by Dan Schiro
“Activating grappling limb,” Orion told his team. “Get your game faces on, it’s almost go time.” Orion turned a knob on the dash and a loud clank sounded from the back of the ExAstra. A pirate-style grappling limb unfurled, thousands of feet of diamond-fiber tubing with an asteroid-mining drill at the free end. A few moments passed as mini-ion engines drove the drill through empty space, and then its whirring teeth tore into the hull of Ray Runner 12. The diamond-fiber tubing expanded automatically to form a seal, tethering the two ships together. “That’s it,” Orion shouted, “go, go, go!”
The crew tore off their harnesses and bolted for the stark decontamination chamber that led to the exit at the stern of the ship. Orion stamped his heel on a concealed pressure sensor, and a large steel panel in the middle of the floor slid open. He reached down and turned the wheel to the airlock hidden beneath the floor, and the four of them looked down into the curving diamond-fiber tube that hitched Orion’s ExAstra to the cargo freighter.
“Everybody in,” Orion commanded. “And land ready to fight.”
One by one they hopped into the boarding tether, the cold vastness of naked space just on the other side of the thin tube. Kangor took the lead with a growl, and Aurelia hopped in behind him, laughing like a kid on a waterslide. Orion and Bully brought up the rear, the great dog woofing as they slid down the few hundred feet of smooth diamond-fiber tube. Orion’s stomach flipped when he reached the intersection of the artificial gravity fields about halfway down, and for an instant he thought he might retch. But after just a few seconds more, he smelled hotly spiced air and dropped through the other end of the tube. He hit the steel floor, sprang forward and rolled so that his giant Cane Corso didn’t flatten him. Then, nimble as a jungle cat, Orion popped to his feet between Aurelia and Kangor.
They stood in the main cargo hold of the freighter, a cavernous space filled with long rows of shelves and stacked crates. Orion didn’t know if the colorful bales of alien spices piled on the shelves were part of the sleeper cell’s cover, or if they had taken the ship and murdered the spice merchants. Either way, he didn’t have time to care. Drilling through the hull had set off every alarm the old freighter had, and the forward doors to the hold were already opening. As armed humanoids clad in white-and-gold robes flooded in, Orion took a deep breath of the pungent air and willed his mind into the White Room. It was time to stop thinking and act.
“Scatter,” he commanded.
Orion and his crew fell into the shadows as blazing-blue pulse bolts tore open bags of spice with colorful puffs of hot potpourri. “Wait,” Orion shouted out once he had his back to a crate.
Peeking over the top, he saw that while a handful of stout poxgane men and women waded out to search the hold, another half dozen — duroks and more poxgane — guarded the door. Orion knew they needed an edge to take that door, and so he looked to the silver gauntlet covering his right hand. Its chrome still glowed with the rich red veins of the Dark Spacer’s life force. He just needed the right word. After a moment of groping, he remembered the mnemonic phrase he had tied to all he had read about Dawnstar and the Luminous Path.
“Eternal Demon,” he said into his silver-swathed hand.
A smoky white orb rose out of Orion’s palm. Crackling and spinning, it floated up above the shelves where it exploded into a willowy figure. She looked to Orion like a human female, ashen of skin and covered with burning fissures, with twisted black horns and long hair made of fire. All of that seemed to track with what he had read in the Luminous Script, as Dawnstar’s holy writings said that the Eternal Demon of Darkness appeared “to each race in their own image.” By the screams that echoed up from the fanatics searching for Orion’s team in the stacks of spice, he guessed that they too saw something familiar. The smoldering demon laughed, and as her malevolence echoed, she unleashed a stream of fire from her mouth that set one of the poxgane ablaze.
“Attack,” Orion shouted to his crew as he vaulted over the crate.
While the Dawnstar devotees fired wildly at their anti-god as she smote them with fiery breaths, the AlphaOmega crew snapped into motion with surgical efficiency. For Orion, the next few moments melted together in the thoughtless battle-blur of the White Room. Pulse bolts crackled on their flickering lightshields. Aurelia flung forth lances of green light that dropped hardened jihadists where they stood. Orion’s short sword severed hands and cut throats with smooth, flawlessly timed strokes that would have made his mentor proud. Kangor snapped a lean durok over his knee, and Bully tackled down a poxgane who was plunging a knife toward Orion’s back.
