by Dan Schiro
They grunted their agreement, and the three of them closed on the happily munching creature. “Remember to kill both brains,” Dalaxa whispered, a few feet behind them. “One in the head, one at the base of the spine.”
Orion stalked forward with silent steps, thankful for the reminder. “Careful… careful...” he whispered to Aurelia and Kangor as he transformed the ends of his bo staff to spear tips. “Careful… now!”
At his exclamation, the lumpy little brute whirled and screamed at him, his black-and-white eyes wide. With a powerful thrust of his short legs, the naked biosynth bounded over all three of them. Orion hazarded a hasty swing with his spear, but he only grazed the creature’s leg. The malformed manowar hit the ground running, leaping onto a ramp that led up into Typhus’ stealth ship. He disappeared into the darkness, his wail fading.
“Quicker than he looked,” Kangor said with a shrug.
“Come on,” Orion said, flinging the blue blood from his spear tip. “Let’s put him out of his misery and see what Typhus’ leftovers can tell us this time.”
The four of them ran up the ramp, following the blue blood spatter into the corridor. Here too the stealth ship seemed to be running on reserve power, with only dim track lighting along the ceiling to illuminate the way. Kangor took the lead, his snout twitching as he chased the plasticized scent of the manowar through a few wide, empty hallways. Finally they turned down a short passage that ended in an arched doorway. A large, open space lay beyond, perhaps a kind of theater for Typhus to address large groups of soldiers. Orion could see the misshapen biosynth hunched over in the middle of the empty floor, waiting where the auxiliary lighting was brightest.
Orion transformed his spear into a gleaming longsword and led his team into the echoing theater with cautious steps. A single low-lumen glowglobe floated near the ceiling, drawing a circle of weak light while leaving the edges and corners cloaked in shadow. “Hey,” Orion said, trying to get the creature to turn and charge. “Hey vat-boy, come get it.”
Rather than charging, the short, round manowar hobbled around and turned his off-kilter black eyes up at Orion, his white pupils bouncing. He was chuckling.
The door behind them snapped shut, as did the other three arched doorways around the theater. Before Orion could whirl back to wedge his sword in the door’s seam, a carbon-compress security shroud slammed down over each exit with crushing force. Even with Aurelia’s cutting green fire, they wouldn’t get through those quickly or easily.
A laugh rang out over the shadowy room, and Orion looked up to see Typhus the Mad Thinker emerge on a balcony affixed to the steel-plated wall. The black-furred vycart wore a long crimson cape and a navy blue military uniform glittering with regalia. His glinting manacite neural crown sat atop his head like a large silver spider, and a smile twitched at his wolfish lips. Dalaxa readied her weapon, a low growl bubbled from Kangor’s throat, and Aurelia’s emerald aura grew hotter and brighter, but a quick signal from Orion’s open hand stayed them for the moment.
“Good job, little brother,” Typhus said, smiling down at the gimpy manowar. “Your part is done now.”
Typhus snapped his clawed fingers, and the failed biosynth started up the latticed stairs leading to Typhus’ balcony. At the same time, Orion heard heavy footsteps from the darkened corners of the theater. Four manowars stalked out of the shadows, and Dalaxa gasped as they saw that these were not the failed experiments they had encountered so far. These fully formed manowars towered nearly eight feet tall with the god-like physiques Dalaxa had described. They had the same light blue skin, but their long, white hair hung perfectly straight, and their white-dotted black eyes gazed intently out of broad, hard faces that were as symmetrical as they were identical. Each of them wore super-sized assault armor, the black plating emblazoned with a crimson claw logo. Their thick arms were double-banded with lightshields, and they carried huge gladiator weapons and heavy pulse pistols Orion wouldn’t have been able to wield with two hands.
Orion offered Typhus an unimpressed shrug. “Why only four? I thought you had thousands of these freaks.”
“You underestimate Dr. Croy’s designs.” Typhus rested his hairy hands on the balcony railing and nodded to Dalaxa. “Four should be entirely sufficient.”
