by Dan Schiro
“Orion, no!”
Dalaxa rushed out from her hiding spot and leveled her rifle. Yet as she squeezed the trigger, Typhus snapped up his head and transformed his icy sickle into a mirror-like shield. Three quick pulse bolts came out like darting blue fish and reflected back at Dalaxa, blasting the multi-fire rifle out of her hands and spinning her around with a cry. Typhus rose with a murderous gleam in his eyes, transforming his shield into an executioner’s axe. Yet before he could cut Orion down, the mirror portal on the opposite end of the throne room rippled open and Aurelia Deon and Kangor Kash stepped through. The Lady of the Jade Way still appeared decrepit and old, and Orion’s vycart friend was bound together at the waist by a band of glowing green energy.
“Typhus,” Kangor roared. “Kangor of Clan Kash has come to kill you!”
Trapped in glossy ice, Orion’s skin burned and his lungs ached as Kangor and Typhus ran at each other and fell into a rolling, clawing brawl. Both of the savage vycarts were already badly injured, but the blood that slopped out of their tumbling dogfight didn’t seem to dim their fury. As Orion’s consciousness ebbed, withered old Aurelia hobbled up and laid a gnarled hand on his icy shell. Green light glimmered, a tingling warmth washed over him, and the ice shattered a moment later.
Half-conscious, Orion collapsed with an agonized moan. Yet Aurelia wouldn’t let him die where he fell. Cursing and panting, the desiccated Lady of the Jade Way took hold of his smartcloak and dragged him toward the base of the sparking conductor array. When they stopped, Aurelia wrapped him in his cloak and let the smart tech’s warming function do its work. After a few moments the world came back into focus, along with the intense pain of Orion’s badly frostbitten face and hands. Aurelia curled against the conductor array next to Dalaxa, the s’zone clutching a hand to her smoking stomach with a pained expression.
“C… c… cloak… pocket,” Orion stammered as shivers wracked his body. “Bu… bu... bottom left…”
Dalaxa’s mouth made groaning shapes, but Orion couldn’t hear her over the echoing vycart snarls and the ordinance exploding outside. After fumbling for a moment, she managed to remove a short syringe from a tight pocket sewn into his shroud. She looked at it with confused pink eyes.
“D… do it,” Orion said, jerking his head to expose his jugular.
An analytical expression wiped the pain from Dalaxa’s sculpted face. The doctor plunged the stubby needle into a carefully lined-up vein, and Orion’s heart hammered as synthetic adrenaline flooded his system. He had stolen the syringe from the White Heath’s medical supplies before they had abandoned him, hoping he would never have to use the harsh drug again but knowing he inevitably would. His throat ached with the scream that ripped out of him and he sat up, frozen joints and sluggish organs be damned.
“Orion, no,” Dalaxa gasped as she clawed at his smartcloak.
“Have to help,” Orion said through cold-blistered lips. The vycarts were still fighting hard on the tilting floor. “Have to finish him.”
“You have to take control of the ship,” Dalaxa said amid ragged breaths. “Use your—”
A deafening boom interrupted her. After many, many attempts, SpaceCorps had finally landed a punch that counted. The huge view-portal — presumably the other side of the great lens on the ship’s spiked hull — cracked with a nerve-jangling screech. The vacuum of space dragged the three of them toward the gaping splinters missing from the middle of the view-portal, but frail Aurelia managed to throw up a tight force field and save them from immediate evacuation. Orion cried out senselessly as he saw Kangor clinging to the huge gears frozen in the floor, his long body stretched out like a bloodied flag. Though Orion couldn’t hear him, he could read his friend’s wolfish lips.
Thank you, little friend.
With that Kangor let go. Hurtling like a missile, he slammed into Typhus the Mad Thinker where he clung to the throne of white stone. Kangor’s claws sank deep into his fellow vycart’s flesh, and the two of them tumbled out through the cracks in the view-portal like tangled dolls.
“Take control with your spellblade,” Dalaxa screamed at him, her voice barely audible even inside Aurelia’s protective bubble. “You’re the only one who can!”
