Ascension

by Nicholas Woode-Smith

  The Devil Child, the void had called her.

  James stared on as Yobu began asking questions.

  Re’lien.

  Void, this is going to be interesting.

  Glossary

  Armada – the Trooper’s starship branch.

  Diplomatic Corps – the division of the Trooper Order dedicated to diplomacy and negotiation.

  Dugobeck – one-eared rodent that resembles a rabbit.

  Extos III – a frontier star system containing Zona Nox, Nova Zarxa and Grengen.

  Frontier – a virtual massive multiplayer online game where players must work together as pioneers on a distant world.

  Imperial Council – a totalitarian theocratic empire.

  MindBand – a method of linking up to virtual apparatus.

  Order of Light – a grimdark fantasy v-flick.

  Order-Administration – Trooper run civilian government on Mars.

  Order-Logistics – the division of the Trooper Order dedicated to manufacturing, procuring and distributing all the necessary equipment, supplies and provisions to all other divisions.

  Revival Corporation – a megacorp specialising in urban development and infrastructure.

  Syn – a catch-all term for a robot or AI.

  V-flick- a series that transmits not only sight and sound, but taste, smell and even feeling.

  Xank – a multi-racial empire waging a war on the free race’s frontier.

  Note from the Author

  The Devil Child started as a random quote in an early draft of Fall of Zona Nox. Quotes from Imperial dissidents are common in my novels. But through some fevered act of a mad author, I decided to write a story about this Devil Child, a character that was meant to just be a side-character. And I fell in love with her story. And that made what I did to her ever more painful.

  I enjoyed writing this novel because I feel it is a good story. It is very different from the previous books in the series. The general trend with my writing has been less action, more drama. I think this is a good thing and I hope you do to. But despite my enjoyment, I also felt sad.

  I outline and plan my books in detail, so I know every character death long before I finish writing it. But even so, when it became time for Muur and Franc to die, I froze. I couldn’t kill them. Muur, especially, was such a wonderful character. But more than that, she was the daughter of one of my favourite characters, Quok. I didn’t want to kill her and I didn’t want to hurt him. But Re’lien needed a spark. And as cruel and as callous as it may seem, I had to give her that dreadful spark.

  But after that spark, she has become forged anew. And as her sister has revealed to her, she is no longer a helpless little girl. No longer just a petty heretic. She is powerful.

  I look forward to writing about Re’lien in the future, especially now that she is entering James’ storyline. How will these two young warpmancers interact?

  Book 9 of the Warpmancer Series

  It is the 36th century and humanity is spread across the stars.

  On the frontier world of Nova Zarxa, a government formed of refugees from the dead world of Zona Nox has secured its authority. Peace has arrived, but at a cost. The Zonians are anxious. They miss their home. With the arrival of an edal girl, claiming to be a Trooper diplomat, these anxieties only rise.

  While they may be safe for now, danger still looms in this dark galaxy.

  “Empires last the blink of an eye. But within that blink, they can change everything.” – Krag-Daikaraga, Areq Immortal and Historian

  Chapter 1.

  Dawn

  The zangorian died with a boot on its head.

  It died the way it had lived.

  Leri didn’t wince as the fragile skull of his kindred caved in under his metal boot. Even the zangorian’s whimpers were shameful. There was no defiance. No courage. Just the faint echo of the desire for self-preservation. But not even that. This was no zangorian. It was a slave. Worse than a gleran. At least the insectoid drones had no choice. This zangorian had the capacity to feel, to decide, to resist. But it did not. When it was sent from the body-budget to its species’ homeworld of Zeruit, it had a chance to forsake the Xank and join the righteous horde. To join Rii’s rebellion. It had the chance. But it didn’t take it.

  When the spineless generals of the Xank army, directionless without their War Lector, ordered the slave to charge, it had the chance to refuse. To join the legion set forth before it. But it didn’t. It charged down an ordered path, towards a volley of plasma. It fell, like its fellow slaves. In the melee that followed, it barely resisted as Leri stepped upon its head.

  It could have lashed out. It could have raised its talons, to delay the inevitable.

