by Dan Schiro
“That’s impertinent.” L’yak’s pointed chin turned up in a remarkably human gesture. “And I’m unconvinced.”
“L’yak, people are dying right now,” Orion pled.
“And I’m doing important work here, learning much about the final days of my people.”
“So? Take a break,” Orion yelled, waving his arms at the silent giants. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere!”
All at once, a rumbling, melodic syllable rolled over Orion. It was deafening in magnitude, accompanied by winds that almost sent Orion’s skysled into a tailspin. His cloak flapping, he squinted down to see a slight breath emanating from the female World Walker’s gently parted lips. The droning, tooth-rattling tone ran on some five minutes long, and Orion thought his ears might bleed. When she finally finished, Orion looked over at L’yak. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but then the glittering ruby red eyes of the male shifted. His parted lips returned a different single-syllable word, just as long and jarring.
“It seems that sage minds think I should help you,” L’yak said when the World Walker was done, shouting loudly enough for Orion to hear over the ringing in his ears.
“What did they say?” Orion shouted back, his own voice muted and distant. He maneuvered his skysled closer to the male’s gigantic nose.
“I’ve barely had a chance to learn their true language,” L’yak said, six-fingered hands open with apology. “But that combination is particularly elegant. I believe the closest galactic standard phrase would be, ‘some things are worth saving.’”
Orion raised both hands in the air and threw his head back, laughing at the mythological scope of it all. “Thank you!” he shouted with all the volume his lungs could muster.
L’yak stood and turned to the great ruby-red eyes. For long minutes, a low, rattling note droned forth from the Engineer’s mouth. Then L’yak beckoned Orion over and jumped on the back of his skysled.
“We need to go to the Maker Rings.” L’yak’s unique floral scent wafted over Orion as s/he looped sinewy arms around his waist. “To your Union’s Grand Chambers.”
“The jaunt pond?”
L’yak smiled. “You should have thought of that on your own.”
As they boarded Orion’s Prodigal Star, L’yak greeted Aurelia and Kangor, and Orion introduced the Engineer to Dalaxa Croy. Orion’s teammates still regarded the ancient creature with mild awe, but the s’zone scientist was stunned speechless.
“…questions,” Dalaxa whispered after a long moment. “So many questions.”
L’yak laughed. “Hoping to learn the secret history of the galaxy?”
Dalaxa nodded. “Very much.”
“Ask your questions.” L’yak’s electric-blue eyes and elfish features were even more striking in the low lights of the dropship cabin. “I may not answer all of them.”
“How… Why…” Dalaxa shook her head, struggling to compose herself. “I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure where to begin.”
Orion clapped his hands. “You’ll have plenty of time to figure it out when we’re back on the White Heath.” He turned from the huddle and went to the command chair. “Right now, we’ve got to strap in and get to orbit.”
Orion seized the controls and turned his hovering dropship slowly while the others went to their strap-in stations. When the cabin was secure, he fired the engines and sent them racing into the sky with a burst of thrust that left the pilgrim camps in disarray. They climbed through the sky, up past the World Walkers’ stoic faces and the patchy cloud cover. As a gray sky turned space-black on the main viewscreen, Orion leaned toward the dash mic and hailed the White Heath.
“Reddpenning, this is Orion, come in.” He waited a few moments. “We’re back, and we’ve got our plus-one.”
The cabin was silent but for the hushed humming of Orion’s ship, and after a few more seconds he felt the creep of a sour realization. Using the control dash to manipulate the viewscreen, he made a visual check of the White Heath’s geosynchronous orbit coordinates. Magnifying the view, he saw no gleaming of the Briarhearts’ stout warship, only empty space. A scan for their call-sign returned a “not available” message blinking in the bottom corner of the viewscreen.
“Perhaps they were attacked,” suggested Kangor from the crash couch.
“I don’t think so,” Orion sighed, leaning back in his chair.
“They’ve left us, obviously,” Aurelia scoffed. “Reddpenning thinks Orion stole her future from her. I’d say simply abandoning us showed restraint.”
