by Eva Brandt
At that moment, when I looked at Brendan, I couldn’t see him standing there at all. I blinked and I could’ve sworn Typhon was the one standing in front of me. An aura of poisonous ice spread around us. At least three people pissed themselves.
Selene seemed oblivious. She was still bent over August, trying to get him to respond. All of a sudden, she froze, her eyes glazing as she stared out into the distance, at something only she could see.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Yes, of course.”
As if in a daze, she retrieved her sword and used it to slice her palm. Blood dripped over August’s cheek, and the bright crimson reminded me of the power of our chimeras. Tartarus’s Gift had failed us today. Would Gaia’s be more successful?
I wouldn’t have placed my hopes in something so vague, but I still believed in Selene. I was not disappointed. As two more drops of blood fell onto August’s skin, a blue-green glow surrounded him. It swept over me and the others like a warm, tight embrace. For the first time, I felt Gaia’s power and it was so intense it almost brought me to my knees.
It was nothing like Tartarus’s touch. I’d always found my gift empowering, but it hadn’t been soothing, not really. Its strength came with a price, one I’d accepted and was happy to pay. Gaia’s power held a different meaning. It reminded me of better days, of the first time I’d met Brendan, of the laughter we’d shared so many times as friends, of the companionship between everyone in our unit, of Selene’s smile and unexpected kindness.
The wave of power faded away and as it disappeared, I felt more clear-headed. The slight radiation damage I’d received was gone. More importantly, August’s injuries were fading away, the burns starting to turn milder. I’d never been prone to shedding tears, but at that moment, I could’ve sobbed in relief. He groaned and cracked his eyes open, rescuing me from utterly embarrassing myself. “Fuck. What happened?”
“There was an accident during the race,” Pollux replied, his voice shaking. “You were badly hurt so we brought you to Hyperion Base 35.”
August’s eyes widened at Pollux’s explanation. “Charybdis?”
I didn’t know how to tell him we’d been forced to leave Charybdis behind. By now, the chimera’s metal form had probably been destroyed by space rock and had drifted too close to the sun to be salvaged. He must’ve realized it anyway, because he tried to get up.
Selene pressed her hand to his cheek and pushed him down, keeping him from moving further and accidentally harming himself. “Shh. Don’t worry about that now. You’re still wounded. You need to rest.”
A single tear trailed down August’s cheek. “Selene, we need to find her. She’s all alone. We can’t leave her. Please.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Selene answered. “We won’t abandon her. We won’t abandon you. Not ever.”
August shot Selene an almost beatific smile. “T-Thank you. I… I’m going to take my words back. You’re far more beautiful than the sun.”
With those final words, he went limp, his eyes drifting closed once again. Pollux’s breath caught. “Is he…?”
He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. Fortunately, Selene was able to reassure him. “August is asleep. He’s nowhere near fine, but he’s not going to die, at least.”
The medics were staring at her in shock, obviously not knowing what to make of this strange development. In their world, people didn’t recover from heavy burns and radiation damage within the blink of an eye. An overload of tachyons could be stopped by a talented healer, but the injuries left behind weren’t that easy to fix.
Or were they? Chimera Warriors had stopped relying on Terrans long ago, but if I remembered well, some legends said that Gaia priestesses had done this a lot during the war with the apsids. Why had we stopped working together?
The scent of Selene’s blood and August’s scorched flesh filled the air. At the back of my mind, Cerberus snarled in anger. Nothing made sense anymore. I watched the medics take August away and made a vow.
This slight wouldn’t go unpunished. I’d find out who was hunting us down and I’d make them regret it. This time, I wouldn’t take pity on them. I wouldn’t let them live like I had with Vincent. One by one, they’d all die.
After all, Cerberus needed to feed from time to time and what better moment to do it than now?
The Sun-Dwellers
Selene
The winner of the tournament was a man named Clay Savage, from The Oceanus Attack Corps. He was promoted three ranks and received a terra-formed domain on Earth as a prize.
