He looked again to the brilliant sapphire glow now streaming from the Furnace, but although it continued to build, there was no obvious offensive capability about the column of light.
And then it flashed out in a coherent bar that stopped in the center of the Gulf. It formed a sphere there that began to burn like a tiny sun, and the Ntja surged even farther away. The smaller ships closed up around the two largest as they moved.
The Variyar, no longer content to merely stand their ground, began to retreat as well, swinging behind the plane of the city, getting the bulk of the Relic Core between their vulnerable ships and the churning sphere of cobalt power.
Marcus focused his attention back on that globe, and saw a deep, cold blackness growing at the center. It started as a small dark knot, but grew quickly, swelling and darkening until its true, black nature was unmistakable. It was clear as he watched that the blue sphere was harnessing the blackness, holding it in check somehow.
As he watched, he felt an awareness far larger than his own all around him. It felt as if the entity calling itself Penumbra was straining forward, eager for the kill. And Marcus shared that taste for vengeance. The more immediate wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Taurani and his dog-faced minions were subsumed into far more ancient grudges. His paltry dead were joined by an endless legion of the fallen, each one screaming out for vengeance and justice.
The sensation overwhelmed him and he felt himself swoon beneath the pounding hatred and passion for revenge. It began to beat within his mind, the rhythm falling quickly into sync with the tempo of the pulsating energy emanating from the Furnace. He felt his eyes open wide in anticipation.
A small window in the churning blue orb released a lash of utter blackness. A branch of vicious dark lightning reached out, visible only as a void before the stars, and caressed several of the nearest Ntja starships. They came apart in an instant. Their protective fields disappeared without a murmur, their hulls disintegrated like sand castles before an incoming tide, and soon they were nothing more than glittering flotsam, expanding off into the void.
A visible panic gripped the survivors, and the tight Ntja formation broke apart as each ship’s captain tried to save himself from the terrible wrath of the thing that had lived beneath the city.
Marcus laughed with the heady power of it. Somehow, he knew that no being had ever unleashed the energies he now lashed at his enemies.
But it wasn’t enough. More windows opened and more black lightning flashed out. More Ntja ships died. In their panic they grew careless, and collisions began to take almost as heavy a toll as the weapon beneath the city. One of the large battleships was struck several times by its smaller kin, and began to drift downward, back toward the city, as its light flickered with damage to its reactors. It drifted too close, and the lightning kissed it, and it died the same, stately death as its consorts.
Only three of the Ntja ships survived to fall into their wormholes. The sole remaining battleship, bleeding fuel and atmosphere in a glittering wake, was the last to drop away. Only the Variyar were left.
Marcus felt a nearly overwhelming urge to then focus the city’s terrible lash upon those usurpers as well. Every slight, every belittling glance, offensive comment, and poisonous sneer came back to him in a rush. The pathetic, envious, wormlike aliens of the city, bloated with self-importance and filled with their own misplaced righteousness, deserved nothing less. His eyes narrowed and he focused on the largest Variyar warship; the one that would be carrying K’hzan Modath, self-styled king of that upstart race.
As he bent his destructive will toward the ship, he tightened one fist, preparing to lash out with the full power of the beast within the city, and then he blinked. His fist. He felt his fist, and his arm, and the rest of his body. He came back to himself in a rush, although his awareness was still locked outside, floating in the cold of space.
He recoiled from what he had nearly done, or allowed the city to do. He ordered the thing in his mind to stand down, gratified that it did so without a fight, and then forced his own mind to settle, clearing the echoes of frustration and anger that had fed the reaction.
He shook his head, casting about one last time to ensure they had scoured the system clean of Council vessels, and then closed his eyes.
The alien presence had withdrawn, but he could still feel it. It was no longer all around him. Now, it was crouched somewhere within his mind, looking through his eyes, and dissatisfied with what it was seeing.
