by Dan Schiro
Kangor stooped to look at Orion’s pale face. “Will you be all right?”
Panting, Orion nodded. “I’ll be fine. Let’s just get out of here.”
Aurelia pushed the slab back in, and Orion leaned on Kangor as they walked out of the cold storage room and back through the security door. He noted that Gulu was nowhere to be found but dismissed it with a shrug, figuring Bully had simply scared him off into a bathroom. Yet as they exited into the short alley between the stone administrative buildings, Orion saw Kangor’s nose twitching.
“You got something?” he asked the huge vycart, still leaning on his thick arm.
Kangor nodded, wolfish ears pricked. “Hot blood. Like warriors before a hunt.”
The misty breath of Kangor’s words still hung in the freezing air as a squad of eight men and women rounded the corner and filled the mouth of the alley. The mixed bag of great apes, red-hided duroks and furry temba nubu wore sturdy boots and long jackets that bulged with suspicious shapes.
“Looks like we got here just in time,” said a female great ape with rusty red hair.
Orion scoffed, his knees shaking as he let go of Kangor and stood straight. “That perv Gulu must have made a call.”
“He did indeed,” said a durok, his uneven crown of horns turned down at Orion. “And it sounds like the wrong people have been poking around in all the wrong places.”
“Yeah, about that,” Orion said, playing for time while he assessed the situation. “Here’s the thing, see…” He shot a quick glance at Aurelia, all the signal she needed.
The Exile murmured a short, musical phrase, and green light blazed bright in her eyes. She swung her arm like a whip and flung a dozen points of sparkling green light at their attackers. Her salvo exploded like a handful of stun grenades when it reached them, full of dazzling radiance and shattering sound. Orion and Bully ducked behind a large, rusty dumpster up against the right wall of the alley, and Aurelia and Kangor crouched behind an industrial crate on the left side. The disoriented thugs drew pulse weapons and fired wildly down the alley, the bright blue bolts peppering the front of the morgue and cutting smoking holes through Orion’s meager cover.
Orion summoned his gauntlet back to his hand, but one glance at the dull metal told him that it didn’t have a shred of fuel left for spell casting. He looked across the alley to see Kangor coiled and ready to explode out. Aurelia, on the other hand, breathed deeply to recover from her quickly mustered attack.
“Any ideas, little friend?” Kangor shouted over the pulse bolts that hissed between them. “Or should we just do it the ugly way?”
Orion peeked out and saw that Aurelia’s offensive had only left one body down and burning while just scorching the others. “Wait for my move, then follow me in,” he hollered back.
Orion unstrapped the hexagonal lightshield on his bicep and fastened it around Bully’s neck. “Don’t worry, boy,” he whispered to the dog, “these guys are chumps.” Closing his eyes, Orion took a moment to shift his mind into the heightened state of awareness called the White Room. Then he whispered to his dog. “Bully — no mercy.”
The 200-pound Cane Corso ran out, fangs bared and hackles raised as pulse bolts glanced off the lightshield. Orion conjured a long silver sword, straight and sharp on both sides, and followed his dog’s mad charge at the gunmen. His mind silent, Orion swung his sword on instinct as he ran, deflecting one pulse bolt, then another and finally a third before he got beneath the enemy lightshields. As he spun into the multi-opponent attack that Crag had called Blades of a Wheel, he heard Kangor’s roar and the rolling language of the Green behind him.
The thugs flailed about with sabers and pulse weapons, but Bully had scared them and scattered them across the mouth of the alleyway. Precise strokes and stabs of Orion’s razor-sharp blade opened arteries and split organs. Blasts of Aurelia’s emerald energy sizzled through chests. Kangor’s huge, clawed hands snapped necks and pulled limbs from bodies. The wet crunch of Bully’s jaws silenced a scream. By the time Orion’s battle-trance wavered just seconds later, he stood surrounded by corpses, and Aurelia held the last of their attackers aloft in a halo of green light.
