by Jacob Holo
Zo shook her head. “Just a glance. If I were to guess, I’d say that ship was an Outcast orbital flyer.”
“What, here? On Earth?”
“Doesn’t make sense, I know. Every alarm in the Earth Nation Fleet must be going off right now. We need to get out of here.”
“Right. My aircar’s in the house.”
“Better than nothing.”
“This way!” Quennin ran up the beach. Zo sprinted after her.
Water exploded behind them, and a ship like a silver arrow flew out and leveled itself above the water. Quennin glanced over her shoulder to get a good look. The Outcast flyer’s prow was a forward-facing delta with smooth curves and fat wings, all clad in reflective armor. Weapons bristled from the nose and hung in clusters underneath the wings.
Behind the triangular front was a long cylinder, three times the length of the main body and encased in the same reflective armor. Quennin guessed it to be some sort of booster section.
It’s built for speed, she thought.
The flyer hovered above the shoreline. A rectangular hatch opened along its belly.
Zo sent out a message over her neural link. Quennin patched in and listened. “Kevik! Kiro! Are either of you near your seraphs?”
“We’re both nearby. What’s going on?”
“Questions can wait! Get on board and get over to my position NOW!!!”
“Understood.”
“Help is on the way!” Zo shouted out loud. Quennin could barely hear her over the flyer’s engine.
Watery blurs dropped from the flyer’s bay, hit the ground softly, and ran towards the two women.
Outcast warriors with active stealth fields and gravity harnesses, Quennin thought. She turned away and pumped her legs even harder.
Something struck the back of her knee, and she tumbled. Zo shouted out, but her voice died against the shriek of the flyer’s engine. Quennin found herself on her back with two Outcast warriors standing over her. Colors and light constantly shifted to conceal their position, but this close, Quennin could just barely see a solid outline. They held their stubby weapons single-handedly, barrels trained on her.
The closest Outcast grabbed her and effortlessly flipped her onto her stomach. He bound her hands behind her back and lifted her to her feet. His movements were practiced and precise, without waste, and inhumanly strong.
As her captor held her bound arms, Quennin counted four Outcasts total: two on either side of her and two in front with weapons trained on Zo.
“Get out of here, Zo!” Quennin shouted, but Zo didn’t move. She’d stopped running a few strides away.
“You can’t take her!” Zo shouted. “You have no idea what—”
The rest of her words drowned in the flyer’s earsplitting roar. Outcasts kept Zo in their sights but held their fire. This was incomprehensible! A seraph pilot stood before them, and they didn’t shoot? It made no sense!
The flyer halted directly overhead. Her captor held her bound arms with an iron grip. The air buzzed with the effects of a short-range gravity field, and she found herself lifted into the flyer’s belly.
The four Outcasts and Quennin crowded into the flyer’s interior: a space designed for utility, not comfort. Screen-skin covered the walls, granting a view of their surroundings. As the bay door began to close, she spotted a silvery glint approaching along the shoreline.
Just the sight of it made Quennin’s heart skip a beat.
The seraph stood roughly in the shape of a man, but was so large it could crush the flyer in one hand. Six blade-like wings extended from its back, their edges glowing brightly. Its armored skin gleamed in the morning sunlight, so polished and beautiful that the Outcast flyer appeared dull by comparison. Delicate curls and curlicues etched across its chest, limbs, and wings, each burning with a fierce inner fire.
It was one of the six Renseki seraphs flown by the Sovereign’s honor guard, and it bore straight in. The Outcasts had only seconds to make their escape.
“You’re all going to die,” Quennin said.
The bay door sealed, and the flyer accelerated hard towards the seraph.
In a flash, the two craft shot past each other. The seraph reached out, and the tip of a finger grazed the bottom of the Outcast flyer. Quennin felt the craft shudder and lurch forward before righting itself.
He must have launched without weapon pods, she thought.
The Renseki seraph turned about, exhaust from its wings blowing sand off the beach in a great storm.