Orion’s lightshield failed late in the fight, and he felt a pulse bolt strafe his side. The polymer nanofiber of his kinetic bodysuit sizzled into his flesh, but Orion refused to feel the pain while in the White Room. He turned on the remaining two alien fanatics with his dripping blade in hand, his face flushed with the thrill of feeding his spellblade, and the terrorists fled up the ramp to the ship’s central corridor.
Aurelia extended two fingers, the fire still bright in her eyes. “Mine,” she called, cutting them down from behind with a pair of green-tinged spears.
And like that, the melee was over. Orion’s slathered sword and his silver gauntlet glowed with thick veins of blood magic, his spellblade gorged on fresh life force. As he called the blade back, he stepped out of the White Room and let his mind begin to think again. The octagonal lightshield strapped to his left bicep read “recharge” in flashing red letters. His hip hissed with pain where the pulse bolts had fused his kinetic bodysuit to his skin. Six bodies lay dead or dying at his feet, and another four burned out on the smoky floor of the cargo hold. Still, he had a feeling that they hadn’t seen the last of the Dawnstar agents on this ship. He looked up the ramp that led out of the storeroom, then looked back to see his ember-skinned demon still floating above the smoldering bales of spice. She smiled at him, baring fire-edged fangs, and bobbed gently in the air.
“I’ve been on ships of this make,” Kangor snorted. “The cargo hold accounts for most it. The rest,” he said, pointing up the ramp toward the corridor, “is merely a small cone with crew facilities along both sides and a bridge at the bow.”
“If the Kalifa of Light is on this ship,” Aurelia said, casting a nod up the ramp, “he’s on the bridge. And he won’t be alone.”
Orion nodded and thought for a moment, stroking Bully’s flank as the dog’s bloody tongue lolled out. “You,” he said, looking up at the fire-maned demon still floating in the cargo hold. “Go, destroy my enemies, and… and so forth.” He pointed down the corridor toward the bridge.
The demon’s hot mouth curled with a wicked grin. She soared over them and down the wide steel corridor, laughing her evil laugh. The ramp slanted up from the cargo hold doors, so Orion only heard the pulse bolts, roaring flames and screams. When the corridor beyond the ramp fell silent, he looked at his team with a shrug.
“A remarkable construct,” Aurelia said with an awed glance at Orion’s manacite gauntlet. “The Blade of the Word may be the most impressive spellblade I’ve ever seen.”
“The demon metal is as impressive,” Kangor added with a cringe, “as it is unnerving. The fiend resembles something from the deepest corners of the Shadowland.”
“I thought I’d get a passable illusion, at best,” Orion chuckled. “But the Dark Spacer’s blood was… thick. Now come on.” He drew a long bo staff from his gauntlet. “Let’s finish this.”
Orion led the way up the ramp from the cargo hold with Bully heeled close at his side and Aurelia and Kangor flanking him, spaced out to disperse themselves as targets. Yet when they crested the ramp and looked down the long corridor, nothing stirred against them. Three burning bodies filled the air with the sickly sweet scent of cooking meat. A few of the large doors along the length of the corridor stood open, but Orion saw no one else in the bunker, mess hall or communications room as they passed.
Whe
n they reached the end of the smoky corridor, they found Orion’s conjured demon crumbling to a pile of ashes on the floor, the fire that had animated her gone. It seemed that Orion’s spell had burned itself out as his fiend had attempted to melt a hole in the heavyweight security door that barred their way to the bridge. Orion called his weapon back into his gauntlet, and Bully sniffed at the crumbling pile of ash, his ears pricked quizzically.
“Megatite anti-hijack door.” Kangor laid his heavy hand on the door. “An old build, but still one of the best.”
“It would take me an hour to melt a hole in this,” Aurelia said, tapping her foot. She shot a sidelong glance at Orion. “Got another trick up your sleeve, oh great leader?”
Vanishing his weapon, Orion flexed his clawed gauntlet. Red-running veins holding the commingled life forces of several terrorists burned bright in the living metal. He raised his hand to the door, but he hesitated.
