The only thing in the room that didn’t look as if it had come from the depths of a demonic cult was a sleek machine in the side of the room - large and bulky, with tubes sinking into the walls and reaching towards the ceiling. I saw that it was filled with cyber-mods, the hopper in the belly of the fabrication unit gleaming with them.
But my eyes were locked on the altar. Memories boiled through me.
I remembered being pushed towards the altar.
Robed figures loomed over me.
I remembered being chained down.
I remembered a voice.
"Begin the ritual."
The chanting. It rose goosebumps along my skin, even in memory, and then. Then. Oh. Then. The jarring, the hideous juxtaposition. The cellphone going off. I could remember one of the robed figures slapping at themselves, then pulling out their phone. Its light - garish and blue - had splayed across the ceiling and I could see the smiling face of Rachel Loesser as she tapped away at the phone, looking up at the others.
"Sorry, guys, sorry..."
The memory cut off, as suddenly as if it had been recorded and someone had hit pause. I staggered to one knee, my hand going to my forehead. "Ah..." I whispered, hotly. My eyes closed and I felt the migraine pulse shuddering through my head. "What the fuck what the fuck what the fucking fuck!?" I snarled.
"Ah, that seems to have torn it."
The voice - cool and calm and Scottish - came from behind me. I sprang to my feet, backing around, my butt pressing to the altar as I aimed my shotcannon at the man who had appeared behind me. He looked as if he wasn't quite there. Not because of a holographic shimmer or a crackle. Rather, it was that he was simply too perfect to be in the same world as the rest of us. His hair was raven black and his eyes were piercing, emerald green. He wore a finely pressed suit, sharp and clean lined, with a golden pocket watch in one hand. He was looking down at it and snapped it shut as I leveled my shotcannon at his face. He looked up at me, tossing his head to flip some bangs back. His angular beauty made my heart ache.
It reminded me of Leviathan.
"I suppose the charade couldn't have lasted forever, lassie," Lucas said.
I stepped to the side, not wanting to touch the altar anymore. My shotcannon didn't waver.
“I have to ask, though,” Lucas said. “What tipped you off?”
I glared at him. “It was a mixture of things…” I said, slowly. “You kept getting cyber-modules - and whatever I am, it’s related to the secret project in this station. Why would they be dispensed in a closet ? You also transmit through anything, without any blocking - but Jules’ voice comes through patchy as hell in half the station. But Levithan blocks your transmissions right out.”
Lucas chuckled. “And the clincher?”
“Well,” I said, my shotcannon aimed right at his chest. “I got paranoid. So, I had Jules sweep for Tesc energy, then baited you into talking…and a ping popped up right around here. Right near this fucking room. Which leads me to the question: Who the fuck are you?" I snarled.
Lucas chuckled. "I have a lot of names, lassie. More than you do." He smirked slightly as he stepped forward - his feet not making a noise as he walked forward. "The Dawnstar. The Accuser. The Roaring Lion." He spread his arms wide. "I am the Lightbringer . I am the whole fucking universe." He smirked at me and that Scottish accent faded - dropped like a mask. He was close enough to touch me now, my shotcannon almost bumping against his nose. His finger reached up and he gently pushed it aside. "And you are going to help me to set this record straight."
"The Tesc aren't aliens, are they?" I asked.
"Depends on your definition," the Lightbringer said, walking slowly past me. He started to circle around me, his finger caressing the edge of the altar. "Better, it depends on your perspective. There are a great number of worlds. Some are light. Some are dark. Some rich with potential. Some dying and cracked." He grinned at me as he came back around the altar. Somehow, he had moved so that I was pinned - his arms were on either corner of the altar, my butt pressed against the edge of it. I could touch his too perfect arms or I could try and scramble up on the altar. But I didn't move. I couldn't look away from his eyes. I couldn't stop listening to his voice.
"Where a world is perched between extremes, it creates potential energy. Like the magnet in an electrical generator," the Lightbringer said, his breath hot against my face. "Your world is one such, caught betwixt and between. And so, your souls have been marvelously potent."