The flyer’s booster section ignited with a deafening crack. Quennin instinctively fought against her bonds to cover her ears, to no avail. The flyer punched up through the atmosphere, shuddering so violently she thought it would break apart. Behind them, air friction turned the pursuing seraph into a flaming comet.
The sound died down to a low continuous thrumming. Quennin couldn’t believe such a craft was capable of outrunning a seraph. She glanced around, appraising her situation.
Even in this extraordinary plight, her thoughts remained calm. She observed where a lesser person would panic. Since early childhood, she had been raised as a pilot of Aktenzek, and the long years of discipline and constant battle did not fail her now.
The four Outcast warriors had switched off their stealth fields and stashed their weapons. They wore flexible body armor that meshed tightly with their fit physiques. Without the stealth fields blurring color and light, Quennin spotted an ornate design painted like a sash across their chests: orange and black dancing in a diagonal swirl.
Quennin didn’t recognize the pattern and took it to represent whatever Outcast nation these four men hailed from. But there was something else, a band across their right arms: black and white in a familiar pattern of tightly packed circles, semi-circles, and arches.
The soldiers wore Veketon’s heraldry. These four were pawns of the Dead Fleet and its leaders, the Original Eleven.
None of this makes sense! she thought.
The closest Outcast removed his helmet. He looked human enough, despite being an Outcast. A buzz cut of black hair framed a square face that, if not handsome, was at least not ugly. Dark piercing eyes appraised her.
“You serve Veketon,” Quennin said. It was not a question.
Around them, sky turned into the black of space. Soon the flyer would be free of Earth’s gravity well and able to fold space out of the solar system. Quennin looked back, watching the Renseki seraph fall further and further behind.
“My name is Plaerion,” the Outcast said. “And yes, I serve the First of the Eleven. By delivering you to him, our nation will gain great prestige.”
Quennin shook her head. It just didn’t make sense. What value did she have? Why would the Original Eleven bother with a wounded and powerless pilot like her?
Quennin reached into the flyer’s information network. As a pilot, she’d been fitted with one of the finest neural links in existence. Covertly, her implants hunted for chinks in the flyer’s network security. Perhaps she could find something that would explain her circumstances.
The flyer folded space. The smiling crescents of Earth, Moon, and the fortress planet Aktenzek vanished from view. Formations of Outcast flyers snapped into existence, glittering in the light of the new system’s star.
“Why have you captured me?” she asked.
“Master Veketon ordered us to.”
Quennin snorted out a joyless laugh. An automaton’s answer: He did it because he was ordered to. What other reason would he need?
Her neural link gained some purchase into the flyer’s network. For now, she could covertly monitor several data streams, though actual intervention would alert her captors.
Loud mechanical clanks reverberated through the flyer’s hull. The spent booster drifted away.
Quennin found a tactical data stream and examined it. Over one hundred Outcast flyers formed up around them. She was now hidden in a swarm of identical craft, escorted by sixteen powerful warships. Ten sleek frigates and five ma
ssive dreadnoughts established a tight defense around a stubby negator, which activated its disruptive field effect, disabling enemy fold engines in range.
They’re going to pin our pursuers in this system, Quennin thought. That will delay the pursuit for when we fold again.
The Outcasts were going through great lengths to capture her. Negators were notoriously expensive to build and operate.
A fold point snapped open, and the Renseki seraph flew out of a ring of twisted light. With her flyer now hidden in a shoal of one hundred, the Renseki hesitated for a moment, then turned towards the negator. Outcast warships came about and opened fire, but their concentrated plasma beams ricocheted off the seraph’s barrier.
The seraph rammed the negator like a kinetic torpedo, buckling the warship’s armor and causing it to spin end over end. The seraph clambered across the exterior until it reached the midsection and raised an arm back. It ignited a chaos dagger from its wrist and sunk the energy blade into the negator’s thick armor.
With both hands, the seraph forced the hull open.
Two more Renseki seraphs folded into the system.