  But it didn’t.

  The zangorian died with a boot on its head. The way it had lived.

  Leri’s expression remained unchanged as he heard the crunch of bone and keratin. The mulch of blood and flesh did not sicken him. The red, matting orange feathers, did not concern him. He had seen it all before. Not just in his lifetime, but in the hundreds before it. Every war his ancestors fought. Hundreds of years of serving in the body-budget, and hundreds of years prior when his people were free to fight their own wars. When one had killed so much already, one more death didn’t matter.

  Leri looked away from his brain and blood splattered boot and surveyed the battlefield. Shouts, trills and screams still echoed across the expanse. The day before, this patch of land had been green. Leri had enjoyed watching the early morning dew evaporate with the rising sun. It was a dustbowl now. The naked talon feet and the metal boots of the combatants had turned this lush field into a sandpit. A dark, reddening wasteland. Scorches along the ground indicated where plasma cannons had fired their incinerating projectiles. Piles of dead bodies, wearing contesting colours told tales of smaller skirmishes. More red dead, meant a skirmish lost. There were many dead that wore the crimson of Rii’s rebellion. But many more wore the cyan of the Xank slave army. Their dead lay in rows, where they had fallen to volleys, to spear walls and to the cacophonic melee of screeching, crying, tearing and the incessant gnashing of beak on feathery flesh.

  My people are beasts, Leri thought. But that thought did not make him feel anything. For what was a beast to think about other beasts? How could Leri judge the murderer when he had murdered so many? And how could he blame his people for anything, when they had been made this way? Insidiously crafted by the Xank to be weapons of war. To be cannon fodder.

  The battle was no longer the roar that it was before. No more explosives. No more ships in the sky. Just talon and beak. Spear and blade. Blaster and flesh. Disparate duels between the survivors of the Xank’s failed invasion force and the bloodied, exhausted rebels that clung onto their freedom.

  A little bit away, Leri watched as a zangorian slave picked itself up, steadying itself on a heat-spear. It tumbled and fell…almost. It caught itself, and rose to its legs, using its spear as a walking stick.

  It slowly, agonisingly, pointed at Leri with a blood-stained claw.

  ‘Traitor!’ it rasped.

  Traitor?

  Traitor.

  No.

  Leri stepped off his victim and walked away. He heard the slave weep at his departure. The gut-wrenching slurp of a blade entering flesh followed and then silence.

  Battles don’t end. There’s no buzz that signals the finale. No referee to call time-out. No goal that when accomplished, everyone stops and shakes hands. No…battles don’t end. They stretch longer and longer. They whimper away, until they are so quiet that one may think it is over. But it is never over. It has just retreated, into the souls of the survivors. When they are granted silence, the battle returns to them. In all its glory. In all its death. Its futility. There is no bang. No whimper. No end. And while all the Xank slaves lay dead or captured at the battle of Kazh-aira, the battle had not truly ended. It would live on, as all battles do. There was never really an end. For the rebels. For the captives. For Leri, and his ancestors who
lived within him.

  Leri strode past a formation of his troops. They were surveying the battlefield – capturing or killing as they went. Nearby, there was a crashed Xank-ship. He was not sure if it was his or the enemies. They still relied on converted Xank tech. Only the Xiu, his dead daughter’s namesake, stood as a testament to what zangorians could make themselves. A shining, space-craft. The flagship of the rebellion. Fortunately, it had survived the battle with only minor damages.

  But it was no longer the flagship of a mere rebellion.

  The Xank forces on Zeruit had been wiped out. Utterly. Rii’s rebellion were no longer the rebels. They were the authority. They were the nation-state that ruled over their planet. Rightfully. And Leri sat on the throne.

  The gates of Kazh-aira stood open. They had not been destroyed. His forces had sallied forth immediately, breaking the enemy forces in a brutal pre-emptive attack. A blitz. Many had died. Leri felt a tinge of sadness at that. And even a tinge of guilt. He had armed them. He had incited them. Without him, they’d still be alive.

  Alive to die a slave.

