his head sarcastically. “You’re the hunted, Typhus, not me.”

  “And when I’ve won justice for the vycart people,” he continued, deaf to Orion’s barb, “I will bring order to this galaxy.” He seemed to consider it with a low snarl. “The new Crimson Claw will stretch across the stars past the confines of the Union, recapturing the full glory of the Engineers’ empire.”

  “I’ve got my own delusions of grandeur, but do you know how crazy that sounds?” Orion arched an eyebrow, chuckling dryly. “I stopped you once. As soon as I’m on my feet again, I’ll stop you for good. Then you’ll fade into galactic obscurity where you belong.” He shrugged. “You’re a footnote.”

  “You’re so very wrong.” Typhus gazed at him solemnly. “I’m much more than that now.”

  Orion blinked as the edges of the dream grew fuzzy. “What do you mean?”

  Typhus curled his lips back with a gleaming smile. “Why don’t you wake up and find out?”

  Chapter 20

  Orion awoke with a gasp, his fists clutching the white sheets of a firm bed. Bright lights stung his eyes, familiar voices rang in his ears, and a coughing fit sent tears rolling down his face. When the spasm relented and Orion wiped his bleary eyes clean, he found himself in a spacious, sleek hospital suite. Kangor and Mervyn stood over him with concern darkening their faces.

  “Why…?” Orion rasped.

  The great ape leaned close to his face and spoke gently. “Why what, son?”

  “Why couldn’t I… wake up to … two of the nurses?” Orion chuckled weakly, a few dry p
uffs of air. “Maybe… a sponge bath?”

  Mervyn’s dark eyes flitted to Kangor. “He’s talking nonsense,” he said in a hushed tone, as if Orion couldn’t hear. “What is he trying to say?”

  Kangor peered at Orion with his fire-red eyes. “He is saying that he is fine.” A slow smile spread across the big vycart’s face.

  “I’m saying,” Orion said with a wince, “that you two… are one… ugly… pair.” He coughed again, slowly breaking up the clinging fluid that made his voice so thin. “Bully? Bully boy, did he…?”

  “He lives, little friend,” Kangor said without letting him finish the painful question. “The noble creature is as hard to kill as his master.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mervyn added. “The veterinarian said it was a close call, but it seems your mutt will pull through, with enough time and treatment.”

  Tears rolled down Orion’s face again, but this time not because of his coughing. “He’s no mutt.”

  Growing serious, Kangor inhaled deeply through his wide, wolfish nostrils. “It was a close thing for you as well, little friend.”

  “Yeah.” Orion wiped his face again. He took a few shuddering breaths and thought about it for a moment. He had made it so easy for Pozoia Tofana. Cringing, he swallowed the lump in his throat. “Where am I?”

  “Apparently,” Kangor snorted, “this is where they keep the real healthcare.”

  Mervyn shook his head and eased himself into an armchair. “This is a private hospital for Members of Parliament, galactic reps, the like.” He glanced down at the diagnostic platform built into Orion’s bed. “Zovaco traded some serious favors to get you and your hound in here.”

  Orion nodded, trying to take stock of his body. “What happened to me?”

  “One of the Mad Thinker’s agents.” Kangor folded his arms across his chest. “Apparently, she seduced you and attacked while you were flaccid, weak, lulled into—”

  “No, I remember that.” Orion cringed again. “What I mean is, what did she do to me?”

  “I’m no doctor,” said Mervyn, clearing his throat, “but my understanding is that you had a slew of diseases thought to be eradicated. Truly nasty stuff.”

  Orion’s mismatched eyes widened. “And? Am I clean?”

  Mervyn folded his hands atop his cane and nodded. “It seems massive doses of ultra-grade consulin work on most everything. The doctors say the damage to your body has been repaired. You simply needed a few days of consulin coma to rest.”

  Kangor grinned. “You should have seen yourself when they first brought you in, little friend. To call us ugly!” He threw back his head for a short bark of laughter. “You had weeping boils all over your tiny human body, webs of purple veins beneath that.”

  “I get it,” Orion said, nervously touching his fingertips to his face. “Really painting a picture there, big guy,” he muttered.

  “Oh, you were a sorry state. And the smell!” Kangor waved a hand in front of his nose. “You smelled like a three-day-dead sewer shark left in the sun of—”

  Orion interrupted him with a yelp — higher in tone than he would have liked — when his probing hands reached the top of his head. His elaborately spiked hair was gone, replaced by the sandpaper stubble of a few days’ growth. “My hair?” he cried, pounding a fist into the mattress beneath him. “She took my hair?!”

  Kangor and Mervyn erupted into laughter, howling as they struggled to spit out a few words. After a moment, Kangor composed himself enough to slap the side of Orion’s bed. “Little friend, you are alive. Your sad little patch of fur will grow back.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mervyn panted, dabbing at his sparkling eyes. “I don’t know why you’re so upset; you humans have so little to begin with!”

  Again Kangor and Mervyn cawed, and Orion sullenly resisted the urge to caress his naked skull while he waited for them to finish. “Come on,” he said when they were both panting again. “Can we get serious? What I did I miss while I was out?”