“What?” Dalaxa checked and rechecked the scans on the ops station dash. “Don’t they know what’s on the line here?”
“Deserters,” Kangor growled. He spat on the floor.
Orion swiveled the captain’s chair to huddle with his team and the ancient creature crammed between them on the crash couch. “Can’t say I love the idea of going back to the Maker Rings without the Briarhearts backing us up, but I get it,” he admitted.
“Bah!” Kangor said, waving his hand as if swatting a persistent fly. “May those who run from battle run forever in the lowest plains of the Shadowlands.” He spat again to punctuate his old vycart curse.
“Stop spitting on the floor,” Orion snapped. He rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “And come on, if they want out, they want out. They’re just regular people. They’re not like us, and they’ve given enough. They’ve given a lot.” He thought for a second, turning his gaze on each of them. “We’re alone in this, but that doesn’t mean we quit.”
L’yak smiled gently. “You have each other. Perhaps the universe has conspired to see that that’s enough.”
Little more needed to be said. Orion took his Prodigal Star into the ether route, and the crew unbuckled for the long ride to the Maker Rings.
Chapter 29
While the ether blurred by outside, Orion heated up two tins of Ogga Food rations and forced them down. Kangor stretched out his long body on the crash couch, furry limbs dangling over both ends, and fell immediately into a sound sleep. The Lady of the Jade Way settled into a cross-legged pose on the floor to meditate and gather her power, and Dalaxa spent her time firing a steady stream of questions at L’yak. Orion had already asked the ancient creature most of them, and L’yak answered Dalaxa with more of the same cryptic poetry s/he had fed Orion.
Some six hours later, they came out of the ether route above the Maker Rings and Orion clapped eyes on Thegra’s Sword for the first time. It was larger than any starship he had ever seen, including the massive generation ships of the Collective Fleet, a stone puffer fish that seemed to defy logical spacecraft design. The great space whale’s ivory-white color reminded him immediately of the Temple of the Chosen, and the glyphs on its hull blazed with colors that matched the brightly embroidered symbols on L’yak’s tunic.
A lightshield of some kind flickered as Thegra’s Sword absorbed hundreds of pulse bolts from swarming Union fighters and gunboats. Every now and then, a slow-moving nuke detonated on the lambent barrier, birthing a brief second sun between the Maker Rings. Yet the Engineers’ stone ship remained unblemished when the flare faded. While the Union armada attacked in vain, beams of hellfire-red energy erupted from the towering spikes that dotted Thegra’s Sword, annihilating shielded warships and swaths of fighters with every hot blast.
“Oh,” breathed Orion. “This is not going well.”
“By the blood of my clan,” Kangor grunted to L’yak on the crash-couch. “It is no wonder your people ruled the galaxy.”
Aurelia clucked her tongue. “Your technology makes even the Green look like children.”
“Our toys,” L’yak sighed. “We heaped them up so high that they fell back on us.”
“Let’s hope we’re beneath its notice,” Orion muttered as he throttled up the ion engine. “Just a tiny dropship, way outclassed in this fight.”
He set a straight-line course for the Hub, maxing out the speed of his high-performance craft. The magnified image on the viewscreen showed that Echohax Tower still stood tall in the center of the metropolis. The city looked mostly intact but for a few dozen plumes of smoke where Typhus’ manowar platoons had crashed to the street. Orion’s mind slipped toward the worry he had been holding at bay — worry for Koreen and Bully, for Skagg and Biz Tessia, for his lawyer and accountant and favorite sushi chef and all the people who were part of his world. He let himself feel the trepidation for a few seconds, and then he buried it to focus on what needed to be done. For a few thousand miles, Orion actually thought that they might make it to the Hub unscathed. Then a sudden tingle rose to the silver spellblade glyph tattooed on his wrist. Before he could imagine what it might mean, L’yak spoke out.
“Orion,” gasped the Engineer. “Thegra’s Sword sees us.”
Emergency lights flashed and alarms rang on the operations console. “We’re under fire,” Dalaxa yelled.