  Anger overwhelmed sadness. An anger fuelled by the charnel pits of his friends and foes alike. For slaves or not, only zangorians had died this day. For that, Leri would add to his reasons to hate.

  Leri entered the shadow of the gate-house. No lights had been switched on. As the sun rose, the towering gatehouse would remain in shadow. It was cool. Leri felt the pleasant chill calm his machine-gun heart. Reinforcements ran from and into the city, bringing supplies, or retrieving the wounded. A few dead lay in the gatehouse. Victims of the long-range Xank assaults.

  ‘Rii…’ said a voice, reverberating through the chatter of chitin and exoskeleton.

  ‘How many dead, Peron?’ Leri sighed. His voice croaked. He had been shouting for hours.

  Leri stopped and leaned against a wall. He had a cut on his leg. He didn’t remember receiving it. It wasn’t anything to worry about. Leri had survived much worse. He touched his cybernetic arm, reassuring himself.

  Peron had two of his four arms crossed behind his back. His six-black eyes were glassy and emotionless. Leri knew better. Peron, for all his competence, was weak at heart. The gleran did not cry because he could not cry. Leri almost envied him. Leri wanted to cry but did not. He held back his possible tears. Peron was able to remain strong from physiology alone. But that made him weak, Leri told himself. One had to face struggle, weakness and pain before one could become strong.

  Peron is weak, Leri thought. But he didn’t really believe it.

  ‘We haven’t approached a final count, yet. That will come later. How are you holding up?’ Peron chittered, eyes blinking interchangeably.

  ‘It is not your job to be concerned for me, Peron.’

  ‘On the contrary. That is my main job.’

  ‘Given by the Word Lectorate.’

  Peron didn’t respond.

  ‘The same Lectorate that pushed me to fight a war that they thought I couldn’t win.’

  ‘That’s wrong, Rii, and you know it. The Word Lector didn’t tell me if he knew about the mutations. I don’t know if he knew himself. He sent you here to disrupt the Xank, so he could secede. He told you that himself.’

  Leri grunted and coughed. Fumes and soot had invaded his throat on the battlefield. He dry-retched and then wiped his beak with his flesh-arm.

  ‘That is something the Lector and I have in common, then. We both want to see the Xank destroyed. But I’m coming after him next. He would have known. He would have had something to do with it. The Lector betraying the Xank just makes him a traitor and a monster.’

  Leri looked Peron in the eyes. ‘I hope I can count on your loyalty, Peron. For your sake.’

  ‘My goal is and has always been the liberation of your species. The Word Lectorate referred me to your cause. They aren’t my employers.’

  Leri eyed the insect up and down. No hint of lies. But Leri couldn’t tell. Peron was always hard to read.

  Peron continued. ‘My goal, not the goal of the Word Lector, is the preservation of your well-being, because I believe you are the path to zangorian liberation. I stand by you so long as that remains the case.’

  Leri looked out of the gatehouse, towards the corpse-strewn wastes.

  ‘Am I really liberating them, Peron?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Leri shook his head. He felt a tear rise and fought it down.

  Strength. Always strength.

  Leri stood. The time for tenderness would come. When their women were free. Until then, they were to be rock. To be steel. To be the hand that wielded the claw, spear and blaster. Warriors.

  ‘They are free now, aren’t they?’ Leri muttered. Peron cocked his head, bemused.

  ‘All of them,’ Leri indicated to the field of death, his arms wide.

  ‘Let’s go inside, Rii,’ Peron said, placing a hand on Leri’s shoulder.

  ‘Yes…’ Leri said. ‘Inside. To plan. To make the next move.’

  Peron pulled him towards the city. Leri didn’t stop looking back at the field – even when he couldn’t see it anymore.

  

  ‘We will consolidate our hold on Zeruit,’ Leri began. ‘And in a month’s time, we will fly to take La’rz.’

