Beyond Apocalypse

by Bruce S Larson

  “I have free will but also implanted traits of devotion. At times one overpowers the other.” Uruk shrugged both his shoulders and wings. “I only wish to make praise for the coming victory.”

  “You are a time traveler, then?”

  “Lord?” Uruk’s left, serpentine eye opened wider. He cocked his head to his right.

  “You have seen or divined the future. I have not.” Anguhr answered. “Such is a power even I do not posses.”

  “Yet you are certainly stronger than this immaterial thing.” Uruk nodded. It was an act of acceptance and understanding recognized by almost all species with heads born of nature or infernal powers.

  “Likely. But strength is not destiny. It is a weapon. And no weapon, no war, would exist if battles were preordained.”

  “This I understand, clearly.” Uruk nodded more quickly. “Some of our past enemies felt destiny was with them, only to fall to us. As always.”

  “The concept of destiny, of fate.” Anguhr's voice became weighted with annoyance at the ideas. “It is best an idea used against an enemy. Understand it, but if it rises alongside your ego, kill it.”

  “They can be great enemies, within.” Uruk added. “Yet one cannot stab oneself to kill them.” Uruk looked at his sword and then sheathed it.

  “If our campaigns were mere acts of fate, then victory would never be an accomplishment or a reason for glory.” Anguhr continued. “Battles would be the mere motion of automatons. Not even the Nabaton behaves this way, and it originated inside machines. All this you know, Uruk. Now return to the ship and stand next to Proxis by my throne. I will sit on it soon enough. At least, that is my plan.”

  Uruk looked off as he wrestled with a dreadful idea. “Lord, your defeat? I cannot conceive it!”

  “I can,” Anguhr answered. “That is why I fight to win. And with a plan. Now, no more words. Now, I act.”

  Uruk bowed his head. He glanced at the nearing planet, and then flew off showing both his discretion and obedience, again.

  Anguhr looked down at the contested world. White sunlight reflected over the hemisphere he crossed. The planet was once amenable to life. Its extinct people had called it Qinchay’n. Now its cloud covered surface was a seared wasteland. And this occurred before the forces of Hell came to its system. Anguhr passed the planet’s terminator and over to its dark side. His eyes could see its upper clouds rolling like violent rivers. Several bands of gray, blue hues, and liquid turquoise spun beneath him. Small cyclones rolled off from the friction between the bands. They reminded Anguhr of the striped atmosphere on many gas giants. Although massive, this planet was a solid world. For that, Anguhr was glad. He liked to stand and fight. He preferred solid ground over muck-covered sea floors or flowing magma. The combat he most despised was fighting deep inside a huge, gaseous planet. In them, orientation was often the angle of attack or sense of pressure rather than a horizon and sky.

  This planet’s artificial ribbons rolled over its surface like banded saws. Their effect was the same. Specific corrosives formed cloud bands. They cut worlds into extractable, marketable components. The Dark Urge demanded many worlds conquered for her to be sundered to sate her eternal hunger, not for mercenary commerce. Anguhr disliked the task. It delayed the next assault. Plus, the tedious labor of the scythe was not an efficient transfer of resources. But there were many things of the Dark Urge that defied reason. Anguhr put that notion aside. He carried a massive battleaxe, not logic’s razor. Nevertheless, he needed reason for making plans and occasionally counseling his leading demons. Now it was time to put the axe to use. Anguhr smiled.

  Anguhr drove his section of moon into the cloud bands. A burning ribbon of orange cut through the turquoise, blue, and gray bands as friction heated Anguhr’s lunar chariot. It struck the barren surface. A blast of dust and molten rock flew from the point of collision. A tremor radiated through the ground as a shockwave made a momentary, spherical vacuum around Anguhr. The sphere collapsed, but Anguhr stood in defiance and held his axe in both hands. He now stood beneath the colored cloud bands and felt the abrading winds. With a thought, they were gone. Beyond his cracked and glowing disk of moon, the planet’s surface glowed blue-white and lit the world beneath the clouds bands. The radiance came from the energy of matter being separated carefully and methodically at an elemental level.