I gulped slowly. "A-And TempleSoft has been...what? Dealing with demons ?"
The Lightbringer laughed. "Oh, no, lassie. The United Airspace Corps started that." He stepped back and away from me, his hands sliding behind his back. "But TempleSoft picked up where they left off. And they figured out this little program." He gestured around himself with one hand. "Clone someone who wants to sell their soul, imprint their memories onto the clone, augment the clone to make them more powerful and sacrifice the clone." He grinned. “The more powerful a body, the more potent the sacrifice.”
"And that works ?" I asked.
The Lightbringer's shoulders twitched. He didn't look back at me. But I could tell he was upset . I smirked slowly as he breathed in, then out.
"It's harder to tell when you're not there . You get the burst of energy, the soul. After a time, the soul dissolves. Far faster than it should. That tipped off my lieutenants and eventually, myself. Even with the augmentations to try and conceal it."
I gaped at him. "And ever since then, TempleSoft fucking bilked-"
The Lightbringer's hand closed around my throat. He lifted me up and off my feet, effortlessly. The iron vice of his grip squeezed tight and his cold eyes flashed as he looked into mine. He snarled, softly, then spoke and shook me with every word for emphasis. "Don't. Poke. The. Bear. Lassie." He dropped me and I hit the ground hard. I gasped for air, my eyes hooded. The Lightbringer shook his head slowly. "Our dimensional finances are in arrears. But fortunately, souls delivered directly should last a great deal longer than those delivered via death..."
I rubbed my throat, coughing. "What the fuck are you on about?"
"You're going to reroute the portal to my home," the Lighbringer said, calmly.
My eyes widened.
"And then you go home," he said, calmly. "You get to take up the life of one Beatrice Montenegro - she offered her soul, and your ritual might have been interrupted by this station being yanked into Hell. The conduit is open."
I breathed slowly. "So, you want me...to dump those four into Hell. Then murder a woman, who..."
"Dump four people who worked for a corporation like this one without asking a single question into a richly deserved afterlife, then complete a contract made by a woman who wants her brother's wealth and is too cowardly to take it," the Lightbringer said, turning to look down at me. "Admit it, nothing you've seen here makes them worth saving. Clones, sacrificed to appease the rich. Weapons technology, in a world already with a peace fragile enough to break with a cough ." He shook his head slowly. “Stealing demonic magic, giving it pseudo-scientific names like Psychokinesis, then using it to run their secret polite.” He scoffed.
I rubbed my throat - feeling the pain fading to almost nothing. But I kept up the movement, not wanting to give away my thoughts. I looked at the Lightbringer - past the Lightbringer, at the statue leering down at me from the wall. That statue of the horned goat, the leering eyes, those slitted pupils. I slowly licked my lips.
"And I get wealth? Fame? Immortality?"
The Lightbringer chuckled. "As close to immortality as can be offered one with your shinimantic makeup, yes."
I grinned. "Sounds good."
The Lightbringer smirked.
"If I was a dickless asshole," I murmured.
I pulled the trigger. The shotcannon wasn't aimed expertly. But it didn't need to be aimed expertly. It was a fucking shotcannon. The pellets slammed into the leering statue, shattering it into a spray of plaster and chunks of stone. The cloud
of the impact filled the room and the Lightbringer staggered away from me, screeching. I scrambled to my feet, sprinting towards the exit. Then I heard the screeching changing pitch. Hue. Tone. It was becoming something else.
Laughter.
"You idiot! " the Lightbringer laughed, emerging from the chamber. He looked more real than he ever had before, dust caking his suit, mussing up his hair. He brushed it off his shoulders and smirked at me. "That wasn't an icon of my power. That was my prison ."
I gulped.
Crap.