  He sat at the head of an oval table. It, and the large chairs surrounding it, had been old. Rusted. They were artefacts from when the Xank had used Zeruit as their seat of power. Zangorian craftsmen had repaired and restored the furniture, then converting them to fit the zangorian frame. Leri had felt uncomfortable using the left-overs of the vile areq, the rulers of the Xank empire. But he soon realised the futility of that disgust. If he was to avenge his people, he would need to use whatever at his disposal. That meant using Xank technology and areq furniture. All that mattered was vengeance, liberation and the eventual cure for their women, who had been trapped in a mutagenic slumber.

  Leri sometimes found himself breathless from the anger and the claustrophobic despair of finding out what had befallen his females, but he knew that it couldn’t be helped now. Enemies were on the horizon. And they needed to be slain. Peace first, then they would be allowed to rest, recover and repent. And then – truly save their women.

  At the artefact table sat an assorted group of people. Trusted counsellors, important influencers, valuable officials. They were his leaders and his war cabinet. Many had been with him from the beginning – from Bexong. Others were welcome new additions. Prodigies and Xank defectors.

  The faint stench of burning bodies was only covered by the stinging smell of medical poultices on the wounds of many of the leaders surrounding the table. Many of these leaders had fought in the spear-wall. Not foolhardy. Honourable. They knew what it meant to be zangorian.

  ‘We lost too many bodies,’ Tek’roa, the previous Xank Lector of War argued. His arm was in a sling. ‘I, more than anyone, want to free my homeworld. But La’rz is a garrison world. It is not like Zeruit. There are no wide-open jungles to hide in. It is a planet-spanning city, filled with Xank slaves. We can’t wage a rebellion there. Guerrilla tactics are impossible. A drone watches every square inch of the planet.’

  ‘So, we don’t use guerrilla tactics,’ Leri replied, matter of factly. He steepled his talons. ‘We don’t repeat the Zeruit rebellion. They will be expecting it now. They will be reinforcing the drone defences, more elite slave-guards and additional forces by the gleran hive minds. We can’t fight them effectively in disparate forces. So, we take them head on.’

  ‘The seat of the War Lectorate? In a conventional war? We can’t do it. As you just said, they will be prepared. Look at the losses here today.’

  ‘We won.’

  That proclamation brought an awkward silence to the room. Tek’roa looked at the table. Peron looked blankly, seemingly into the void. Other members of Leri’s war cabinet didn’t dare respond.

  Leri stood from his chair at the head of the table and paced the room.

  ‘My brothers. This war of liberati
on will not end until all zangorian are free. If we do not free La’rz now, then when? When do we say that Xank oppression has gone too far? When do we fight back?’

  Leri looked at Tenpa and Xupa, two of the original Bexong rebels who had grown to become commanders in his army.

  ‘I drew the line when I rode down those sandy steps. I saw my brothers being beaten by scrap and I said enough.’

  Still, silence. Leri sighed and looked out the window. The sun was setting now. The battlefield was still being cleared. The wounded were still recovering – if they were to recover at all. Kazh-aira, his city, had fallen before. To him. But it hadn’t fallen again. But at what price?

  The sun set, and the battlefield went dark. A day wasn’t long enough to rid the wastes of its scars. Leri turned back to his cabinet and spoke.

  ‘Before this attack, we all cheered when I said that we would paint the stars red. That we would slay the Xank for what they have done to us and our women. I stood atop this citadel and I shouted for vengeance. I shouted for our liberation. We knew then what it would cost. This revolution has already cost us so much. This battle was no different.’

  ‘Rii...’ Xupa stuttered. ‘They killed so many of us.’

  ‘Some must die for all to be free,’ Leri recited. He had said it before. That seemed long ago.

  Silence. Everyone considered their laps – except Peron and an old zangorian with cloudy eyes.

  ‘Proceed with your plan, Rii,’ an old, croaky voice pronounced. It was Gura-Teng. The old pacifist from Bexong. The stress of the rebellion had taken its toll. His feathers were matted. Their tips were grey. ‘It is too late to return to the idyllic peace. Too late to return to blissful ignorance in chains. Raise your banners, light the flames of your starships, sharpen your talons. Go to war. But ask yourself, Rii, what are you willing to sacrifice for your liberation?’

  Leri looked the old man in the eyes.