  Intense bursts of light flashed over the horizon. The Nabaton came to meet Anguhr’s challenge. This would be the final battle, at least for this solar system. Lightning lanced through the sky as a field of ions massed. The cloud rivers formed a cyclone in the distance. The Nabaton was devoid of a physical form, but to fight it now created one. Anguhr wished it had been as solid as himself and the world they battled on for the right to destroy. Instead it infused itself into a massive storm perhaps more powerful than Anguhr. The General smiled. This enemy could incinerate his demons. He would kill it and they would give him all due glory. In turn, he would praise the Dark Urge. At least that was the orthodox progression. His actions would appear as a dutiful servant of Hell. Yet victory was a moment of lament for Anguhr. It was the resigned acceptance of a battle’s end. He fought for the enjoyment of combat. The Dark Urge could enjoy the victory.

  The Nabaton’s storm reached from the planet’s surface to the highest edges of the atmosphere. It was a warrior as vast and powerful as a fleet of alien warships. The bands of turquoise, blue and gray swirled towards the cyclone. Thick lightning bolts of intense white shot from it like whips. Each bolt split off further whips. All were hotter than the face of the local sun. The cyclone paused before Anguhr. The bolts shot at him with destructive purpose more focused than rage. Anguhr swung his axe. He appeared to block several lightning strikes, but his motion was not merely to deflect their burning assault. He could not stop them all. He directed bolts into others to engineer an energy lattice within his enemy aided by the forces in his axe. The Gordian currents Anguhr knit within the storm would be impossible with any tool save one forged in Hell.

  The Nabaton joined the battle with one goal: annihilate Anguhr. To do so it summoned vast power to burn him down just as it eroded whole worlds. Anguhr loved to fight, but would never protract and labor a battle. If an enemy were ever to defeat him, it must do so not only with strength, but with strategy. Anguhr never fought a mindless battle. He focused on his mind on his strategy and his body suffered for it. Anguhr felt his hellish flesh burn under the super-heated bolts lancing across him. Jagged ribbons of white glowed across the deep black sections of his armor. He finally felt the pain within his giant form as he parried more bolts and suffered greater burns. He could withstand more, but this improvised god of winds and electric fire had shown all it had in power and the will to fight. Anguhr still stood. It sought to withdraw.

  Perhaps the Nabaton saw Anguhr’s determination or finally deduced his real strategy. Anguhr swung his axe with a speed faster than most minds could form thoughts. There was a momentary ease in the abrading winds that signaled the Nabaton’s doubt. Mind to mind, Anguhr had won. He ended the battle. Anguhr raised his axe that glowed deep red across its blades. A new volley of lightning bolts staggered Anguhr before he hurled his massive, glowing axe through the storm. It sailed end over end towards the upper atmosphere. Anguhr had woven the storm into a column of force now captured by the axe’s infernal metal. The matrix of lightning and teeming ions was pulled behind the axe’s trajectory into the planet’s magnetic lines. Anguhr’s ship amplified their force as it hovered over the planet’s northern pole. A brilliant, red aurora flashed as the Nabaton’s storm and its mind were pulled into the boosted field and torn apart.

  The mind that controlled the planet’s slow destruction was dead. Winds rushed to fill the void left by the dissipated cyclone. The forces it controlled fell into typical physics. The bands were gone and their hues made chaotic mixtures overhead. Smaller storms formed as pressure zones collided. For a short time, mindless weather ruled the planet’s skies. In the hemisphere opposite to where Anguhr stoo
d, his axe continued its arc back to the surface. It struck with the forced of an asteroid impact. New tremors shook the ground and a shockwave obliterated storms in its path. Winds rolling across the planet helped cool Anguhr’s armor. He sighed. Victory was his, again.

  The black grace of the Dark Urge undoubtedly smiled on the destruction of another force she saw as an enemy. Lore imprinted on Anguhr’s mind claimed that she could peer into the minds of any being, anywhere. If so, she never shared the plans of Anguhr’s opponents with him. Their defeat was by his actions, alone. He would not want it any other way. Still, Anguhr wondered why the ever-burning mistress of all things did not act as an omnipresent spy to hasten the destruction of her adversaries. Anguhr pushed those thoughts aside. He was well practiced in the act. Over time, his experience had surmounted imprinted information and orthodoxy. Nevertheless, he served the Dark Urge well, but perhaps not for the same reason she gave him.