“Wait, AD,” Orion said, holding out a shaking hand “Don’t—”
Aurelia closed her fist, twisting the rusty red great ape into a ball with a flurry of sickening snaps. She smiled a wicked grin and let the twisted body fall to the icy stone alleyway in a heap.
“…kill her,” Orion finished. He hung his head, pale and exhausted.
“What’s that?” she asked as she turned to him, the green light fading from her bronze eyes. “Why not?”
Orion called the bloody sword back into his gauntlet, the spellblade metal ripe with bloody veins. “Just hoping to interrogate a live assassin, this time.”
“Ah, yes. That would have helped, wouldn’t it?” Aurelia shrugged. “So it goes.”
“Why not use your demon metal again?” Kangor snorted as he wiped his bloody claws on his leather vest. “Give one of these meat-suits another few minutes of life, no matter how undeserved.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way.” Kneeling, Orion grabbed his panting dog by the head and spoke only to him. “Good boy, Bully, good boy.” He ran his hands over the Cane Corso’s thick body, checking for any wounds. When he was satisfied that Bully was unhurt, Orion unstrapped the spent lightshield around the dog’s neck and looked back up at his vycart comrade. “The Blade of the Word can only pull off that trick once, no matter how much blood it’s had to drink.” He thought for a moment. “But maybe they can still answer some of our questions.” He looked at the nearest steaming corpse, yet as he rose to go to it, he fell back to his knees, panting. “Come on,” he said to Aurelia and Kangor, “toss these chumps for me.”
His teammates got to work emptying pockets and cutting open shirts. Slowly but certainly they found the signs — a golden sun medallion, a tattoo in the same shape, a ring with a tiny sun icon floating in the jewel.
“That settles it, if there was any doubt,” Aurelia said, dropping the bloody medallion back to its owner’s still chest.
“More of the same vermin?” Kangor breathed. “Their zealotry is a plague upon the galaxy.”
Orion stood up and rubbed Bully’s head while he turned it over in his mind. “Okay, so Dawnstar is trying to kill Zovaco Ralli. But why?” It could be revenge for his raids on the terrorist cells in the Golden Bowl star cluster, but that didn’t seem like Dawnstar’s style to Orion. They attacked symbols like the Painted Palace, the trade summit on Konnexus, the Galactic Games — after all, politicians came and went. “Why do they want you dead so badly, Zo?” Orion muttered.
“I care little for their reasons why,” Kangor grunted. “We’ll simply track them down and bring them to bloody justice wherev—”
Without any signs of storm in the overcast sky, a purple-white bolt of lightning thundered down into the alley. Orion felt like his every nerve had been set on fire despite the insulating effect of his smartcloak, and the sheer force of the unexpected bolt threw him against the wall of the huge administrative building. His head cracked hard against the stone, and as he slid to the ground, Orion felt consciousness ebb away from him.
But only for a brief moment. As he fought back the black-blooming flowers that crowded his vision, he looked up to see a female humanoid standing over him. Black leather striped with bright yellow fit snuggly over her densely muscled form, and a helmet with an iridescent faceplate shrouded her features and her interstellar race. Yet these were only details — Orion’s blurry vision focused in on the spellblade gauntlet on her right hand. The shining chrome had an intricate network of electric-yellow veins.
“What have we here?” She stomped her black boot down on Orion’s right elbow, pinning his spellblade gauntlet to the ground. “And where did a human like you get such a powerful weapon?” Her voice came out deep and digitized t
hrough her helmet’s voice modulator.
“Where did a… scumbag terrorist… like you… get one?” Orion rasped, struggling to draw a breath.
She tilted her head, almost curiously, and leaned closer. “Which one of the Masters sent you?” she asked quietly. “Is this a test, pitting us against each other?”
Orion reeled with a hoarse, dry laugh. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you probably shouldn’t have said that.”
Her boot moved like a blur, slamming into Orion’s jaw. “Insolent prick.” A silver staff rippled into her hand like a spindle of liquid mercury, and a long blade formed at one end. “Who trained you?” With a quick flip, the blade hummed through the air and stopped just inches from Orion’s throat.