I wanted to kick someone in the face when I heard. My mother and her priestesses worked themselves to the bone and slaved night and day to heal the damaged earth. Every individual patch of land took ages to return to its previous condition. The Grand Judiciary had just given away a decade’s worth of work.
I didn’t have time to focus on my righteous anger over that. In fact, I didn’t bother staying to witness the end of the tournament at all. Instead, I left Hyperion Base 35 and headed into The Fields of Mercury again. I had a job to do and a promise to keep. We couldn’t abandon Charybdis. If we had even the slightest chance to find her, we owed it to both her and August to try.
Brendan was the Chimera prince and couldn’t just leave. Pollux had to keep an eye on August. Knox and I still had our chimeras in perfect working order, so it was up to us.
Knox seemed to think finding her was impossible, but he followed me anyway. He was the one who’d last seen Charybdis. Apparently, he’d torn off her cockpit to extract August, at which point he’d been forced to leave the dormant chimera. I didn’t blame him, even if he blamed himself.
“If we don’t find her, another model can be built,” I tried to reassure him.
“I know, but that takes a long time. Chimeras aren’t exactly regular mechas. And even if the shell itself is created, there’s no guarantee the soul will come to inhabit it anytime soon. For all we know, the machine will remain dormant instead of turning to August again.”
“Has that happened before?” I asked with a frown.
“A few times, yes, although never like this. Chimeras don’t fall apart in the middle of a battle. It’s not in their nature. This is just too strange.”
Someone had sabotaged the Charybdis. But who and why? Had they been trying to get to me and August had just been in the way? If so, why had the Sphinx remained untouched even when the Typhon and Scylla had started acting weirdly?
I didn’t understand anything anymore, but I did know this. August had said Charybdis was alone. That meant she had to still be alive.
“What do you think, Sphinx?” I asked my friend. “You’re the expert here. Where should we go?”
“There’s no point in heading closer to the Sun. I can’t feel her anywhere, but if she did wander into that area, she’s lost to us anyway. Let’s try Mercury.”
Knox and I split up in an attempt to cover as much ground as possible. The planet wasn’t very large, not anymore, but it would still take us at least a day to properly map.
In space, everything was silent, and Mercury was no different. Once Knox and I went our separate ways, the silence seemed to gain physical substance, battering the Sphinx. I held onto my controls as tightly as I could and divided my attention between the displays and my additional skill.
It was a little easier when in direct connection with Sphinx, but still strenuous after two days’ worth of fighting. It also brought me next to no results.
One would think that a gigantic, snake-like mecha would be easy to find, but that wasn’t the case at all. The surface of the planet was still uneven and remnants of old ships had been left behind. Space rock constantly struck the ground, so the geography changed. If Charybdis had fallen somewhere here, she could have been buried underground and we’d never see her.
Hours passed, with no progress. My head hurt and Sphinx’s concern started to vibrate through me. “We should stop, Selene. You need to take a break. At this rate, you’ll give yourself brain damage an
d we won’t get anywhere.”
“I can go a little further,” I insisted. “We’re close. I can feel it.”
“All right, but if you push yourself too far, I’m putting my paw down. Understand?”
“Yes, yes. Don’t worry. I’ll stop if I absolutely have to.”
I hoped it wouldn’t come down to that, because in a situation like this, every second counted. Charybdis might not be my chimera, but she was, in her own way, my friend. If we couldn’t save her, if we couldn’t do this one, simple thing, how was I supposed to change the way people saw women as a whole?
My stubbornness paid off, and only a few minutes after my exchange with Sphinx, I caught a glimpse of crimson down below. My heart started beating faster. I guided my chimera lower down and started to remove the space rock in my way.
It didn’t take me long to realize I’d found my target. It was her. It was Charybdis. She was inactive, but still mostly in one piece. “Can she be fixed?”
“I don’t know,” Sphinx replied, “but we have a better chance, now that we’ve found her.”