  Anguhr was driven to find the next opponent after defeating the last. He never thought of conquest as a means to build his own empire. He only loved the battle, the war. In truth, war was Anguhr’s greatest love, eclipsing regard for even his dark monarch. That was yet another secret among the many spawned in Hell. Anguhr pushed the truth aside in his mind as his will reached beyond his healing body and blocked the savage winds. He thought of his next opponent. It was not a world mind, but an empire. Ships. Soldiers. Whole planets as battlefields. As his armor cooled, his spirits rose. Anguhr smiled.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Thousands of light years away from Anguhr, life on another world enjoyed sunlight through clear skies. The entire world was a thriving, fertile garden. A forest of towering rhododendrons flowered at the caress of sunlight. Oddly, the rays did not originate from the golden star in the daytime sky. Instead the light hovered like a curtain with substance of its own.

  The calls of songbirds and singing insects echoed from the canopy. Another presence mind flew into the idyllic scene. The mind known as Gin thought the shape of a golden eagle was appropriate to speak to sunlight about plans for war. As the eagle, Gin stayed silent but his thoughts became words pulsed on the wind to speak with the curtain of light. He knew the sunlight had a wealth of ideas from eons of contemplation, and now action.

  “Zaria, there is word.” Gin communed as he alit on a thick branch. “Your target has entered the Xa’rol system. They stand ready.”

  “Then I must join them.” Zaria answered.

  “Please do so only in projection.” Gin flexed his new talons and regripped the branch.

  “If we are to keep our pleasant illusions intact, one day we will need to directly engage our enemy.” Zaria cautioned.

  “That day is not now.” Gin refolded his eagle wings.

  “Perhaps not. But remember how to form talons, old friend.”

  “I am glad the weapons you have envisioned are more powerful than talons.” Gin released his left talon and flexed its claws in the air. “There is no greater fury than what reaches out from Hell.”

  Zaria paused. Her light indeed became reflective. “This I know only too well.”

  Thousands of light years farther, a world of extensive oceans had survived untouched by mercenary intelligences or Hell. In this age of the war, such a state was fleeting. For an instant, a star appeared over the deep blue waters. A city rested directly below it within the depths. The flash dimmed into a sphere of plasma. The searing ball incinerated the submerged metropolis and burned through the upper atmosphere. The blast’s shockwave forced tsunamis across the planet. The masses of ocean struck and inundated coastal cities that rose out of the water and across land like static waves. Steam and charred sea life surged skyward in the vortex column that followed the blast.

  General Sutuhr observed the surface devastation on a projection inside his bridge. Like all Hell’s Generals, Sutuhr had his own unique form. He appeared to be the child of mythic creatures salted with cruelty. His body resembled a giant from Earth legend merged with a lion, and then adorned by pieces cut from an arachnid. His chimera traits reached a fitting zenith on his skull. A spider’s carapace was fused to the top of his lion’s head. It forced his feline eyes into sharp angles at the sides. The eight arachnid eyes formed two rows descending to the root of his snout. When Sutuhr sneered, venom rolled down from his fangs and glistened across his lower lip. His left hand held a callused scar from wiping the corrosive toxin away and then pawing that irritated hand with his right set of fingers. He committed both habits as he sat in the throne of his ship and considered a mystery. His Ship Master, Crucis, stayed focused on finding targets. Preferably ones with strategic value or a population. The cities just annihilated were uninhabited. This was contrary to accurate, recent intelligence. Sutuhr would kill someone horribly for this failure. They would be an unfortunate proxy. He had already made the intelligence source drifting ash several systems ago.

  The detonated warhead was the closest thing to a warning shot carried by Hell's warships. Its use was provocation. Sutuhr fired it to reveal the enemy while his main arsenal stood ready. This planet's civilization had the technology to be a threat. Sutuhr would not commit his horde to the planet. It may only appear abandoned. The enemy should inhabit the vast oceans. Logically, they would act to stop further ecological devastation, or seek vengeance if they were an emotional species. Sutuhr liked to use emotion against his opponents. He hated uncertainty. At no other time in all his campaigns had he encountered a world whose intelligent species had vanished. There was no retreating force luring him into a massive ambush. Not that it would matter against the forces of Hell and his power. Sutuhr expected victory in each system he attacked. But for victory, there must be at least one battle. Here there wasn’t even a facile opponent or capitulating inhabitants. There was no one and no trace of their flight from radiation trails or slight gravitational disturbances. That was impossible.