Orion spat out a bloody wad and ignored the weapon so close to ending him. “You made me bite my tongue. That’s the worst, you know.” He smirked up at her, all the fight he could muster between the blood loss and the lightning strike. “You gonna do this, or what?”
“Who are you?” she asked with a shake of her head, exasperation just beneath the surface of her digitized voice.
“Name’s Orion…”
For a long moment she fixed him with her faceless gaze, and then sirens filled the air, their wails getting nearer by the second. The woman in black-and-yellow leather stepped back and called the spear into her gauntlet.
“Really?” Orion chuckled as he struggled to sit up against the wall. “Just like that, huh?”
She turned her iridescent faceplate to him one last time. “It’s my business to know who I kill, especially if they have their own spellblade.”
Orion spit out another mouthful of blood and grinned at her. “So what you’re saying is… we’ll meet again?”
Did Orion hear a digitized groan from the helmeted woman? He couldn’t be sure. She turned her face up to the sky, straightened her posture and pushed a button in the center of her black belt. Two ultra-thin wings levered out from her small backpack, and a miniature ion engine fired. The faceless woman blasted off into the sky, and Orion watched her disappear with a puff through the low cloud cover before he slumped down and passed out.
Chapter 11
The dream began as it always did, and it felt as real as ever.
Orion stood on the balcony of his private quarters, gazing down on the Grimslade family’s palatial home on Mars. The towers, domes, outbuildings and perimeter walls were made out of red stone mined during his grandfather’s eco-forming project, and the rolling green lawns surrounding the estate had been added when Orion’s father was still a boy. Beyond that, Mars stretched out jagged and crimson, so much yet to be tamed. Above him, the first stars had just appeared as the pink sky deepened to purple.
Orion could still hear the music from the celebration he had abandoned, the beats pulsing from the arched stone rooftop of the great hall below. He had seen his fair share of outrageous parties in his young life, but never anything like the display of overcompensation his father had arranged that night. A troupe of alien dancers performed a sensuous ballet suspended from the ceiling by silk ribbons. Synthetic Symphony — the galaxy-famous neo-trance pioneers Synthetic Symphony, not a cover band — had been compensated for a whole night of live music. His half-siblings had invited every pseudo-friend, sycophant, drug dealer and woman of questionable morals that Orion had met during his reprehensible trek through the best private schools and military academies in the solar system. Premium alcohol flowed freely, endangered species were eaten, no expense was spared. It was the night of Orion’s 21st birthday, after all, and he had just come into a trust fund that could choke a Titan-class ion engine.
He took a deep breath of the dry, dusty Martian air and pulled his datacube out of the pocket of his designer vest. The glossy device flashed red and white with a waiting notification. Since he had only one topic tagged for alert, Orion knew what that meant. Steeling himself, he tossed the cube into the air and gave the command. “Access notification.”
The floating cube opened into a tetrahedron, its diode winked with blue light, and a hologram appeared in front of Orion. “And we end Terra News Now with a story both sad and strange,” said the human news anchor, her black hair spun into a tall beehive. “Renowned artist Nadia Sadé-Grimslade, first wife of industrialist trillionaire Orion Grimslade Jr., has gone missing.” The hologram flashed to the mug shot of an unsmiling blonde woman with sharp green eyes. “Ms. Sadé-Grimslade is most remembered for her sculpture Ares Wept.” The hologram flipped to the image of the hulking red stone sculpture, hunched and muscular and naked. “More recently,” the anchor continued as an image of a monolithic gray building appeared, “she had been a resident at Luna’s Sea of Tranquility Asylum — until her violent escape today.” The woman with the beehive returned. “Four orderlies sustained moderate to severe wounds, and Ms. Sadé-Grimslade absconded in a hospital aircar for points unknown. Luna authorities have notified nearby spaceports and hope to—”
“End,” Orion said with a sharp, sobbing breath. He groped for the datacube, found it and closed his fist tightly around the cube, squeezing until its corners drew blood from his palm.