Kangor cocked his head and looked at him. “What is it, little friend?”
Orion cringed. “I’m just hoping I don’t need another spell for whatever’s on the other side of this door.”
“This is no time for your arrogance to falter, human,” Aurelia said. “You know you can stand and fight well enough without blood magic.”
Orion rolled his eyes. “Don’t make me blush.” After a deep breath, he focused and called on the Blade of the Word. “Open sesame.” Neither Aurelia nor Kangor nor Bully understood, but he couldn’t resist.
Tendrils of white smoke curled off his gauntlet’s clawed fingers and snaked over the large door. Gears ground, heavy bolts snapped back, and the anti-hijack door popped open with a steely groan. Orion conjured a long, straight-blade saber to his hand, Kangor shouldered the heavy door aside, and they bounded into the freighter’s command cabin. Orion had expected to face the Kalifa of Light and his elite guards, maybe meet some kind of trap. Yet the simple triangular room — a main viewscreen, command station and two secondary operations stations — looked empty.
Or at least, almost empty. A durok child wearing a white shift lay in a pool of blood on the cold steel floor. Her throat had been slashed with a single clean cut.
Orion vanished the sword and called the spellblade gauntlet back into his body as he rushed to the child. He got to his knees, ready to press his arm hands to her wound, but he saw in her wide yellow eyes that she was long gone. “No,” he spat, pounding his fist into his palm. For a few trembling moments, rage bubbled within him. Then he looked up at Aurelia and Kangor and exploded. “What is this?” He waved his arms at the empty command stations. “What is this game?!”
“Calm yourself, little friend,” Kangor said, his eyes fixed on the dead child.
“Well, isn’t this interesting?” said Aurelia, her eyes looking past Orion. “Oh, that’s fascinating.”
“Something you’d like to share with the class, AD?” Orion rose to his feet, so angry that he barely registered the green spark in Aurelia’s eyes.
“That,” she said, pointing at the empty air in front of the main viewscreen. “Right there.”
“What?” Orion shouted.
Aurelia glanced back with a slight smile. “I’ve lived among you lesser carbons for so long now. But I still forget that you can’t see the universe the way the Green can.” She stared into empty space with a jade twinkle in her eyes. “Orion, the fabric of space has been torn here… and it’s been torn by a spellblade.”
Orion felt small next to the power of the Jade Way, and his ire fizzled like a match tossed into a puddle. “What… what do you mean?”
“Of course.” Aurelia spun on a heel and looked down at the little girl. “The blood of the innocent. Pure, potent… perfect fuel for a spell of that magnitude.”
“Don’t be flippant about this,” Kangor growled, a clawed finger pointed down at the murdered girl. “Say what you mean.”
Aurelia looked up at Orion and Kangor. “The Kalifa of Light was here, and he used a spellblade to cut a hole in the universe to get away. The good news?” She beamed with the arrogant smile that the Green had likely perfected eons ago. “I can track him. Call Costigan,” she added to Orion. “Have his Briarhearts bring my trunk immediately.”
Chapter 16
Orion and Aurelia waited in the cargo freighter’s command cabin while Kangor and Bully took their sensitive noses for a thorough search of the sleeper cell’s vessel. Zagzebski and Seals arrived some tedious minutes later, hauling Aurelia’s trunk between them. They seemed to be working far harder than one would think based on the size of the steel-banded wooden box. As the two grunting men plunked it down at Aurelia’s feet, Orion chalked up the apparent disconnect to another mystery of the Jade Way. The Green did not always play by the rules of physics.
“Thank you, boys,” Aurelia said to the big, bullish mercenary and his wiry companion. “I hope you didn’t strain yourself.”
“Not at all, ma’am,” said Zagzebski, flexing a bare bicep for her.
Seals shook his shaved head, sweat glistening on his dark skin. “Damn, lady,” he said, rubbing his right arm. “What’s in that thing?”
Aurelia winked at the young man. “Oh, a little bit of everything.”
“Thanks, fellas,” Orion added. “Are the others already going to work?”
Zagzebski nodded. “Drakely, Dettman and Uphoff are checking over the bodies… you know, what’s left of them. They’ll snap some pics, see if we can identify them. Woodward’s patched into their comms room, but it sounds like all the data’s been wiped.”