Quennin closed the data stream. “You didn’t answer my question. Why did you capture me?”
“Master Veketon will explain his reasons to you in person,” Plaerion said.
“In person? That’s a strange way to talk about the Original Eleven. They’ve been dead for millennia.”
Plaerion gave her a smug grin. “I find your ignorance amusing, Quennin S’Kev.”
The shoal of one hundred flyers folded space and vanished.
Chapter 2
Alliance
The war was going badly, and few knew it better than Seth Elexen.
But now, finally, they had a chance to turn the tide.
From within his black seraph, Seth saw with its scanners and sensed the hard radiation of space with its armor. The seraph’s hands were his hands. Its wings were his wings. He felt the fierce beating of the central pump and the flow of energized fluid pulsing through the giant limbs and wings.
Seth didn’t merely pilot the seraph. He was the seraph.
He banked around a gargantuan derelict warship, leaving a faint trail of purple energy in his wake. Shunts stylized as runic script burned hotly along his dark, angular armor. They projected a powerful energy barrier around him: the light of his soul amplified and given physical form.
Twin swords, each as long as the seraph was tall, were docked against his back. He summoned a burst of speed, and the edges of his wings heated from purple to almost white.
Seth ducked through the gaping, leprous hole in an ancient juggernaut and darted out the other side. The Graveyard lay beyond, site of one of the largest battles between the Aktenai and the Grendeni. Remnants of the thirteen-thousand-year-old conflict still choked the region. The forgotten technology deployed in the battle had permanently scarred this area, granting the debris field a surprising level of stability.
The field extended for millions of kilometers in each direction. All around him, cadaverous battleships suffocated space. Ethereal ribbons of darkest, faintest red flickered between the dead hulks, remnants of the reality-tearing carnage. Both sides had deployed their pre-Exile doomsday arsenals, depleting weapon stores that no one today, not even the Original Eleven, knew how to replicate.
Perhaps that was for the best.
Seth flew past the pockmarked spine of an archaic dreadnought and entered a wide gap in the field. Ahead was a sight none in that battle could have imaged.
Even just a few years ago, I would have said this was impossible, he thought.
Over a hundred modern warships floated in neat rows, Aktenai dreadnoughts flying alongside their Grendeni counterparts.
And neither were shooting at each other.
Each faction’s robotic warships were now almost indistinguishable. They shared the same battle networks, flew in mixed squadrons, and combined their exodrone swarms to patrol the debris fields. In a sense, the Aktenai and Grendeni fleets no longer existed. There was only the Alliance.
Seth angled towards a cluster of eight seraph carriers. A squadron of matte gray Earth Nation seraphs stood watch, wings retracted against their backs, long-barreled rail-rifles held at the ready. Though the carriers had all been manufactured in Aktenzek, the majority of their pilots hailed from Earth.
No one in the Alliance knew why, but Earth was the lone source of seraph pilots in the galaxy. Pilots that weren’t born on Earth could always trace their lineage back to that tiny, primitive planet.
An EN seraph with command bars on its shoulder waved as Seth flew past. He slowed his approach, then stopped underneath the carrier Resolute and folded his wings.
Armored shutters flinched open, and twin rails extended down. Locking mechanisms rode the rails down, latched onto his wings, and pulled him up through three shutters to the seraph bays.
Soft white light illuminated a ledge at waist height to the seraph, and a high balcony overlooked the bay. A dozen repair and maintenance arms dangled from the roof like dead insect legs, ready to remove his weapon pods.
Seth concentrated for a moment, forcing the connection between his true body and the seraph into remission. The flow of energy through the seraph dwindled, its shunts darkening until they were black. He breathed in with his own lungs and exhaled slowly through his own mouth. He wiggled his fingers, and they were the digits on his true hands, not the seraph’s.
He was nothing more than a man once again.
The walls of the cockpit entombed him in darkness, then widened into a spherical chamber. The outer hatch opened downward, meeting an extending gangplank. Seth pushed out of the pilot alcove and exited the seraph.