The Charybdis was too massive for me to carry back to the base, so I contacted Knox to get his help. Cerberus showed up a little while later, visibly excited. I was pretty sure he was wagging his tail. Not for the first time, I wondered to what point the chimeras felt things like they had in their old, flesh-and-blood bodies. One of these days, I had to ask Sphinx about it.
“Well done, beautiful,” Knox said. “August will be thrilled we’ve found her.”
“We couldn’t abandon her.” I reached out and patted Charybdis’s side with Sphinx’s paw. “She’s one of us too.”
“How charming. You know, I never did understand humans. How can they get so attached to monsters who do nothing but prey on them?”
Alarm erupted over me, both my own and Sphinx’s. I looked away from Charybdis, only to realize that at one point when I hadn’t been paying attention, a group of Sun-Dwellers—apsids—had surrounded us.
I’d seen a lot of depictions of the famous aliens in my mother’s books, but none of them did the creatures justice. They looked like people, except not quite. Their bodies shone too brightly for me to be able to distinguish their features. I squinted, trying to at least figure out how many of them there were. Fifteen, if my calculations were correct. They didn’t seem armed. In a fight against me and Knox, they didn’t have a chance. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel wary.
It was never a good idea to underestimate one’s opponent. What was the best thing to do in this situation? Attack outright?
“No, you can’t,” Sphinx said. “Apsids never travel alone in space. If there’s a group of them here, their ship is undoubtedly nearby and their superiors are watching. They haven’t attacked us. It’s better to wait and see what they have to say.”
I had my doubts, but Knox had yet to strike, so I followed his example. Since he had seniority, I let him speak. “We’re not here to start a fight,” he said. “One of our own was injured. We’ll retrieve her body and go.”
“Yes, the chimera,” one of the apsids said. “We saw. What a charming spectacle it was. Quite enjoyable. Not to worry. We’ll let you go in a minute. But before we do that, we have a request.”
“A request?” Knox repeated. “And what, pray tell, can we do for you?”
“We’re not interested in you, Flight Lieutenant Alexander. It’s Selene Renard we want.”
Knox let out a snarl of anger and the Cerberus’s claws flared with bright, crimson light. I launched myself into the air, ready for battle. Just the fact that they knew our names was alarming. No matter what Sphinx had said earlier, I wasn’t about to wait and see what else they had in mind.
Unfortunately, my chimera had been right in her earlier guess. A powerful blast struck the Cerberus, amputating one of his heads. I cried out in terror and anger, knowing how closely connected Cerberus was to Knox. But the Cerberus wasn’t thwarted by the wound. As the severed head dropped down to the ground, his paws began to glow again, this time absorbing the tachyons from our environment instead of emitting them.
The apsids backed away, but they didn’t seem too scared. Cerberus lunged at them again, intent on destroying them. He never got the chance to touch them. A bright light fell upon us, pinning Cerberus in place and keeping him from moving further. When I tried to rush to his aid, I found myself frozen as well. My displays, weapons and engine were working fine, but I just couldn’t move. It was as if I’d been trapped in some kind of cage or net. Fuck. This wasn’t good.
“I can’t say I don’t admire you and your pets,” the alien who’d first spoken said, “but you must be aware that we have our ways to deal with their unique skills.”
As far as I knew, our enemies didn’t possess any technology that would allow them to immobilize a chimera so utterly. That was the whole point. Apsids were fire-based beings. They couldn’t fight chimeras, not when their engines worked, at least.
Then again, it had been a long time since the war. The apsids might have created weaponry they hadn’t used before. But why use it now? Why today, against us?
Maybe this wasn’t about us at all. Maybe they were planning a bigger attack on Hyperion Base 35 and we’d happened to stumble into them. If so, we needed to warn the others. Knox and I might not survive it, but we’d at least give our fellow Chimera Warriors a fighting chance.
“I’ve already tried to reach the base,” Sphinx whispered in my head. “The com frequencies are blocked.”
Great. Just great.