A desperate shout echoed off walls that were somehow far away and close at hand at the same time. He recoiled from the sound, and he felt the awareness within him surge up again.
The brilliant sapphire cage began to dwindle, the darkness within receding, even as his vision of the space around the city faded.
That fleet was not the only danger, he remembered. There was an entire army bearing down upon him, wherever his body was, even now.
The call had been Angara’s. He was sure of it.
And the anger within him surged to the fore again, merging with the awareness that had taken up residence behind his eyes, and burning with a dreadful light, fear for his friends adding fuel to the fire.
He felt as if he were falling down a great shaft, leaving the darkness of space behind him, the soft green glow of the command chamber below.
A small part of him knew fear as he fell. Fear not of falling, but of what new power he would find at the bottom.
But a larger portion of his mind hungered for that new power, and the anticipation of further revenge stoked the heat in his chest to an almost painful degree.
*****
Angara had watched as Marcus drop onto the giant seat. When the back of his legs touched the metal, his body had gone rigid, his back arching painfully, and his mouth had opened in what appeared to be a silent scream.
Then he had stopped moving completely.
She was not sure how long he had been like that, because soon after he had stopped moving, the viewing fields had begun to snap to life all around them. She had watched Marcus for several moments, but there was nothing she could do for him. He did not react to her shouts, and when she tried to nudge his body she found him frozen in place as if everything about him, his flesh, his hair, even the fabric of his clothing, had been transmuted into metal.
Nhan would not move, staring at Marcus with something moving deep behind his eyes that might have been hope, or might have been despair.
In the end, she had told the little mystic to watch the Human trapped within the stasis of the chair, and she had gone to see what the viewing fields were showing.
From the top of the dais she had been able to make out the view on the main screen. It showed Penumbra as if seen from above, with the battle raging in its skies as the remaining Variyar, unable to hide from their pursuers, had turned to fight. She watched as shuttles rose toward the fleet amidst the towers of the city, and realized they were trying to recover as many of their people as they could. It was a brave attempt, and entirely Variyar in its sensibilities. They would rather die in battle, standing on the decks of their warships, than hunted down through the corridors of Penumbra.
She took the dais stairs two at a time and walked along the wall of shifting images. Every one carried a different view of the battle overhead, or the army of Ntja soldiers milling about the shattered wreck of Sanctum.
Her eyes flicked back to the main screen, as a flare of blue light dominated the image. The Furnace, that mysterious glowing cavern that had been the object of inquiry and myth for as long as Penumbra had existed, was pulsating with sapphire brightness. Countless beings had investigated the Furnace down through the ages, but the intensity of the fires that burned within had defeated every technology brought against it. The theories concerning the purpose of that fire were as numerous as the grains of sand blowing across the dead planet below. None of them, however, had imagined this.
She had never seen anything like the stream of light that flooded from the Furnace
to fill the Gulf. The sphere that formed next looked like a brilliant blue sun, with a darkness beating at its heart. Her eyes widened with the first blast of power. Ntja ships shivered into oblivion at the touch of that black fire, and she realized there was only one thing she could be seeing.
The primordial power that bound the universe itself together had somehow been harnessed by the beings that first made the Relic Core. That energy was now being unleashed with gleeful abandon upon the Galactic Council’s Peacemaker fleet, and the warships were simply disintegrating beneath its caress.
No race in the history of the galaxy had been able to harness this dark energy. But somehow, the Humans had done it. Puzzle pieces began to fit into place in her mind. She saw Humans, pushed back to the very brink of defeat, desperately clawing at the boundaries of known science for some technology that would save them. It seemed they had found it, but too late.
She wondered what had happened to those last Humans, huddled here at the end of nowhere while the rest of their race was being pushed back and relocated on that evil little ball of mud and misery they had come to call Earth. Somehow, they had disentangled the secrets of dark energy from the interstices of the universe, but it had been too late. They had never had the opportunity to use this weapon, she knew, or the history of the galaxy would have been very different.