The Lightbringer snapped his fingers. The cryocrypts opened and the dessicated corpses of the other sacrifices emerged. Their bodies showed, now that they were standing upright, the huge cuts where their hearts had been removed, their entrails ripped out. They stepped out, their arms reaching towards me, hideous moans busting from their mouths. I stepped back against the wall and felt a clammy hand close around my ankle. I looked down and saw the one handed corpse of Rachel Lossener looking up at me, her mouth gurgling, her eyes glowing with red fury. I shot her in the head and staggered backwards and away. The other zombies were rushing forward, and I could hear snarling sounds coming from the other cryo corridors. I'd be surrounded soon. I stepped backwards, waiting until the zombies were clustered. Then I reached out with my hand - a telekinetic field closing around the tube that ran along the ceiling and fed into the cryocrpyts. Metal squealed, popped, and then a gouting spray of hyper-cold gasses spurted into the zombies. When it had cleared, they were frozen solid.
The conduit's surging power faded for a moment. I risked a sprint forward, rushing for the elevator shaft. I got there almost at the same time as the second zombie hoard. My shotcannon roared and several zombies staggered backwards, more thrown by the pellet impacts than damaged. But as I cocked the shotcannon, I heard laughter chasing me from behind the corridor. The Lightbringer walked towards me, shaking his head slightly as he went.
I hauled myself into the elevator and slammed down the button for Corporate. The elevator closed and I held up the communicator I had salvaged from the drone. The roar of gunfire that reached my ears was intense and made Jules hard to hear.
"We're only getting a third of the power needed!" he said. "And the Tesc are boiling out of every fucking hole in the wall! The turrets are going full tilt, and we're-" There was a roar of gunfire, getting louder, then softer. "And we're not going to hold out forever!"
"Warm up the portal," I said.
"You're not here-"
"It'll take extra time to build the gate thanks to the lower power, right?" I asked. "Just fucking do it!"
The doors opened and I came into Corporate. I could hear rattling in the pipes. But I didn't give it any mind. I ran forward towards the flayed bodies that had been put up on the walls. Prison, huh? I leaped up, grabbing one of the spikes. I hauled back and managed to wrench it free with a grunt, and the corpse swung away from the wall, hideously red. It tore free from the other nails as I dropped down. It splatted and the pipes burst open as hundreds of Broodlings emerged from the darkness. They scuttled into the room with wild abandon.
I had to work faster.
I swung my shotcannon around - not aiming at the Broodlings.
I aimed at the second flayed corpse.
I fired and took it in the shoulder. Flesh snapped and popped and tore and the body thumped to the ground, leaving only two solitary arms stuck to the wall. I managed to work another shotcannon pump and blow another corpse - this one slumping in half - before the Broodlings were on me. They swarmed over my body and I felt teeth slamming into the nanite sheath surrounding my body, my armor dropping. I screamed and thrashed - firing off lightning, but it did nothing to the massive swarm. Their teeth continued to bite and bite, and though they didn't tear my flesh, they left dozens of stinging bruises. I felt some scuttling against my face and struggled desperately.
The sound of the roar that chased them off was like the end of the world. The Broodlings tumbled away from my body, screeching. Several burst like hideous fruit, splattering me with their black blood. Then I was sitting up, blinking. The immense head of Leviathan looked down at me. His breath was warm on my body.
Unexpected, his voice rumbled in my mind. The barrier had kept me imprisoned here.
I grinned. "The enemy of my enemy..." I paused. "F-Fucks my brains out. A-Apparently."
Not this time.
That great, warm mouth breathed on me again and I was reminded of that time, laying underneath his avatar, my body stretched deliciously. My eyes shuddered shut and I writhed and panted...and realized I had cum. From just the memory and his breath alone. Then he was stomping away, heading towards the elevator. It screeched as his arm tore out the innards, the cables snapping, the car tumbling down the shaft. Careless of the damage he was causing, the immense bulk of him slithered into the shaft and was gone.
I panted.
"Inconsiderate asshole," I snarled.
I grabbed my spacesuit helmet. Snapped it on. Stood up.
The huge windows in Corporate shattered quite nicely.