The technician waiting on the ledge was a head taller than him. Most people were.
“Does your seraph require any special attention, pilot?” she asked.
Seth broke the seals on his interface-suit helmet and handed it to the technician. He ran a gloved hand through damp locks of short black hair, turned, and appraised the seraph with dark eyes.
“There’s still some stiffness in the left shoulder. I’d like you to take another look at it.”
The technician bowed her head crisply. “At once, pilot.” She straightened and snapped her fingers. Three more technicians hurried over and opened holographic interfaces facing the seraph. Slender arms deployed from the ceiling and began peeling the flexible armor off the left shoulder.
Seth walked to the back of the ledge and took a lift up to the Resolute’s command center.
Wall screens covered every vertical surface in the circular room. A black ceiling with concentric rings of light illuminated a central dais surrounded by several desks. Two pilots sat across from each other at a desk on the far side, a holographic interface floating between them.
Commander Jared Daykin of the Earth Nation looked up from the pile of d-scrolls he was thumbing through. He rose to attention.
“Sir, welcome back.”
Jared wore the storm-gray uniform of a seraph pilot, white six-winged hawks at the cuffs and collar. His red armband carried the EN planetary seal of Earth and Moon ringed with stars.
“Good to be back, Jared,” Seth said.
Yonu Nezrii, daughter of Renseki Zo Nezrii and Renseki Mezen Daed, sat across from him. She stood up and bowed her head to Seth. She resembled her mother greatly, though with a noticeably fuller figure. A shower of black hair formed a complicated braid that almost reached the backs of her knees. Her soft, oval face framed a pair of ocean blue eyes. The blue armband on her uniform bore the seal of Aktenzek.
The two pilots formed an unorthodox couple, one from Earth, the other from Aktenzek. Together, they commanded Knight Squadron, a rare mixed-tactics squadron of twelve pilots from both worlds. Some said they now rivaled even the Renseki in fame and prowess.
“Pilot Elexen,” Yonu said, “have they reached a decision?”
Seth nodded. “We’re proceeding with the attack on Wise Counsel.”
“Finally,” Jared said. “About time we went on the offensive.”
“Are the Grendeni joining in?” Yonu asked.
“As much as they can,” Seth said. “They’re still recovering from the destruction of those two forward supply schisms.”
Jared accessed a strategic hologram of Alliance space. Zones opened above his desk, outlined in red or green and speckled with icons. Over the past few years, Outcast forces had claimed a deep wedge of territory pushing towards Earth and Aktenzek. Over thirty percent of Alliance space was now either disputed or completely under enemy control.
But hope remained. Much of the Alliance’s industrial might was focused within the fortress planet of Aktenzek. So while territory may have been lost, the Alliance’s ability to produce ships and munitions remained potent. Even better, as the Outcasts pushed towards Aktenzek, the Alliance could reinforce its fleets with greater speed while Outcast supply lines were stretched dangerously thin.
The Wise Counsel and stations like it were the enemy’s solution to that problem. Part supply depot, part mobile manufacturing center, the Wise Counsel could service and support hundreds of warships, and it had just received a massive shipment of munitions, parts, and even whole ships piloted by skeleton crews.
Jared grinned. The red glow of the map lit his face from beneath.
“They are going to be so upset when we blow it up.”
Yonu clapped him on the shoulder. “I should let the rest of the squadron know. They’ll want to hear this.”
“Yeah. Good idea.”
“Pilot Elexen?” she asked.
“Go on. It’ll be good for morale.”
Yonu gave him a curt nod and took the lift down.
“Has Tesset returned from her recon flight?” Seth asked.
“Not yet, sir,” Jared said. “But she’s due back shortly.”
Seth nodded thoughtfully. He didn’t realized how much he missed her until that moment.
“There’s nothing to worry about, sir,” Jared said. “She has a real gift for this kind of work.”
“Is my concern really that obvious?”
“Quite obvious, sir.”