Within the fields before her, the last Ntja ships had made good their desperate escape. There was clearly no defense against the jagged death stabbing out from that brilliant blue ball. The wreckage of nearly their entire fleet floated in the skies above Penumbra, and the Variyar were already moving back into position, redeploying their ships and their recovered warriors to address the force now churning, confused, around Sanctum far above.
She found herself caught within the silence that followed the destruction of the Ntja fleet. Despite the odds, it looked like they were going to be victorious after all. Marcus, somehow, had protected them. His faith in whatever had been drawing him along had been vindicated.
They were saved.
The thought caught in her mind. It was a comforting one. It was a warm realization. And it was utterly wrong.
Distant sounds intruded upon her sudden realization. Heavy, echoing footfalls, muttered orders, and the scrape of metal on metal surged toward her, growing louder and louder with each passing moment.
She turned quickly to Nhan. It would not matter if the Variyar above destroyed the remnants of the Ntja army if enough of them made it down here to kill them before help could arrive.
The little mystic was still standing before the massive chair, staring at Marcus.
Except that Marcus was not there anymore.
A huge, stylized, metal statue sat in Marcus’s place. Where Marcus’s body had taken up the small, Human-sized recess within the seat, this shape now filled the throne completely. It was not smooth metal, she saw, but rather formed from countless angular grains of steel, each shining in the cool green light.
The face was majestic. It was not Marcus’s face, but rather the ideal Human face, strong and regal. Within it were isolated elements that might have been gifted to the Children of Man; the resolve of the Mnymians, the wit of the Namanu, the haughty power of the Subbotines. All of them were somewhere within that stately face, and yet clearly this was the master of them all. It was also completely still.
“What happened?” She cried as she ran back up the steps, forgetting, for the moment, the approaching enemy.
“I don’t know.” The little creature’s voice was soft and hollow, filled with pain and loss. “It looked like dust, sifting upward over his body.” He pointed to the statue with a trembling finger. “It only took a moment, and he was gone.”
The statue was cold to the touch; grainy and rough. She stared down, completely at a loss, when the first Ntja rushed in, a heavy falchion gripped in both hands, staring around, the whites of its narrow eyes gleaming. When it saw them both standing on the dais, it barked a command to soldiers following behind, and ran at her, heavy weapon raised to strike.
Chapter 31
Marcus continued to fall into darkness. The sensation of freefall ended abruptly, replaced with a strange, remote sense of cold. He could hear some sort of commotion in the distance, but he felt no urgency toward it. The cold was all-consuming, leaving no room for distractions.
The anger was still there within him; a flicker of warmth in the all-pervasive ice. He wanted nothing more than to destroy, to crush, to kill those who had hurt him, hurt his friends, and denied him his rightful place. He felt, surging beneath his own anger and hatred, a much larger animosity, like a great sea monster gliding through the darkness of the deep ocean of his mind. It was alien to him, different from him. But it was kindred, somehow, and he welcomed its support and vindication of his own black thoughts.
The fact that he could not move only fueled the rage. Something was holding him back from his vengeance, and he threw all of his being against those chains, straining for the freedom to destroy.
He felt something coil behind his eyes, some strange intrusion that was somehow a part of himself and yet different. Whatever it was, he felt a click somewhere in his mind, and his eyes flared open.
His vision had a blueish cast, making everything appear more distant and cold. He was in a vast hall, with mysterious shapes dropping down from a ceiling lost in shadow. Large pillars rose up around him, lost in the gloom overhead. He saw banks of shifting images all along the walls, showing scenes of chaos, devastation, and combat. None of the particulars of any image registered in his mind, but he was nearly overwhelmed with a sense of joy as he saw red-skinned terrors battling dog-faced monstrosities across the city.