A red beam miles wide blazed down, and Orion threw the ship into a spin as the annihilating ray swept after them. Accessing his ship’s post-factory modifications, Orion put the Prodigal Star’s engines into burnout mode to stay ahead of the red lance of death as its murderous gaze swiveled. Then he barreled down beneath the great band of the Maker Rings, counting on his hunch that Typhus wanted to rule the Hub, not destroy it. The lurid red light died, and for a few minutes they accelerated around the underside of the band.
“Risky,” Dalaxa said, barely choking out the word as she clutched the ops console. “But damn clever.”
“We’re not clear yet,” Orion said, gripping the navigation wheel so hard his knuckles blanched. “Everyone hold on to your Ogga.”
The imagery on the forward viewscreen swirled, and they looped around to the other side of the Maker Rings. They came in upside down above the Hub, hitting the bubble of atmosphere at a tremendous speed. His teeth shaking from the vibrations coursing through his dropship, Orion jerked the navigation wheel again to avoid colliding with a vast, thin solar panel gliding down its track over the ring. He managed to flip his Prodigal Star right-side up with a quick directional thrust, but he had left the dropship in burnout mode for too long. An explosion rocked the craft, and they plunged toward the swooping arcology of the Hub in a silver-skinned coffin.
“We lost the main ion engine,” Dalaxa screamed over the roar.
“Just when things were going great,” Orion yelled back as his control dash warned of ship-wide system failures. “Hang on!”
His fingers stabbing at the control dash, Orion manipulated the thrusters on the wings and underside of the ship. With a series of alternating spurts, they brought the ship into a steady glide that narrowly cleared the blades of a great windmill. Their descent evened out as they soared down a main avenue of the Hub, gliding through the smog of warfare. From what Orion could see on the main viewscreen, Legionnaires and SpaceCorp troops were taking on squads of advancing manowars all over the city. Bright bolts sizzled between the dug-in Union resistance and charging hordes of pale blue giants converging on the Grand Chambers. Orion’s fingers twitched over his dash, but with his weapon systems fried, there was nothing he could do to help. One by one the remaining systems on his control dash failed, and soon the overtaxed landing thrusters blew out with pops that rocked the dropship.
“Hang on,” Orion said, voice straining as he wrenched back the navigation wheel. The ostentatious fountains, pillars and domes of Parliament’s Grand Chambers towered not far down the street. “Hang on, we’re going to make it!”
They glided lower and lower, and whatever last spark of control Orion had over the ship’s maneuvering flaps died with the main computer. Orion’s Prodigal Star slipped between two huge polished pillars and smashed through the towering diamond-glass doors to the palatial administrative building. Back-up power failed, and along with it the main viewscreen. Multiple impacts followed, and metal screamed all around them. As the main cabin went dark, Orion’s captain’s chair snapped off its base. He tumbled about hearing his companions’ grunts and curses, but then a blow bloodied his temple and dimmed his consciousness to embers.
Did he dream of Crag Dur Rokis Crag? He sat up in the emergency lights of the ransacked cabin feeling as if his old mentor were right there. Shaking his head to clear the strange cobwebs, he coughed and touched his throbbing head. His fingers came away wet and sticky with warm blood, but not much of it. When he was sure the rest of his wounds were no more than painfully superficial, he looked around and saw Aurelia, Kangor and L’yak stirring, groaning and sitting up. Dalaxa Croy slumped over the ops station, her slender limbs limp and motionless.
“Dalaxa.” Orion leaped to his feet and stepped over the strewn Ogga Food tins. Gently, he leaned her back and looked into her heavily lidded pink eyes. “Dalaxa, come on. Say something.”
She groaned. “You’re… a… terrible… pilot.”
“I really did make the best of that.” He reached into a pocket of his smartcloak and retrieved a primitive packet of smelling salts. “Let me help,” he said softly as he cracked it under her delicate nose.
Dalaxa’s eyes snapped open and she coughed. “Ah, stings.”
“Don’t be a baby, destroyer of worlds.” He straightened up and scanned the others as they got to their feet. “Everyone in working order?”
“I endure,” L’yak said.
“I am fine.” Kangor helped Aurelia to her feet, her green hand dainty in his beastly paw. “Exile, are you unhurt?”