Calm washed over Orion, suppressing the pain lancing across his skin and burning in his lungs. He turned to Aurelia and gave her a solemn nod, and the Lady of the Jade Way seemed to understand. She reached out her bony hand and laced it through Dalaxa’s long fingers, and the force field fell back over the two of them like a glowing green blanket.
The vacuum ripped Orion off the ground. Torquing his body as he rocketed toward the view-portal, Orion reached out his armored limb and spread his gauntlet’s clawed fingertips. With more than a little blind luck, Orion caught the top of the throne. The manacite claws carved deep furrows in the white stone and held, and Orion fought the winds of decompression until his muscles burned. After breathless seconds that felt like torturous days, he managed to lock his long legs and left arm around the back of the throne. His vision blurred as he grew cold, but he flung his right arm back and slammed his manacite-swathed hand into the six-fingered handprint on the armrest.
If the altered state of the White Room seemed to slow time for Orion, whatever happened next paused it outright. He caught a quick snapshot of the throne room under the influence of decompression — the dust of old bones swirling out, ancient machines snapping apart, strange components soaring through the air, all of it completely frozen. Then he fell with a terrifying drop. A brief, cool darkness followed, and Orion opened his eyes to find himself floating naked in a warm, pink fluid infused with glimmering luminescence.
Yet he was not himself. After all, he didn’t need to breathe, and his body was as hairless as it was without scars. “He” was some kind of mental avatar, but where was he? When he stretched out an arm, a rainbow of ancient glyphs appeared around him, floating in a slowly turning sphere. Somehow, he could read all of them, and he intuitively understood their purpose. The hundreds of symbols weren’t letters or words, but subtly nuanced ideas that could be rearranged, intermingled and inverted to impose his will on Thegra’s Sword. Each of the glyphs corresponded to one of the manacite symbols writ large across the ship’s stone hull, giving Orion access to the power of thousands of spellblades. The vast spectrum of old magic put almost no act out of reach.
In between real-world nanoseconds, Orion strung together a few hundred commands to purge the virus he had created and restore the ship’s greater powers. Back in the material world, the ornate view-portal repaired itself, and Orion’s flesh-and-blood body climbed down into the throne as the vacuum died. He split his mind smoothly in scores of different directions, restoring the warship’s force field while sending a message rippling through the communications network of the SpaceCorps armada.
This is Orion Grimslade III. I have taken control of Thegra’s Sword. Please stand down. The assault is over. Typhus the Mad Thinker is dead. Everything’s going to be okay.
As easy as flexing a muscle, Orion called forth a dazzling galaxy map. The Engineers’ ancient interstellar highways stretched out over three-fourths of the starry swirl, and the many systems of their empire shone like countless dewdrop jewels in a vast spider web. There were hundreds of ether routes and thousands of star systems the modern galaxy had not yet rediscovered. Orion spread his message to the ether routes so it would permeate the datasphere and cross the lightyears in seconds, letting anyone who was listening know they were safe.
“Orion, can you hear me?” asked Dalaxa back in the real world, her voice distant.
“It’s too much,” Aurelia rasped. “Too much for anyone, even you, Orion.”
Dalaxa leaned close to his placid face. “I didn’t tell the Union, Orion, do you understand? I didn’t tell them how to activate Thegra’s Sword. No one should have that kind of weapon, that kind of power.”
“You’ve got other things t
o do in this life, Orion Grimslade,” Aurelia added.
Orion’s words came out through the stone like slow-dripping sap. “Just… one… more… magic… trick…”
“Orion,” Dalaxa said with a note of panic, “your judgment is not sound right now.”
“Be careful,” Aurelia said. “Be very careful what you do next.”
“Want to… give a… gift,” Orion said, his voice resonating through the chamber.
Orion’s mental avatar plunged deep into Thegra’s Sword, beneath the ship’s devastating weapons, through its libraries of secret knowledge and past forces strange, wondrous and terrifying. Finally he found the ship’s glowing soul, a tiny blue sun Orion could cup in his smooth hands. Carefully, gently, he took the spark of purest magic from Thegra’s Sword and reached out across cold space. He placed it in a ring of inert manacite that encircled the Engineers’ artificial star, and ancient machinery came back to life as Thegra’s Sword died.