Before Orion could fire back with a ready quip, Typhus shouted a command in the old vycart tongue and the assault began. The manowars drew their heavy pulse pistols in perfect unison and opened fire on Orion’s team, slowly closing in on them with heavy steps. Instinctively, Orion and his companions formed up back-to-back in the middle of the room, and Aurelia threw up a green force field to hold off the initial onslaught.
“Time to shine, oh great leader,” said the Lady of the Jade Way, her voice strained by the blazing blue bolts that peppered her barrier. “What’s the plan?”
Orion slid into the White Room and answered her with an emotionless voice. “Our lightshields will only hold for a few seconds when you drop the force field, so we all have to act as one. AD and Kangor, pick one and engage in close combat. Dalaxa, you open fire on another with explosive rounds, should go right through his lightshield. You just have to hold them for a few seconds, and I’ll kill them all.”
Dalaxa’s pink eyes went wide. “You’ll kill them… all?”
“Little friend,” growled Kangor. “This is not the time for delusions of grandeur…”
Orion shook his head and gazed into the glowing red veins of his living metal gauntlet. “No delusion.” His spellblade had absorbed dribs and drabs of life force with the non-lethal violence it had tasted on Romp. But would that add up to enough blood magic to get the job done? “Aurelia, count down from three and drop the shield.”
She nodded, her skin bright with emerald fire. “Three… two…”
As she finished, Orion clenched his armored hand tight around the pommel of his silver sword and thought of Zovaco Ralli’s spellblade. “Swiftsilver,” he said.
Dalaxa reached for him suddenly. “Orion, no, he—”
Time seemed to slow around him, and Dalaxa’s words were lost in a distortion of honey-dripping syllables. Living between seconds, the force field dropped like a sheet of green water around Orion, and he watched his team snap into action. Individual slugs of Dalaxa’s multi-fire assault rifle emerged and exploded on the nearest manowar like blooming orange flowers. Bright beams of energy stretched out from Aurelia’s palms like streams of green syrup. Manowar pulse bolts moved like languid electric fish, and Kangor’s war cry stretched out, garbled and endless. Yet since his mind was within the White Room, Orion saw no wonder in this spell, only deceptively simple equations of violence drawn in stark red lines.
He must have looked like a blur as he dashed toward the blue-skinned giant brandishing the spiked flail. Orion glided into his Skywalk Strike attack, and a blazing-fast stroke of his longsword cut the whirling weapon’s chain and sent the spiked sphere flying in a straight line across the room. Orion watched the dangerous chunk of metal hit one of the other brutes in the head, knocking him into a slow-motion stumble. As Kangor pounced on the stunned manowar and slapped his huge saber away from him, Orion used his own opponent’s sturdy knee to vault up. He stabbed his sword up through the chin, killing the first brain. Then, with a kick to the biosynth’s chest, he flipped away before the gurgling goliath could bear-hug him. Orion’s swift feet barely touched the floor before he was on the move again. Using Blades of a Wheel to spin past his staggering opponent, he jammed his sword deep into the base of the monster’s synthetic spine. As before, the soulless creature gave his spellblade exactly nothing for fuel.
His first opponent fell away in front of him with a drawn-out thud, and Orion took a long sliver of a second to check on his slow-moving friends. Kangor grappled and growled with one manowar on the steel floor, biting and clawing and straining as he struggled to get the upper hand. Aurelia poured green fire down on another, her mad laughter slow a
nd thick as if it were underwater. Dalaxa, on the other hand, wasn’t faring as well. The manowar with the long spear had charged through her hail of explosive rounds and knocked her down, bouncing her rifle away. As the manowar raised his huge spear to nail Dalaxa to the floor, Orion tested the upper limits of his spell-powered speed.
He crossed the room between fractions of seconds, transforming his blue-slathered longsword into a two-handed war axe. Moving into his Furious Wind attack, he swung with his immense momentum behind the blade, and the supernaturally sharp edge chopped clean through the attacking manowar’s tree-trunk leg at the knee. Dalaxa managed to roll out of the way as the vat-grown gladiator toppled forward, and Orion scrambled up onto the manowar’s back, splitting the creature’s skull like a melon. Yet Orion’s instinct to kill the head first betrayed him. The double-brained soldier reached back, grabbed hold of Orion’s smartcloak and flung him through the air.