  Sutuhr understood a giant demon General commanding a flaming ship and horde of armed monsters seemed impossible to many civilizations advanced enough to fight him. In this system, he was cheated out of creating such shock. Sutuhr hated that. In fact, he hated most everything. His acidic, black heart did have adoration for the Dark Urge. She was his more black-hearted mother, and the greatest of all powers. Sutuhr was not known as the Destroyer, the Scourge, or the Ravager. His title was the Devoted. If that was not respected by the other Generals, Sutuhr did not care. He hated them, too. Nevertheless, he wished one of them was facing this perplexing system if only to annoy them and free him for greater glory. All glory was praise for the Dark Urge. All war was in her service. But even Sutuhr knew when to break from veneration and fight. Now he was doing neither. Sutuhr, the Devoted, hated that.

  The fact this planet was marked for the scythe increased his irritation. Turning too much of the world into vapor was a potential insult to the Dark Urge. Sutuhr hated to risk his forces and himself to sunder this world without knowing where the enemy had fled. It could be bait in a massive trap. Yet there was no choice but to obey the Dark Urge. And to praise her. Sutuhr thought little of why worlds were carved apart and sent to Hell. His job was finished when the long trains of pressured vessels or conquered rock were behind his ship. He understood it was an inefficient transfer of mere mass to a being made of perpetual energy. None of that mattered to Sutuhr. He was the servant of creation’s greatest will. The Dark Urge must have a reason why it was done. That was enough. All he wished was to make war for her again and follow the bliss of his unquestioned faith that conquered the absence of reason.

  War was not something Sutuhr enjoyed for itself. War was the means to give bequest and glory to the Dark Urge. But this planet was making conquest far too easy. A civilization of great power had risen from the waters. Sutuhr could take the world, but if the people could hide from him and avoid slaughter, it would be an embarrassment. His Field Master, Marn, and his Ship Master, Crucis, would never voice such thought lest he eat them. It was the Dark Urge herself whom he feared might question his
devotion. He could make the scythe and begin butchering the planet. Yet, then the main batteries would be inoperable. Deploying his demons would be constricted to avoid incineration between the main drive and the scythe. Venom welled against his lower lip. And then an idea, a fear, occurred to him.

  “Fire a missile phalanx. Now!” Sutuhr roared.

  Crucis obeyed. Missiles flew from his ships hidden bays and into an expanding circle. Almost immediately, several exploded only a few ship lengths distant from Hell’s dreadnought. They appeared to detonate against an arc of space itself. Sutuhr and Crucis knew it was not an anomaly. It was a gigantic ship.

  “Continuous fire, now! Vaporize them!” Sutuhr roared again. He hated being surprised.

  More missiles flew from Sutuhr’s flaming ship and detonated mere seconds later to its aft. Secondary gun domes emerged portside and opened fired. The volley of missiles and beams repeated. Momentary spheres of bright plasma and flashes of deflected energy revealed an arc of an otherwise invisible ring. Its protective field expanded from the heat of the onslaught. Visible space distorted behind it. The full, immense circle was revealed. The onslaught fired against it blew back against Sutuhr’s dreadnought. Waves of force buffeted his ship’s crimson flames near the aft region and main drive.

  “Our salvos have distorted the enemy’s protective fields.” Crucis reported from his command dais. It swept before him in the shape of two raven’s wings. The rigid feathers served as the control keys. Information was relayed into the Ship Master’s brain and across the projections hovering before him.

  The floating screens were also viewed by Sutuhr and Marn. The Field Master stood next to his Lord’s mace in its mount on the right of the General’s slab-sided throne. The mace was the bridge’s most massive presence, second to Sutuhr.

  “Damage?” Sutuhr asked.

  “Unknown.” Crucis answered.