With the determination of an animal biting off a foot stuck in a bear trap, Orion severed his connection with the celestial spacecraft. As every pain in his earthly body came rushing back, Orion blinked his unfocused eyes and saw Dalaxa and Aurelia standing over him.
“What did you do?” Dalaxa asked.
Orion smiled wanly as the fourth band of the Maker Rings ground into motion on the view-portal behind them. “I made a new place,” he breathed, slumping dazed and exhausted in the throne. “A new place for the s’zone… and anyone else who needs a home.”
Chapter 32
Orion, Aurelia and Dalaxa sent out a distress signal from the lifeless husk of Thegra’s Sword, and the SpaceCorps medical ship Celestial Soother rescued them. Aurelia fell deep into a replenishing trance to restore the glamour that made her appear young, while technicians rushed Orion and Dalaxa into separate med bays to treat their injuries. The techs did their best to glue Orion’s scalp back together and force consulin injections into hairline fractures while he struggled to rise from the gurney. When they accepted Orion would not rest, they rigged up a sort of headless environment suit filled with automated medical devices to heal his torn muscles and frostbitten flesh. Then Orion marched to the bridge to speak to the commanding officer.
What were they going to do, say no? He had saved the Maker Rings and spared what was left of the SpaceCorps armada from certain destruction.
He paced the bridge for the next few hours, uncomfortable in his clunky beige med-tech suit. At his request, the three-man bridge crew trolled space near the drifting wreck of Thegra’s Sword. The great stone puffer fish’s spikes were cracked, its spherical hull marred by bomb blast and its single glassy eye dim. The bridge crew searched diligently with full spectrum scans, but Orion knew their hero-worship of him would only power them for so long. The Union officers had been on duty in a war zone long before they picked up Orion, and the helmsman, operations officer and commander looked ready to keel over at their stations. A few throat-clearings from the mystskyn commander made Orion think the man might be working up his nerve to call off the search.
Before he could, the durok woman at the ops station cried out. “There, there!” She uploaded her most recent scan to the main viewscreen. “I would have bet my red ass that we’d never… but look, there’s an organic thermal signature, there, in the middle of open space.”
Orion saw a slow red pulse spreading to pale yellow as heat coursed through a large humanoid shape. “A heartbeat,” he breathed as he gripped the rail of the bridge’s upper tier.
The mystskyn commander straightened up in the captain’s chair. “Can you get an optical lock?”
“One moment.” The durok at ops manipulated her controls, zeroing in on a stiff body covered with a rocky orange exoskeleton. A billowing external lung sac bloomed from his back and wrapped his wolfish head.
“Yes,” Orion said, striking a blow to the railing that sent a spiral of pain up his arm. “Let’s go, man,” he added, clapping at the temba nubu at the helm. “Full speed ahead, let’s get my boy!”
The scaly commander shot his subordinate a nod. “You heard him.”
Mere minutes later, med techs hauled Kangor Kash in through the airlock. Orion watched from an observation lounge as they used laser scalpels to slice open the sloppy lung sac and revved powered saws to cut away the vycart’s rocky exoskeleton. Orion stood with his hands against the glass, so tense he didn’t even hear Dalaxa walk up behind him.
“Orion?”
He spun, swearing. She wore a kind of thick compression sleeve over her gut-shot torso, a less extreme version of the auto-healing tech strapped to Orion. “Dalaxa,” he breathed when he regained his composure. “We got him, we got Kangor.”
“I know, I know,” she said, her eyes bright. “But you need to go to the bridge right now — the White Heath is hailing us.”
Orion frowned, his thoughts sluggish. “But, the Briarhearts… they bailed.”
“No time for hurt feelings,” Dalaxa said with a shake of her hairless head. “Reddpenning says it worked.”
“It worked?” Orion’s brow knit with confusion. “What worked?”
“Little Brother.” Dalaxa smiled, a mere twitch at the corners of her small mouth. “My program cracked him. We’re inside the manowar neural network.”