I tumbled outwards into space, buffeted by the air rushing past me. Station keeping jets flared and sputtered above and below my field of vision - but as I watched, I saw their flames were strangely thin and long. And as the exhaust spiraled away from the station, I saw it twisting and turning inconsistently, as if the very physics that they obeyed were breaking down. It clicked. What would smoke look like, if half of the smoke stopped moving because it had run out of time? It'd create strange, skittering, geometric clouds just like that .
The station was starting to slew slowly. I looked away from it and at the hellish planet that it orbited.
No.
Not hellish
Hell .
I kicked on the thrusters that I had used to repair the stationkeeping engine, shooting towards the physics lab ring of Virgil Station. My heart hammered as I heard the gunfire over my communicator - ringing in my mind. Jules voice, shouting. "Look out!"
I hit the accelerator harder. The airlock started to fill my vision. I spun around and decelerated equally as hard - but I had left it for too long. I slammed into the station hard enough to jar the air out of my lungs. I woofed against the helmet and almost cracked the faceplate against the metal of Virgil station. Only reflex kept me from spinning away and away and away from the station - my hand closing around the grasping bar above the airlock. I tapped at the door and the airlock cycled open. I started forward-
Run. The instinct was sudden and intense and set me thrusting forward as hard as I could. Even so, my foot was nearly smashed by the airlock door slamming shut while I was in the middle of it. I gasped loudly, looking around myself. Then it hit me. The Lightbringer had given me my access codes. I had freed him and now he wasn't interested in me fucking up his plans. But then the gravity of the station was on and the inner door opened. Air surrounded me now - and through that air, I could hear the screech of the Brood.
The demons.
The hammering of the auto-turrets was a ferocious undercurrent to the sound of screeching demons. I leaped through the door as fast as I could, rolling and coming up onto the balls of my feet - the door slamming shut behind me. I looked around the corridor, trying to place where the central chamber would be compared to me. I was pretty sure I knew the way, but I stopped myself as I saw that I was standing right next to a security station. I oohed softly.
My palm pressed to the keypad and I fired off an immense jolt of electrical energy into it. The door sprang open with a squealing growl, hydraulic fluid dripping from the upper edge of the door frame. I stepped under the droplets and grinned slowly as I looked around the room. The security forces had been overwhelmed too fast to bring out all of their guns. There was an armor locker, which I smashed open with the same brute force electrical overload I had used before. I strapped the green carapace chest on, snapped on the gauntlets. It socketed on and around my spacesuit armor, and made me feel less...exposed.
Less naked.
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I whistled slowly as I pulled out the underslung plasma cannon that was contained in the Riot Response Kit.
"TemplarSoft doesn't fuck around ," I whispered, tapping on the weapon and checking the battery. The battery glowed red. A Tesc power source. An infinite power source. I grinned wickedly. "Groovy."
I was so glad I’d specialized in energy weapons and not kinetics.
I walked out of the armory and down the corridor. The plasma cannon was heavy in my arms. Comforting. I followed the sound of violence and came on a pocket of demons rushing towards the fray. They were all Warrior Brood, their bodies sleek and black carapaces, their tails swishing from side to side. I thumbed off the plasma cannon's safety and felt it whirr . A glowing reticule projected before my face thanks to some rather handy holographics and I leveled it on the demon in the lead. I pulled back on the trigger and the upper barrel on the plasma cannon let loose with a torrent of purple-white energy. It flew in a perfectly straight line, hit the Warrior Brood in the side, and caused it to pop like a balloon. Keeping the trigger depressed, I swept the beam around - and saw that it dragged like a stream of water. The Brood skittered, backpedaling, almost comically trying to back away from the stream, but they failed to move in time.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
I grinned. "I like it."
I stepped around the last corner and came to the sea of violence that swarmed around the auto-turrets. The portal stood in the center of the room, crackling and swirling with energy. I let loose with a stream of plasma, sweeping it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Tesc by the dozens exploded into sprays of gore, and several larger ones turned to face me. The huge beasts looked like they had been augmented by a mad cyberneticist - rocket launchers attached to their shoulders. I swept the beam along their heads, then dropped the plasma cannon to roll away from the return fire from the survivor. The rockets smashed into the ground.
Mind Games Page 14