The world still moved in slow motion for Orion, but his time-distorting speed couldn’t help him if he couldn’t touch the ground. Again he got a snapshot of his friends. Kangor held one of the massive manowars in a punishing leg lock, his shins twisting the biosynthetic creature’s neck with grinding crunches. Dalaxa had recovered her rifle and was delivering point-blank pulse-bolts to the split-skulled manowar’s back, finishing the job Orion had started. Aurelia had beaten her opponent to his knees, scorching his pale blue skin black and melting his weapons into his hands, but she made the mistake of looking up when Orion went careening through the air. This momentary pause in her barrage was all the opportunity the charred manowar needed. Orion watched the biosynth soldier hit Aurelia with his sizzling, slag-covered fist and send her sprawling back, and there was nothing he could do about it for many long nanoseconds as he fell back to the floor.
When Orion’s feet touched down, he transformed his spellblade from war axe to broadsword and transitioned into his Bull Thrust attack. The charred manowar didn’t even seem to register the approaching blur, nor the hum of the gleaming broadsword as it swung through the air. The sharp edge of Orion’s long, heavy blade hit the kneeling manowar in the middle of his wide pate and unzipped him from his head to his groin, killing both brains at once in an explosion of blue blood.
Orion felt his speed ebb as the manowar fell to pieces in front of him, a burnt-plastic stench wafting out of his charred body. He looked around once again. Aurelia was choking on her breath and holding her side, but Dalaxa was there, pulling the old exile to her feet. He turned as Kangor’s leg lock tore the head off his opponent and unleashed a fountain of blue. Unfortunately for Kangor, the manowar’s body fought on, and as their weight shifted, the manowar’s powerful arms got leverage over one of Kangor’s legs. The vycart’s long femur snapped and poked through his thickly muscled thigh, and Orion scrounged up the dregs of his magical speed to aid his friend.
Milliseconds later, Orion wrenched a nimble longsword free from the headless manowar’s back and rolled the corpse off Kangor with a grunt. Kangor tried to say something, but his words dragged on far too long for Orion to understand. All four manowars were down and motionless, and no more than a minute had passed since he had uttered the word “Swiftsilver.” He looked up to see Typhus the Mad Thinker smiling down and clapping his huge clawed hands.
“Impressive,” Typhus bellowed, his voice slow as cold crude oil in Orion’s ear.
Orion felt the slight nausea he always did before a spell’s effect fizzled, so he decided to ask one more thing from his thimbleful of blood magic. He ran straight at the wall with long strides, leaped, twisted and planted a foot, then another. His great momentum carried him up and sideways, running along the wall between the blinks of an eye. Typhus had barely turned his way when Orion neared the balcony and launched. He threw all of his strength behind a single sidelong swing of his silver sword, decapitating the Mad Thinker as if cutting through paper instead of thick vycart hide and dense bones. While the regalia-bedecked body remained erect, the head popped free and bounced to the ground. Orion watched it roll to a stop in real time as his speed spell finally died. Wires sizzled in the stump of the vycart’s neck, and oily black fluid pumped forth in diminishing gouts.
“A robot,” Orion muttered as Aurelia, Kangor and Dalaxa mounted the stairs to the balcony. “A cheap robot.”
“A robot?” Kangor shuffled forward on his broken leg, fresh skin already papering over the extruded bone. “All along?!”
“No, you idiot,” Aurelia rasped as she held her side and took pained breaths. “This is a robot. He’s played us again.”
Orion shook his head and called his sword back into his gauntlet. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Dalaxa spat. By the way she moved, Orion could tell she was smarting with deep bruises from her tumble to the floor. “He—”
Dalaxa froze mid-sentence as the robotic body whirred into motion. Stooping, the large animatronic patted the ground until it found the severed head. Picking it up, the mechanized vycart turned and showed them the still-moving eyes of the head.
“Did you really think it would be that easy to kill me?” asked the head with a wolfish sneer.