Orion looked back down into the surgical theater to see Kangor’s huge chest heaving with breath. Some minutes later, Orion lumbered across the boarding tube to the White Heath in his bulky medical suit. Reddpenning greeted him and Dalaxa with deep circles beneath her flinty eyes.
“So,” Reddpenning said, casting her tight braid over her shoulder. “You’re the big hero again.”
Orion shrugged as best he could in the cumbersome suit. “Would be nice if it were that simple.”
She walked toward him, stopping inches from his face. “You might have saved the world, but you didn’t save everyone’s world,” she hissed.
“Alana, please,” said Dalaxa. “Can you take me to Little Brother?”
They went through the austere corridors of the White Heath without another word and came to the heavy cruiser’s modest med bay. The misshapen manowar they called Little Brother lay strapped in a hibernation pod, his twisted face peaceful and his uneven eyes closed. A handful of wireless pads adhered to his lumpy blue skull sent signals to the holo terminal next to the pod. A simple phrase flashed in green letters above the terminal: “Command Access Granted.”
Dalaxa looked at Orion. “What should I do?”
“You know them best.” Orion threw open his hands, his suit whirring. “Feel free to make a suggestion.”
“Unfortunately,” Dalaxa muttered, “I can’t just command them to drop dead. It doesn’t work that way.” She tapped a finger to her sharp chin. “But I should be able delete all of their combat programming and sever the tactical network that keeps them working together.”
“So,” Orion said with a tilt of his head, “instead of a fighting force of coordinated, well-armed giant biosynths, we’ll just have a mob of feral giant biosynths?”
“Essentially.”
Orion chuckled darkly. “I suppose that’s an improvement.”
While Dalaxa went to work manipulating the holographic image of the manowar’s brain, Orion and Reddpenning leaned against a stainless-steel exam table and watched. After a long, icy silence, Orion finally spoke.
“Would saying sorry again do anything?” he asked softly.
“Probably not,” Reddpenning admitted without meeting his eyes. “I… I’m so angry. At you, definitely. But I’m angry at everything, not just you. I’m angry at Jim, at myself. At the life we chose. I’m angry that Jim knew the stakes, knew exactly what he signed up for. And I’m angry because that lets you off the hook.”
“I… I’m sorry,” Orion said. “I wish I had some magic words to...”
“Coming from you, that would be funny.” Sti
ll the hard woman refused to glance at him. “If I wasn’t so damned angry.”
Orion nodded and let a few moments pass in silence. “What’s next for you?”
“I don’t know.” Reddpenning heaved a heavy breath. “But if I’m still in the mercenary business, I…” Finally she took a long look at him with her flinty eyes. “Look, Jim died for a good cause, and he knew that. But the stakes are too high working with you, Orion.”
“I understand,” he said with a solemn nod. “Could you do me the absolute last favor of loaning me a dropship?”
“Bay three.” Reddpenning went back to gazing at Dalaxa as she rotated the brain-shaped hologram. “Got somewhere to go?”
“Home,” Orion said, before correcting himself. “You know, the Hub, Echohax Tower. I’ve got people I need to find.”
Dalaxa soon finished, assuring Orion that the manowars would now be no more than individual monsters roaming the streets. After an awkward goodbye with Reddpenning, they boarded the gunmetal-gray squadron saucer in hangar bay three. They cruised through a field of shattered spacecraft and passed roving search-and-rescue teams as they descended toward the innermost band of the Maker Rings and the Hub. Soon after they entered the band’s bubble of atmosphere, Orion saw that the damage to the city was worse than he had expected. The manowar pods that had crashed to the streets had done their fair share, as had the guerrilla war the Legionnaires had waged against the invaders. Yet at some point since he had teleported away through the jaunt pond, a hail of debris from the space battle had hit. The falling wreckage had pocked the sparkling, swooping arcology of the metropolis with many smoldering holes.
“Wait,” Dalaxa said sharply as they cruised over the smoking cityscape. “If Kangor survived the vacuum…”
“Yeah, I thought of that,” Orion said with a snort. “If Kangor lived, maybe Typhus did too? But I doubt it.”