  His words sobered them like a bucket of icy water to the face. The two hirsute humanoids glanced at each other, but before either could speak, the door to the suite hissed open and Koreen entered. She carried a tray of Ogga Food — fried tubi worms and vat-burgers — that spilled to the ground when she shrieked and flung her arms in the air. She ran to Orion’s bed and threw herself on him, her calloused fingers clutching at his hospital gown. For a few moments she cursed at him in her native tongue while he laughed and coughed.

  “I’m surprised you’re so happy to see me,” Orion said when he had cleared the coughing fit.

  Koreen pulled her face from his chest, leaving his hospital gown dotted with tears. “Oh, I’m just happy to still have a job,” she said with a sniff.

  Mervyn reached out and took her hand. “You owe this lady, Orion,” he said with a gruff nod at Koreen. “She was the one who thought to go back to the office and check on you.” He smiled, the apish flesh around his eyes wrinkling. “She saved your life.”

  “Well, that’s what I pay her for.” Orion swiped at the tears welling in the corners of his own eyes. “Thank you, Koreen.”

  She looked away. “Well… I just hope all of this nonsense is considered at my yearly review.”

  Orion laughed, but he could tell something had blunted Kangor and Mervyn’s mood. “So, the gang’s almost all here,” Orion said. “I’m sure Zo’s a little busy right now, but what about Aurelia? Dalaxa?” He added her name instinctively, as if she had always been with them.

  “The Exile,” Kangor huffed, “is at a party at her friend’s penthouse.” He shook his head. “The one who keeps pestering me to wear his silly clothes and prance across a stage.”

  “You know how she is,” Koreen said as she gathered up the cheap fried food she had dropped. “When we told Aurelia you were at death’s door, she scoffed at us. ‘He’ll be fine, he’s got things to do,’ was all she said.”

  “Sounds like her, alright,” Orion said with a shrug. “More importantly, what’s going on with Typhus? Did we get him?”

  Kangor and Koreen both tightened up and looked at Mervyn. He glanced at them, and seeing that it fell to him to explain, he sighed. “Orion, you’ve been out 11 days, and the galaxy has changed… considerably. There’s something you should know…”

  Moments later, Orion watched it unfold in the hologram that bloomed forth from Mervyn’s datacube. Data tags around the edges of the image denoted a classified video file from a SpaceCorps surveillance satellite. Orion recognized the three massive gas giants — one creamy red, one deep blue and the other cloudy green — and knew he looked at the s’zone home system. The tiny moon of S’ai drifted somewhere in orbit around the blue titan, a tropical world where the fast-burning s’zone people had evolved. As Orion was wondering what he was supposed to be seeing, a rippling red-black glob hurtled past the satellite’s point of view. The data tags at the edge of the screen calculated the formless object to be as large as a dwarf planet, with a preliminary analysis showing a mix of antimatter and exotic energies. Memory’s Prism whispered Sunkiller.

  As the tumorous mass cruised past the three giants toward the system’s yellow sun, the sped-up recording showed Orion in seconds what had taken hours to happen. When the antimatter cluster smashed into the sun, the star’s luminescence dimmed and flickered. The stellar surface quaked, and red-black veins twisted across it like a network of vines. Orion saw a stream of spacecraft flowing away from the moons and space stations, the individual ships blurred by the accelerated recording. With a few shuddering breaths, the star at the center of the system fell in on itself and pulsed darkly for a few moments. Then, in the blink of an eye, the hologram flashed to pure white and ended. Mervyn retrieved his floating datacube and dropped it back into his suit pocket.

  Orion sat up in his hospital bed, his face pale and his mouth agape for long seconds. “What was that?” he said at last, glancing aroun
d at the dour faces that filled his room. “What happened?”

  “Nine days ago,” Kangor grunted. “Project Sunkiller lived up to its name.”

  Mervyn nodded, his dark eyes searching the floor. “The S’ai system was completely annihilated when the star went supernova. The moons, the giants, scores of space stations, all reduced to glowing dust and hot gas.” He looked up and met Orion’s eyes. “Millions escaped in time, but… billions of others… and everything that shaped their culture…” He shook his head, squeezed Koreen’s hand and returned to his armchair, slumping into it.

  “He did it.” Orion fell back on his pillows, too stunned to cry or rage. “That’s what he meant…”

  “Little friend,” Kangor said, his thick brow knit. “Are you alright? Should we summon the healers?”

  “No, no.” Orion shook his head, dazed. “Dalaxa must be...”

  “Near catatonic.” The big vycart looked wistful for a moment. “I know what it is like to lose everything in the time it takes a snake to strike. She needs time, but she will be ready to fight. The pain will see to it.”

  Mervyn frowned, planted his cane and laced his hands atop it again. “She did manage to say that Typhus shouldn’t have the resources to fire his antimatter cannon again, if there’s any sweetness to the rotten fruit.”

  “My god,” Orion said. “How could the Union let this happen?”

  “Even with the prototype ships we’ve rolled out to fight this Mad Thinker, we’ve got no defense against a weapon like that.” Mervyn’s round shoulders tensed. “Typhus must have fired the blast days before, from hundreds of thousands of miles beyond the system.” He met Orion’s eyes with anger vexing his kindly face. “SpaceCorps satellites saw the antimatter wave coming — of course, it was the size of a damn moon! — but there was nothing we could do. Pulse bolts passed through it like air, thermite missiles disappeared without detonation. It even swallowed one of the new Paragon-class warships whole.” He sighed, the exhale deflating his wrath. “The best Parliament could do was call for a hasty evacuation.”