“What is this?” Orion said. “Why bring us here, Typhus?”
“You’ve been very useful to me, human,” said the head with a chuckle. “Such grace, such power, such technique. Truly, you could have stood blade-to-blade with the Crimson Claw’s finest. And now that I’ve captured you in action, it will be a simple matter to program my soldiers with your violent ballet.”
“You’re lying.” Orion cast a sidelong glance at Dalaxa. “Right?”
“He… it’s right,” she grumbled. “I designed the manowars to mimic and adapt, sharing information with the other datasphere-networked soldiers instantaneously. They’re probably refining their combat algorithms as we speak.”
“That sounds bad,” Aurelia said, grimacing as she kindled a ball of green fire in the hand not clutched to her side. “Can I melt this thing to a bubbling pile now?”
“In a minute,” Orion said, still gazing at the decapitated head. “First, he needs to hear something.”
“Oh, a threat?” chuckled the robot. “Very well, human, I’m listening out here, across the stars. Say your piece.”
“You say you did all of this to steal my moves?” Orion smirked. “Well, consider me flattered. But I’m going to be the one to bring you down, Typhus. I promise.”
Again the head laughed, a low, menacing chortle. “Don’t misunderstand, human. You’re already dead. Death is your shadow now, and it is only a matter of time before the shadow overtakes you. Now,” the headless body offered a shrug, “if you’ll excuse me. I have a galaxy to conq—”
The robot’s voice was drowned out, first by Kangor’s great roar as he limped forward on his lamed leg, then by the pulverizing blows of the mighty vycart’s huge fists.
Chapter 25
Typhus the Mad Thinker piloted a small cargo hauler through the incandescent tunnel of the ether route. He sat behind a control dash far too small for his huge frame, and his robe-clad right-hand man Vargas perched at the modest operations station in the dingy cabin’s port alcove. They had been traveling down an unmarked ether route to a star system that wasn’t on any map for the last day and a half. The two of them were the only crew on the muscular hauler as they towed a battered cargo cube the size of the Grand Chambers with a web of diamond-fiber cable. Typhus was grateful that Vargas knew him well enough to stay quiet while he was using the neural crown to project his mind across the stars to taunt the human. When the vycart warlord finally opened his eyes with a smile, his gruesome little companion decided to speak up.
“We’ll come to the end of the ether route soon, my lord,” said the bald, beady-eyed creature.
“Good,” Typhus said, blinking his white-blue eyes to dispel his meditative trance. “Prepare to shut down the manacite drive, Varga
s.”
“Yes, my lord.” Vargas’ clawed fingers tapped at the console in front of him. “We should come out of the route within visual range of the gas giant, if good Dr. Croy’s borrowed memories are reliable.”
“Oh, they’re reliable,” Typhus said with a sharp nod. “I had to go deep for those memories.” He tapped a finger to his spidery neural crown. “But when I found them, they were as pure and hard as diamonds.”
“The Union.” Vargas laughed, three creaky notes from his small, toothy mouth. “Not even above mind-raping their own to keep secrets.”
They were silent for a few moments as the digital timer on the main viewscreen ticked down to their ether route exit. “A bit of a shame to leave the crew behind,” Vargas mused with a shrug of his uneven shoulders. “I won’t say those prostitutes and pirates served you with distinction, but they were serviceable.”
“They were certainly adept in luring the interlopers to the ship,” Typhus said, a slight furrow creasing his brow.
“I must admit,” Vargas said, his words clipped, “I’m surprised the human and his pets were able to defeat four of your manowars.”
“We got what we needed,” Typhus grunted, hot breath whistling through his wolfish nostrils. “What’s more, Nixus owes a debt to his brothers and sisters. I always thought he was the strongest of my children, and now he can prove it.”
“Of course, my lord,” Vargas said softly. “The children must be avenged.”
“Their loss matters nothing.” Typhus shook his head. “I raised them to be warriors, and warriors die in war. The manowars will serve me better in what’s to come.”
“Indeed, my lord. Your sleeping giants should be quite the sight when awakened. I very much look forward to opening our ‘little’ tow package.”