“Anything else you need from us, OG?” Seals asked.
Orion pointed down at the small body covered by his gray-blue smartcloak. “Take her back to the Star Sentry.” He bit his lower lip and offered a small shake of his head. “I doubt we’ll be able to find any of her people, but she deserves better than sharing an airlock with a bunch of dead terrorists.”
Zagzebski scooped up the small body as easily as if she were a loaf of bread, a hard frown creasing his broad face. “We’ll take care of her,” he said gruffly. Seals shot Orion one last nod, and the two hired guns left the bridge.
Aurelia knelt gracefully in front of her wooden trunk. “Now with that unpleasantness out of the way…”
Orion watched her carefully, curious to see how she would open a box with no locks, handles or visible hinges. Aurelia laid her hands on the well-oiled wooden lid, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then she muttered a quiet, rhythmic phrase, and Orion saw a flash of emerald light from the snug seam between the lid and the wooden box. With that, Aurelia slid aside a lid that moments before had seemed cemented in place. The trunk released a faint musky smell, part campfire and part perfume. “A handy enchantment,” Orion noted.
She looked up at him with an eyebrow raised. “You, of all people, know better than to call it that. The Green are not sorceresses, merely—”
“Energy merchants,” Orion finished for her. “Yeah, you’ve explained it to me before. That doesn’t mean I get it.”
“Energy,” she said, leaning into the box and rummaging around, “is everything. And as energy moves, it can burn, break, or like this box, bind. And if you can see it, all energy leaves its mark.” Without glancing up, she gestured at the empty air in front of them. “Ah, here it is!”
From the bottom of the box, she pulled out a sculpted silver mask that was featureless but for the contours of a humanoid face. Something about the mask unnerved Orion, as if its eyeless gaze looked into him. “That’s going to help us track the Kalifa of Light?”
“Yes, I believe so.” Aurelia set it aside and went back to digging in the large wooden trunk. “This spirit mask has been in my family for a long time, but it’s not of the Green.”
Orion picked it up and felt the silver tattoo on his wrist tingle. “This is E-tech?” He could tell by the shiver in his cells that the mask was pure manacite like his spellblade. “Ho
w does it work?” he asked as turned it over in his hands.
Aurelia laughed. “How does your spellblade work? The point is, whoever was in this room cut a portal to somewhere else in the universe, likely with a spellblade.”
Orion looked around the empty command cabin again. “If you say so.” Gently, he put the mask back down.
“Trust me, it leaves a mark.” Aurelia shook her head and placed more small items on the floor next to the spirit mask. “The mask will amplify my vision. Hopefully, I’ll be able to see what’s on the other side of the fading portal.”
Orion squatted down next to her and started looking at the other objects she had laid out — a small mirror, a jingling coin purse made of old leather, a dram that she had filled with a few milliliters of blood-red fluid and a bundle of incense sticks. “Are you telling me that you’ll be able to see where the Kalifa of Light is hiding?”
“Perhaps,” Aurelia sighed, “if you stop pestering me.”
“Fine, fine.” Orion stood and stepped back a few feet. “I’ll be quiet.”
Aurelia tilted the small mirror on its stand, trying to find just the right angle. “I’m serious, Orion,” she said, glancing up at him with a cross expression. “This will take time, and I don’t want you pacing around behind me. Go — rest, eat.” She waved a hand to shoo him off the bloodstained bridge of Ray Runner 12. “I’ll signal you the moment I’ve broken through.”
Orion headed back into the main cargo hold to find Kangor and Bully, but they hadn’t sniffed out anything suspicious in the bales of spice. After checking in with the Briarhearts that had stripped and searched the terrorist bodies, they returned to Orion’s ExAstra and set a course for the Star Sentry. As they pulled away from the rust-red cargo freighter and waded out into the steely swarm of the Collective Fleet, Orion could see that SpaceCorps military vessels — likely carrying hardened Legionnaires — had joined the rescue ships crowding around the Kasia Tal. That tussle was nothing to rush into, especially without Aurelia, and so Orion steered them well clear of the ongoing disaster. They would return to the Star Sentry and see how the situation had evolved before they came back at the Dark Spacers.