“Just get me out of this Goddess-forsaken can,” she huffed as she fussed with the dirtied purple silks that wrapped her body.
“You good to go?” Orion asked Dalaxa as he helped her out of the ops chair.
Dalaxa grimaced and dusted off her Union-issued bodysuit. “I have to be.”
Kangor’s pointed ears pricked up at the sound of muffled explosions. “We should be moving, little friend.”
“Yes,” L’yak agreed as s/he looked up at the big vycart. “I’ll need time to bring the jaunt pond to life.”
They dug through the dropship’s disheveled storage lockers, and Orion collected as many charged lightshields as he could. Dalaxa found her multi-fire assault rifle intact and scrounged up a few more explosive rounds. Kangor shouldered a sack full of specialty grenades Orion had bought at a military surplus sale but never found a use for. Aurelia and L’yak turned up their noses at any additional weapons, but they did accept the lightshields Orion strapped to their arms.
Moments later, the five of them found their way out through the wrecked rear airlock. One by one they emerged into the light to see that the Prodigal Star had smashed through the outer layers of the complex, coming to rest in the stadium-like space of the Grand Chambers proper. The seating tiers were devoid of galactic representatives, and no one occupied the 12 seats around Parliament’s high, crescent-moon table on the lowest level. As for Orion’s twisted ship, the fortified main cabin had survived boring through tons of stone, metal and glass, but not much else had. The forward wing of the asymmetrical design had been completely amputated, and what did remain of the hull had been stripped to little more than twisted struts and sparking wires.
“Still 22 payments left on that thing,” Orion muttered.
“We are alive, little friend,” Kangor chuckled. “Is that not enough?”
“I’d just like to own a ship outright before I crash it,” he grumbled, shaking his head. “Come on.”
Orion led the way, climbing down the tiers of the great empty bowl while explosions outside shook fine veils of silt from the arched ceiling. After a few moments, they clambered to the main floor where speakers would address their fellow galactic representatives and Parliament. L’yak paused to stare down at the Union symbol — a blue-and-white line drawing of a spiral galaxy — writ large across the floor.
“I see your
government wasted no time repainting after we opened up the jaunt pond last time,” s/he said with a fleeting glance at Orion.
Orion shrugged. “I don’t think our rulers like to be reminded that their kingdom is built on top of someone else’s castle.”
S/he nodded thoughtfully and stretched out, extending an arm. “Everyone stand back.” The living metal of a spellblade flowed forth to the Engineer’s shoulder. “It may take a moment to locate the interface.”
Orion and the others shuffled to the edges of the polished floor, the explosions and pulse bolts outside growing ever closer. L’yak flexed a six-fingered hand digit by digit as s/he cast around for some sign, and soon Orion felt a faint hum from the floor beneath his feet. When L’yak stopped turning, s/he was facing directly at Parliament’s high table. The ancient creature grimaced with concentration for an instant, and then blazing light erupted in concentric circles across the floor. The ancient glyphs blazed white for a few dazzling seconds and fell into shifting colors that mimicked the bright hues of L’yak’s tunic. After a few moments, a font of white stone erupted from the floor, shattering the glossy veneer with a shriek.
“There,” said L’yak as s/he relaxed.
The five of them approached the stone font and looked down into a basin full of what seemed to be nothing more than clear water. “Okay, the same interface as your temple,” Orion said hopefully. “So, you dip your hand in there, and bam! We’re up on that monster warship… right?”
“You make it sound so simple,” L’yak said with a shadow of a smile. “I’ll do what I can.” The Engineer’s eyes lit with sparkling radiance as s/he placed manacite-dipped fingers in the basin. “Speak to me, whale of the star-sea,” s/he said, voice thrumming.
A blast echoed through the Grand Chambers, and pale-blue giants lumbered in through an entrance on the upper tier. When the first of the brutes came through the smoke and saw them down on the floor, he shouted something rough and guttural over his shoulder. Soon the manowars were flooding in behind him armed with oversized pulse rifles and huge sabers banded to their backs.