His mother had wanted to be free so badly that she had almost killed four orderlies, just as she had wanted to be free of family — of motherhood — so badly that she had tried to take her own life. He felt like a little boy all over again, hearing the rushing water and pushing open the bathroom door. He remembered feeling the steam, and smelling wet metal before he saw her. The bathwater had been so red, her skin so white.
That was when Orion decided, sure to the marrow of his bones. He would not go back to the parties and money and empty thrills that waited down his father’s path. He would be free too, like his mother. Deactivating his datacube, he tossed it over the edge of the balcony.
On some deep level of consciousness, he knew what came next in the dream. He took one of his many expensive aircars and flew to the nearest spaceport. There, he traded his car and his fine clothes for a Union credit chit and a ticket into the ether routes, out to alien worlds. Soon after he reached interstellar space, his long road to the bottom began. He was seduced. He was abducted. He was broken, chained and set to be sold in a distant star system where Union laws held no sway. Then came the strength he didn’t know he possessed, the escape, the old durok, the training and the spellblade. But the dream disintegrated before he could relive all of that, and Orion fell back into the aching reality of the waking world.
Chapter 12
Orion came to sore and stiff in a Corvis Stoat hospital bed, scaring his green-scaled mystskyn nurse as he sat up with an angry growl.
Over the next few minutes, a dour great ape doctor brought him up to speed. The doctor grumbled that a terse communiqué from “allies in lofty branches” had kept the local authorities away from the “incident.” His companions, though shaken, had “stridently refused” medical attention at the scene. Orion himself had needed transfusions of synthetic human blood and consulin injections for the burns to his feet, but he too would be no worse for the wear. “The animal” had taken the worst of the “aberrant” lightning strike and had been transported to the White Pax animal hospital, but the doctor had no news as to if “the creature” had pulled through.
When Orion heard this, he set his jaw and pulled the IVs out of his arm. He dressed with suppressed groans, hobbled down the hall and checked himself out, deaf to his doctor’s protestations. Some minutes and an aircab ride across the city later, Orion led Bully out of the animal hospital with a smile, light snow swirling down on them. Though the bandaged Cane Corso seemed a bit slow and dozy from the painkillers, the veterinarians had explained that his thick, fatty hide had insulated his organs against the brunt of the shock.
“I’m sorry, boy, I’m sorry,” Orion said as he laid a gentle hand on the black dog’s head and looked into his droopy blue eyes. “I promise, we’ll make her pay for this.” He though
t for a moment and muttered, “Whoever she is.”
After negotiating another aircab ride over snowy White Pax, Orion and Bully made it back to the spaceport and boarded his steely, stingray-shaped dropship. Inside, Aurelia stretched her green body in one of the sleeping slings hung across the cabin, and Kangor snored on one of the sagging crash couches. The stench of Kangor’s fried fur filled the cabin.
“Welcome back,” Aurelia said with the barest nod. “I was beginning to wonder when you were going to pull up your pants and get back to work.”
“Little friend,” Kangor said as he rose, rubbing his fiery eyes. “Is your fragile pink flesh intact?”
Orion’s mouth slipped into a comfortable slant, his usual smirk at half-wattage. “Close enough, buddy.”
“And the fart machine?” Aurelia regarded the giant canine with a half-lidded gaze. “He’ll live?”
“It’ll take more than a little lightning to knock big Bully boy out of the fight.” Orion slung an arm over the dog’s broad shoulders and slapped his side lovingly. “But we don’t have time for you two to get sentimental. We’re late — really late.”
Aurelia sat up and slipped nimbly out of the sleeping sling. “Any clue as to where to track down this Rahjal?”
“No idea,” Orion snorted as he eased his sore body into the captain’s chair. “But we had better figure it out.”
“Perhaps we should visit some fanatic-friendly ports,” Kangor suggested. “Hang people out of windows and the like?”
“We’ll get around to that,” Orion said with a grin. “But the first part of the job is to keep Zovaco Ralli alive.” Pulling the control dash over his lap, Orion flipped a few switches to warm-up the thrusters on the underside of the ExAstra Mark III. “And we’re late for his campaign stop at the Collective Fleet — we were supposed to be there when they came out of the ether route.”