Frustrated tears burned at the corner of my eyes. I didn’t want to die like this, in such a stupid way. I hadn’t even gotten to do anything. And Knox was here, just as helpless as I was. He’d have the same fate.
No, I couldn’t think like that. As long as I was still drawing breath, there was still a chance. The apsids hadn’t killed us yet and they hadn’t been hostile per se. They claimed they wanted me. Maybe I could still find a way around this. If I stalled, could Sphinx and Cerberus break out of this strange net around them? It was worth a shot.
“It seems you have us at a disadvantage,” I said. “All right. I’m listening. What do you want with me?”
“I’m glad to hear you’re finally being reasonable,” the apsid I now guessed was their leader replied. “There’s no need for any unpleasantness. Just come out from your chimera and we can deal with this in a friendly, peaceful manner.”
“You can’t be serious,” I replied. I wanted to be cooperative, but that suggestion was just ridiculous. “No offense, but I don’t find dying a horrible death all that peaceful.”
“I’m very serious,” the mysterious alien answered. “Come now, Selene. I promise no harm will come to you.”
I shouldn’t have believed him. His words made no sense. If I stepped out of the cockpit, I’d end up like August, or worse. But a strange haze settled over me and all of a sudden, I found myself unable to resist. My hands moved of their own accord, sliding over the controls of the chimera. “No, Selene, don’t,” Sphinx cried.
She tried to block what I was doing, but her efforts proved to be in vain. She couldn’t keep me trapped inside her. In the end, there was a reason why chimera pilots were called tamers. I forced my way past her and opened the cockpit.
“There you go,” the apsid encouraged me. “Don’t worry. We won’t hurt you. You’ll be fine.”
“Fine?” a small voice screeched at the back of my head. I was at the mercy of hostile aliens, with next to no protection against the void of space. If I survived this, it would be nothing short of a miracle.
And yet, when I stepped outside, I didn’t feel in any way off. I could still breathe normally. I didn’t feel any difference in temperature. When I took a step forward, I felt as if I was back on Earth, on recently terra-formed territory.
Somewhere in the distance, beyond the asteroid belt, the Sun burned brightly, solar explosions still flashing over its surface. There was no atmosphere on Mercury, nothing that could form
a barrier between me and the radiations. And yet, nothing in space—not even the Sun—could touch me.
It was comforting, or it would’ve been had I not realized I was still in a lot of trouble. The apsid was protecting me from possible environmental damage, but that didn’t mean he was my friend. The strange hold he had on my mind told me that much, and a part of me would’ve preferred burning alive than being controlled in such a horrible way.
To my left, I could see the Cerberus struggling to escape. Another apsid approached his invisible cage and said, “Remain calm, Knox Alexander. We’ve only come to pick something up. Once we do that, we’ll leave.”
The alien’s voice sounded female, but it made no difference to Knox. “Over my dead body,” he bellowed. “You won’t take her.”
The terror and anguish in his voice gave me strength and I started to struggle against the strange hold the apsid had on me. “Don’t,” he hissed. “You’ll just hurt yourself. This will just take a moment. We will complete our mission and then we will depart.”
Mission. The word flowed over me with the potency of a chimera tachyon blast. All of a sudden, I was in the labyrinth again, with Jared Glass clinging to me and whispering a cryptic request.
Mission. Had Jared been connected to the apsids? But why would a chimera pilot be involved with our enemies? It made no sense. Had he been a traitor? But why?
I had no idea and my uncertainty and confusion kept me from fighting off the apsid’s odd power. My feet carried me to the group of waiting aliens. I half-expected their glow to burn me, but it didn’t. Instead, it mingled with whatever power was protecting me, allowing me to get a good look at them.
The first thing that struck me about them was the fact that they didn’t all look alike. Oddly, their leader reminded me of a human being. He had the regular number of hands and legs, and even a penis. I didn’t have enough control over my body to analyze him too closely, but it was just as well. The only guys I wanted to see naked were August, Pollux, Brendan, and Knox.