Echoes of those battles were playing out right before him, he realized slowly, but instead of the horned Variyar, there was a ferocious girl and a diminutive furry creature battling the hulking, black-clad dogs. She had the purple skin and white hair of one of the slave races, the Tigan, if he was not mistaken. The creature by her side, wielding a nanostaff with something more than adequate skill, looked more like a Goagoi than anything else, in the fluttering robes of some priest or mystic.
He watched as the Tigan girl spun through the howling attackers. A glittering knife sparkled in either hand, and as she danced through them, glistening arcs of vitae sprayed out behind her, and dogs died.
The Goagoi was a blur as he kept the nano-weapon spinning in constant arcs, defending himself from clumsy attacks and then riposting, the weapon changing shape countless times. It was a long staff to accept a blow from one sword, then slid off that blade and lengthened into a delicate war spear to flash out and stab a distant soldier in the face. As it withdrew it became a squat weight of spiked metal that raked another of the enemy across its wrinkled snout, tearing what looked like metal domes affixed to the thing’s face free from the flesh.
There were over a dozen dead soldiers heaped on the floor, their blood flowing freely and rendering the footing tricky for the surviving combatants. The purple-skinned Tigan was grinning maniacally as she fought, each blow striking home with a triumphant grunt before she was on to her next victim. The Goagoi, though, did not look to be taking any joy from the battle.
He continued to watch from his high seat as the enemy poured through the wide door, pressing the Tigan and her little ally most sorely. He saw a lucky strike slide through the woman’s defenses, her flesh parting in a spray of blood high on her left shoulder. She staggered back, her face a mask of anger. She unwisely launched one knife through the air, taking the lucky assailant in the eye and pitching him back into death. But that left her with only one weapon, and she obviously regretted her decision before her enemy had fallen.
It was a foolish thing to do, to relinquish half of her limited arsenal. But it had been brave as well, and he understood the motivation behind it. His approval, however, would not save her from the odds now terribly stacked against her.
The Goagoi howled as he saw his friend’s blood, and the little creature redo
ubled his own efforts, pushing the encircling enemy back with the fury of his attacks. Clearly the beast was a worthy friend and ally despite its debased genetic stock. The nanostaff was now nothing but a vibrating cloud of matter in his hands, shifting shape and size too quickly to see. Towering enemy figures were spinning away shedding sheets of blood in every direction, but he could tell even this would not be enough. There were simply too many of the ugly adversaries pushing in from all sides.
The girl staggered, ducking beneath a wild slash and slipping to one knee with a grunt of pain. Her knife drove out and caught the arm wielding the sword in the elbow, but as the momentum of the heavy weapon dragged the limb around, her dagger was plucked from her exhausted grasp, wedged in the bones and gristle of her victim.
A howl went up among the attackers and they surged forward. The Goagoi stumbled forward, pushing the Tigan girl behind him, ready to defend her with his last breath, and something swelled in his heart.
“Angara!” The name issued from stiff lips before he even remembered it, and the voice terrified him. But when he said it, when he heard it, the strange, foreign filter over his eyes dropped away, and he surged forward, raising one hand to reach for her.
Except that it was not his hand. The arm that responded to his desperate impulse was heavy, a grainy, gritty metal that threw off tiny emerald flashes from a million miniscule facets scattered across the surface. It was a statuesque arm, well-muscled and well-proportioned to the strong hand whose fingers now flexed out toward Angara Ksaka, bowed down before the Ntja.
And beyond that hand he saw then that the attackers had stopped, every flat-nosed face turning in confusion and growing fear toward him.
Behind them, peering through their bulky bodies, Khet Nhan rose, his red eyes wide and his little mouth open in amazement.
Marcus looked down at his body. It was the form of a metal Adonis, all rippling muscle and clean lines, crafted from the same metallic grain of the arm. It reminded him of Nhan’s staff, somehow, and a world of possibilities coursed through his mind at the thought. He was towering over the rest of the room, he realized. Looking behind him, he saw that he was taller than the enormous chair that had somehow done this to him. Then he froze.
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